A fundamental problem facing the worldwide process of democratization is the continued lack of gender equality in political leadership. The basic facts are not in dispute: Today women represent only one in seven parliamentarians, one in ten cabinet ministers, and, at the apex of power, one in 20 heads of state or government. Multiple factors have contributed to this situation, including structu...

Education improvement efforts over the past two decades have focused primarily on articulating standards for student learning, refining the way we assess students' proficiency on those standards, and tying results to accountability. The one element still unaligned with these reforms is grading and reporting. Student report cards today look much like they looked a century ago, listing a single g...

In this paper we discuss the problem of planning safe paths amidst unpredictably moving obstacles in the plane. Given the initial positions and the maximum speeds of the moving obstacles, which we assume are disk-shaped, the regions that are possibly not collision-free are disks that grow over time. We present an approach to compute the time-minimal path between two points in the plane that avo...

W e present a motion planning/control system that deals with moving obstacles whose trajectories are not known a priori. A n artificial potential field planner i s tightly coupled with a robust inverse dynamic controller, allowing the robot t o avoid obstacles in realtime while retaining the benefits of inverse dynamic control. Our implementation of the artificial potential field planner uses d...

Configuration space computation is a transformation process that reduces a robot to a single reference point by expanding obstacles on the image plane. The obstacles can be expanded by inverting the robot along a reference point and then slide this reference point along their borders. The area covered by the union of inverted robot during the sliding along with the obstacles defines the configu...

Coverage is critical for wireless sensor networks to monitor a region of interest and to provide a good quality of service. In most cases we need to achieve full coverage which means every point inside the region (excluding the obstacles) must be covered by at least one sensor. The problem of placing the minimum number of sensors to achieve full coverage for a region with obstacles is NP-hard. ...

obstacles to research activities: a survey of faculty member’s view at urmia university of medical sciences in 2010     mir ghaffarzadeh sh [1] , nazari h [2] , motazakker m [3]     received: 18 aug, 2012 accepted: 15 nov , 2012     abstract   background & aims : this study uncovers the obstacles to research activities by studying the views of faculty members at urmia university of medical scie...

BACKGROUND Organizational and structural obstacles are a group of major obstacles in achievement of appropriate family planning counseling. Detection of these obstacles from the viewpoint of managers, staffs and clients who are key members in health services providing system is a major step toward appropriate planning to modify or delete this group of obstacles. The present study was conducted ...