In the area of formal reasoning about action and change, one of the fundamental representation problems is providing concise modular and incremental specifications of action types and world models, where instantiations of action types are invoked by agents such as mobile robots. Provided the preconditions to the action are true, their invocation results in changes to the world model concomitant...

Background In January 2011, FDA announced the availability of a final guidance for industry entitled Process Validation: General Principles and Practices (the 2011 Guidance). The 2011 Guidance revises and replaces FDA’s Guidance for industry entitled Guideline on General Principles of Process Validation, issued in May 1987 (the 1987 Guideline). The 2011 Guidance defines process validation as “t...

This paper presents a new approach to efficient parallel computation of statistical inferences. This approach involves two heuristics, highest impact first and highest impact remaining , which control the speed of convergence and error estimation for an algorithm that iteratively refines degrees of belief. When applied to causal reasoning, this algorithm provides a performance solution to the q...

The Italian National Scientific Qualification (ASN) was introduced in 2010 as part of a major reform of the national university system. Under the new regulation, the scientific qualification for a specific role (associate or full professor) and field of study is required to apply for a permanent professor position. The ASN is peculiar since it makes use of bibliometric indicators with associate...

The application of test automation tools in a safety-critical context requires so-called tool qualification according to the applicable standards. The objective of this qualification is to justify that verification steps automated by the tool will not lead to faulty systems under test to be accepted as fit for purpose. In this paper we review the tool qualification requirements of the standards...

OBJECTIVE The Neck Disability Index (NDI) is a patient self-assessed outcome measurement tool to assess disability, and that is frequently used to evaluate the effects of the treatment of neck-related problems. In individualized medicine it is mandatory that patients can interpret data in order to choose a treatment. A change of NDI or an absolute NDI is generally meaningless to a patient. Ther...

Teollisuuden Voima Oy (TVO) operates two nuclear power plant units and has started to build a third one. The current nuclear power units have a continuing need to maintain and update existing instrumentation and parts of their control systems. Each new device shall be classified and qualified according to its safety requirements. Using modern technology means, in practice, that more and more co...

This paper presents a backward stable preprocessing technique for (nearly) ill-posed semidef5 inite programming, SDP, problems, i.e., programs for which the Slater constraint qualification, 6 existence of strictly feasible points, (nearly) fails. 7 Current popular algorithms for semidefinite programming rely on primal-dual interior-point, 8 p-d i-p methods. These algorithms require the Slater c...

In 2008, a compulsory national basic teaching qualification was introduced for all university teachers in the Netherlands. At that time all eight University Medical Centres (UMCs) and the only Faculty of Veterinary Medicine had adopted or were setting up teacher development programmes. This study explores how these programmes relate to each other and to the basic teaching qualification. To gath...

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a well-established and frequently used technique in the pharmaceutical industry. Therefore an appropriate analytical instrument qualification (AIQ) is required for quality assurance. AIQ forms the basis of a quality management followed by analytical method validation, system suitability tests (SSTs) and quality control checks. Two parts of the AIQ, namely the o...