This Article-in-Press has been permanently withdrawn. The editorial policy of Medical Hypotheses makes it clear that the journal considers "radical, speculative, and non-mainstream scientific ideas", and articles will only be acceptable if they are "coherent and clearly expressed." However, we received serious expressions of concern about the quality of this article, which contains highly contr...

“This correspondence is now closed”: but in medical ethics the traditional editorial fiat is often less easy to issue. The quality of argument and counter-argument demonstrated by so many contributors to the Journal of Medical Ethics illustrates not so much that they are undefeated because they have gone on trying, but the existential importance, for them and for many of their readers, of the c...

The great attention toward environmental issues and especially on energy utilization, leads the European Union to implement the 2009/28/EC Directive, fixing three main goals to be achieved for 2020 by the EU member states: 20% reduction of the greenhouse gases emission, 20% increase of using renewable energy and 20% improving of energy efficiency. To achieve these objectives, new environmental ...

Socio-technical systems are characterized by the interplay of heterogeneous entities i.e., humans, organizations, and technologies. Application domains such as petroleum, e-health, and many others rely on solutions based on safety-critical socio-technical systems. To ensure a safe operation of these interacting heterogeneous entities, multifaceted and integrated modeling and analysis capabiliti...

The development of the information society is characterized by the introduction of new electronic services available through different types of technologies and devices. Publicly available electronic communications services create new possibilities for users, governments and businesses. However, at the same time, these services have large capacities and possibilities for processing personal dat...

In this paper we consider the consequences for measurement of material deprivation, consistent poverty and economic vulnerability of the shift from the ECHP data set to the EU-SILC instrument. Despite the restricted number of deprivation items available in EU-SILC, we show that there is a substantial overlap between such measures when they are estimated using EU-wide and Irish specific indicato...

Recently, there has been growing interest in average-reward reinforcement learning (ARL), an undiscounted optimality framework that is applicable to many diierent control tasks. ARL seeks to compute gain-optimal control policies that maximize the expected payoo per step. However, gain-optimality has some intrinsic limitations as an optimality criterion, since for example, it cannot distinguish ...

This work presents a new policy based security framework that is able handle simultaneously and coherently mandatory, discretionary and security property policies. One important aspect of the proposed framework is that each dimension of the security policies can be managed independently, allowing people playing different roles in an organization to define security policies without violating a g...

In hierarchical classification tasks using the local approach, an important decision concerns the selection of training examples to build the local classifiers. To this end, several policies, which take into account the class taxonomy information, have been proposed. However, a study of a comprehensive comparison concerning the performance of these policies is still lacking. This paper presents...

In this paper we study adaptive power allocation (PA) policies for improving the performance of convolutional and turbo codes on fading channels. The transmitter has an average power constraint. The fading process can he continuous (e.g. Rayleigh distribution). Perfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) and the receiver (CSIR) are assumed. For convolutional codes, we consider b...