The regulation of assisted conception has been a contentious issue for many years and the debate shows no sign of approaching a conclusion. New reproductive technologies are being developed so rapidly that they are outstripping the provisions of the few legal frameworks that have been devised to regulate them (Ohl et al., 1996). Legislators have raised doubts as to whether any ‘single piece of ...

By scientific standards, the accuracy of short-term economic forecasts has been poor, and shows no sign of improving over time. We form a delay matrix of time-series data on the overall rate of growth of the economy, with lags spanning the period over which any regularity of behaviour is postulated by economists to exist. We use methods of random matrix theory to analyse the correlation matrix ...

We consider a classifier based on Independent Component Analysis Mixture Modelling (ICAMM) to model the feature jointprobability density. This classifier is applied to a challenging novel application: classification of archaeological ceramics. ICAMM gathers relevant characteristics that have general interest for material classification. It can deal with arbitrary forms of the underlying probabi...

In this paper we determine the spectrum of possible cardinalities of a blocking set in a H(v,3,A) and in a H(v,4,1). Moreover we construct, for each admissible ~9, a H(v,3,1) without blocking sets. Introduction A handcuffed design with parameters v, k, A, or for short an H(v,k,A), consists of a set of ordered k-subsets of a v-set, called handcuffed blocks. In a block (a., a z ' ... ,a!:) each e...

The examination of user data as a basis for developing production models of user behavior has been a major focus in the PAT Algebra I Tutor's development. In recent work, we have investigated relationships between related tasks and the solution strategies displayed by students. To solve a PAT Algebra I problem, students must complete several related arithmetic and algebraic tasks. The sequences...

Insight into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of planning support systems (PSS) is fragmented between users and system developers. The lack of combined insights blocks development in the right direction and makes potential users hesitant to apply PSS in planning. This study presents SWOT of PSS from a combined user ^ developer perspective. We first express them in te...