This paper explores the issue of whether strict liability imposed on polluters has served to reduce uncontrolled releases of toxics into the environment. Strict liability should create additional incentives for firms to handle hazardous substances more carefully, thus reducing the future likelihood of uncontrolled releases of toxics. However, the size of these incentives may vary according to t...

A genetic learning algorith m modeled after biological evolution is pres ente d to discern patterns relati ng one observable t hat is taken to be dep endent on many others. T he problem is reduced to an optimization pr oced ure over a space of conditions on th e independent variables. The optimi zation is p erformed by a genetic learning algorithm , using an information t heoret ic fitness fun ...

HAT DO MINICOMPUTER USERS want? In setting design objectives for HP's new 21MX Series minicomputers, we tried to make the objectives conform as closely as possible to the answers to this question, as we saw them. Minicomputer applications have broadened tre-m e n d ou s ly-nth e lesffewTcarilOnsfrn dsm puters today solving problems that only a few years ago would have required a large expensive...

ABSTRACT While aspe t{oriented approa hes draw their strength from improving modularity at the sour e ode level, their a eptan e for wide spread appli ation depends on a seamless embedding into the software life{ y le. When striving for an appropriate design notation for AOSD it is important to arefully balan e the abstra tion required by design with the pre ision required for implementing a gi...

Recent events have demonstrated the susceptibility of conventional network infrastructures to both man-made and natural disasters. The attacks on September 11th, 2001 disrupted many communication channels that were routed through the World Trade Center, and the mass panic that ensued also caused the telephone switching network to collapse [2]. Even more significant disruptions to communication ...

An electrical resistance network (ERN) is a weighted graph (G, μ). The edges are weighted by a function μ and interpreted as resistors of possibly varying strengths. The effective resistance metric R(x, y) is the natural notion of distance between two vertices x, y in the ERN. We discuss how R can be formulated in terms of an energy form E defined for functions on the vertices, a dissipation fo...

It is widely agreed that rare disease patient registries should be international and follow the guiding principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) for humans and computers. Furthermore, the procedures to collect and exchange data should be harmonised. Since 2014, the Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) annual workshop has been organised by and held at the National Centre for Rare...

a Scientifi c Resource.—Bird collections were founded and built during the heyday of global exploration. The mission of these collections through most of their history has been to document avian diversity and its distribution and to serve as a resource for research and education. As bird collections became established and grew, ornithology itself became a scientifi c discipline and broadly expa...

R e a l i s t i c n e t w o r k a n d s i n g l e c e l l m o d e l i n g c a n b e p o w e r f u l t o o l s t o s t u d y t h e o p e r a t i o n o f r e a l bra in s t ruc tures . We have used rea l i s t i c s imula t ion approaches based on fu l ly ac t ive compartmental models to study the cerebel lum. Here I summarize some of our recent results that address cerebe l lar l earning . Assum...

In recent years the explosion in the volumes of data being stored online has resulted in distributed storage systems transitioning to erasure coding based schemes. Local Reconstruction Codes (LRCs) have emerged as the codes of choice for these applications. An (n, r ,h,a,q)-LRC is a q-ary code, where encoding is as a two stage process. In the first stage, h redundant parity symbols are generate...