Instructional policy reforms that focus on standards and assessments have gained popularity in the last two decades. State governments, which had previously left most instructional matters to local governance, set challenging learning standards and developed related assessments and curricular frameworks. Despite their popularity and persistence, standards-based reforms face the challenge of suc...

With worldwide revenues in excess of $400 billion in 2003, it is not surprising that the pharmaceutical industry can justify the investment of up to $ 800 million in the development of a new drug [1, 2]. However, with the main focus being on reducing time-to-market, the industry commonly relies on poor operating practice with regards to production losses, with low sigmalevels in the range 2-3 b...

This paper contributes to a theory of rational choice for decisionmakers with incomplete preferences due to partial ignorance, whose beliefs are representable as sets of acceptable priors. We focus on the limiting case of ‘Complete Ignorance’ which can be viewed as reduced form of the general case of partial ignorance. Rationality is conceptualized in terms of a ‘Principle of Preference-Basedne...

T0 the practical mind, particularly one trained in economics, it might sound a trifle paradoxical to suggest that the truly important issues in a public policy debate have nothing to do with the relative efficacy of the policy options. Paradoxical or not, this is very often the case. And there is no better illustration than the ongoing — and heated — debate over alternative approaches to pollut...

Predicting missing links in incomplete complex networks efficiently and accurately is still a challenging problem. The recently proposed CAR (Cannistrai-Alanis-Ravai) index shows the power of local link/triangle information in improving link-prediction accuracy. With the information of level-2 links, which are links between common-neighbors, most classical similarity indices can be improved. Ne...

Over 800 pesticides are currently approved for use in one or more EU countries. The maximum residue levels (MRL) for agricultural pesticides are derived from field trials conducted under good agricultural practice (GAP). The MRL is a legally enforceable limit related to GAP. The results from field trials would only be used to establish MRLs if the estimated intake of residues did not exceed the...

BACKGROUND Though the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended Infant and Young Child Feeding (IYCF) indicators have been in use, little is known about their association with child nutritional status. The objective of this study was to explore the relationship between IYCF indicators (timing of complementary feeding, minimum dietary diversity, minimum meal frequency and minimum acceptable di...

Image hashing allows compression, enhancement or other signal processing operations on digital images which are usually acceptable manipulations. Whereas, cryptographic hash functions are very sensitive to even single bit changes in image. Image hashing is a sum of important quality features in quantized form. In this paper, we proposed a novel image hashing algorithm for authentication which i...

OBJECTIVE To determine the international distribution and practice of arthroscopy performed by rheumatologists and to evaluate proposed guidelines on minimum standards for training in arthroscopy in the context of current clinical practice. METHODS A questionnaire was sent to all rheumatology centres identified as practising arthroscopy, by (i) searching Medline from 1966 to 1999, (ii) search...