Several important issues are pertinent to an ethical discussion of the new technology today grouped under the name Assisted Reproduction Technology (ART). This is a moral imperative because each of us must decide what is to be considered ethically acceptable in assisted reproduction. Reflecting on the ethical dimension of ‘creating’ a new human life can play a major role in ensuring that in eac...

Since 2005, state legislatures have passed hundreds of immigration bills, and state officials have argued that their efforts attempt to solve immigration crises caused by federal inaction. The state–federal clash over immigration seems to confirm scholarship suggesting deepening lines of conflict in the federal system since the 1990s. The question remains, however, whether this explosion in sta...

In this study two combined mutation operators have been developed to increase the performance of Genetic Algorithm that helps to find the minimum cost in the known Travelling Salesman problem (TSP).In order to do this the combined mutation operators which are named as Inverted Exchange and Inverted Displacement are compared with four existing mutation operators. These are programmed in C++ and ...

This paper explores the former Eastern Bloc’s (primarily the GDR and the Soviet Union) supremacy in developing elite sporting excellence and traces the ‘ow’ of elements of such systems to selected Western nation-states. The national elite sport development systems discussed in the West are: Europe (UK, France and Spain), North America (Canada, United States) and Australia. A tentative conceptu...

The authors present a novel approach for image representation based on geometric distribution of edge pixels. Object segmentation is not needed, therefore the input image may consist of several complex objects. For an efficient description of an arbitrary edge image, the edge map is divided into M £ N angular radial partitions and local features are extracted for these partitions. The entire im...

The term low-discrepancy sequences is widely used to refer to s-dimensional sequences X satisfying the bound D∗(N,X) ≤ cs(logN) + O((logN)s−1), where D∗ denotes the usual star discrepancy. In this article, we are concerned with (t, s)-sequences in base b, one of the most famous families of low-discrepancy sequences along with Halton sequences. The constants cs for (t, s)-sequences were first co...

University of Alberta set out to build a world checkers champion. He succeeded. In 1994, CHINOOK, the program written by Schaeffer and his group, won the Man versus Machine World Checkers Championship. (Although CHINOOK has now mostly retired from championship checkers, it is still possible to play CHINOOK. To play CHINOOK or just see information about CHINOOK and checkers in general, go to www...

Monitoring of water cover and shorelines at a global scale is essential for better understanding climate change consequences and modern human disturbances. The level and turbidity of the surface water, and the background objects in which they interact with, vary significantly at a global scale. The existing water indices applicable to detection and extraction of water cover at local and regiona...

The efforts of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Breyer to provoke examination of the vitality of the American judiciary’s independence have inspired two conferences,1 which in turn have produced many thoughtful papers and much commentary. I have been asked to respond to one such paper offered by Professors Paul Carrington of Duke and Roger Cramton of Cornell.2 These two distinguished sc...