This paper examines an interesting combinatorial optimisation problem that generalises both the graph colouring and k-partition problems. The problem has an interesting practical application in the construction of wedding seating plans, where we seek to assign equal numbers of guests to tables such that they are sat near friends and, perhaps more importantly, kept away from their enemies. We de...

BACKGROUND Characteristics associated with the response to a personalized, mailed invitation for the Papanicolaou (Pap) test vary among women. This study assesses the relationship between selected characteristics (e.g., demographic, obstetric, Pap history) and the response to a letter of invitation to undergo a Pap test among Mexican women affiliated with the Mexican Social Security Institute (...

BACKGROUND Despite concerns that facilitating informed choice would decrease diabetes screening uptake, 'informed choice' invitations that increased knowledge did not affect attendance (the DICISION trial). We explored possible reasons using data from an experimental analogue study undertaken to develop the invitations. We tested a model of the impact on knowledge, attitude and intentions of a ...

* The author is an Associate Professor of Accounting on the faculty of the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. The essay is written based on a few lectures on accounting theory given at various universities. The author thanks the audience at these lectures. In preparing the written manuscript, comments by Xijia Su of City University of Hong Ko...

J. Andrew Bagnell March 15, 2015 J. A. Bagnell is an associate professor at the Robotics Institute and Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Imitation learning is the study of algorithms that attempt to improve performance by mimicking a teacher’s decisions and behaviors. Such techniques promise to enable effective “programming by demonstration” to automate tasks, such as d...

Multiple scattering is an important and interesting topic, of relevance in a wide variety of physical contexts. In this short paper, we attempt to review some of the theory and applications with the aim of encouraging further investigations. For simplicity, we consider the scattering of two-dimensional time-harmonic acoustic waves by hard parallel cylinders. Methods described include separation...

Parity games and their subclasses and variants pop up in various contexts: μ-calculus, tree automata, program verification [3, 1, 8]. Such games provide only binary information indicating the winning player. However, in classical games theory [12] the emphasis is rather on how much we win or lose. Can we incorporate the information about the profits and losses into parity games?