Since antiquity, some men have not been considered accountable for their actions when they transgressed the law, and were exempted from legal penalties, or given lesser ones. Why? The rationale for legal exemption has varied over time. So have the labels assigned to such lawbreakers, and even the personnel involved in the labelling process. For centuries, settling the question of deviant mental...

How can several individuals’opinions on some factual matters be aggregated into uni…ed collective opinions? This question arises in many contexts. A panel of climate experts may have to aggregate the panelists’con‡icting opinions into a compromise view, in order to deliver a report to the government. A jury may have to arrive at a collective opinion on the facts of a case, despite disagreements...

A phenomenon as complex as protein folding requires a complex model to approximate it. This thesis presents a bottom-up approach for building complex probabilistic models of protein secondary structure by incorporating the multiple information sources which we call experts. Expert opinions are represented by probability distributions over the set of possible structures. Bayesian treatment of a ...

Introduction The material in this section provides a foundational overview of the Canadian Legal system. It is structured into four topic areas which are discussed in varying detail below: [I] Foundations of the Canadian Legal System: The Constitution; [II] Legitimacy of the Canadian Legal System and Constitution; [III] Sources of Law; [IV] The Common Law System in Operation. A number of readin...

The paper concerns a dynamic model of influence in which agents make a yes-no decision. Each agent has an initial opinion which he may change during different phases of interaction, due to mutual influence among agents. We investigate a model of influence based on aggregation functions. Each agent modifies his opinion independently of the others, by aggregating the current opinion of all agents...