With the support of the Republican leadership of the US House of Representatives, Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey continues to attempt to limit provision of US family planning (FP) funding to foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who agree to enforce absolute prohibitions on engaging in abortion-related activities. Despite the fact that the House is withholding funds to meet US...

This study investigated effects of profound hearing loss on mother-infant interactions before and after cochlear implantation with a focus on maternal synchrony, complexity, and directiveness. Participants included two groups of mother-infant dyads: 9 dyads of mothers and infants with normal hearing; and 9 dyads of hearing mothers and infants with profound hearing loss. Dyads were observed at t...

We conceptually design, formally verify and experimentally evaluate a sophisticated information control mechanism for a relational database instance. The mechanism reacts on access requests for data publishing or query answering with a granularity of either the whole instance or individual tuples. The reaction is based on a general read access permission for the instance combined with user-spec...

In the course of the emergence of more complicated data models, which are used in the database world, more elaborate access control schemes are required as well. Security models have to be developed that are at least at the same level of abstraction as the data they have to deal with and the policies they have to enforce. We describe a role-based authorisation scheme for object-oriented data mo...

Norms, that is, obligations, permissions and prohibitions, are a useful abstraction to specify and regulate the actions of self-interested software agents in open, heterogeneous systems. Any realistic account of norms must address their dynamic nature: the norms associated to agents will change as agents act (and interact) – prohibitions can be lifted, obligations can be fulfilled and permissio...

This rule implements subtitle A of title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Public Law 101-336, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability by public entities. Subtitle A protects qualified individuals with disabilities from discrimination on the basis of disability in the services, programs, or activities of all State and local governments. It extends the prohibition of d...

Normative organisations provide a means to coordinate the activities of individual agents in multiagent settings. The coordination is realized at run time by creating obligations and prohibitions (norms) for individual agents. If an agent cannot meet an obligation or violates a prohibition, the organisation imposes a sanction on the agent. In this paper, we consider norm-aware agents that delib...

BACKGROUND Socio-cultural and economic factors constitute real barriers for uptake of screening and treatment of Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Better understanding and addressing these barriers may enhance the effectiveness of HAT control. METHODS We performed a qualitative study consisting of semi-structured interviews and focus group discussi...