An 11-year-old boy experienced almost daily wheezing, dyspnea on exertion, and sleep perturbation because of cough. In addition, nadir peak expiratory flow (PEF) was below 100 L/min, which was 30% of predicted (328 L/min),1 compatible with severe persistent asthma.2 After the initiation of therapy with 180 g of albuterol 3 times per day, the patient’s domiciliary PEF rose to 200 L/min and his s...

The first three articles in the Clinical Ethics section of this issue of Journal of Medical Ethics address potential conflicting duties of physicians. The first paper, by Niklas Juth and Niels Lynöe (see page 215, Editor’s choice), reports results of an empirical study of Swedish physicians’ attitudes regarding the provision of virginity certificates or hymen restorations requested by women, of...

The paradigm of advisable planning, in which a user provides guidance to influence the content of solutions produced by an underlying planning system, holds much promise for improved usability of planning technology. The success of this approach, however, requires that a planner respond appropriately when presented with conflicting advice. This paper introduces two contrasting methods for plann...

Project selection is a complex decision making process that is influenced by multiple and often conflicting objectives. The complexity of the project selection problem is due to the high number of projects from which a subset (portfolio) has to be chosen. We present a hybrid fuzzy rule-based multi-objective framework for sustainable project portfolio selection. The multiple and conflicting obje...

This article recognises the conflicting goals of South African Institute Chartered Accountants (SAICA) and faculties commerce in universities. To achieve central aim study, a qualitative approach based on literature review was applied. The study argues that excessive focus SAICA chartered accountancy route prevents accounting research country is thus conflict with objectives Based this argument...

Effective policing in a democratic society must balance the sometime conflicting objectives of public safety and community trust. This paper uses a formal model of optimal policing to explore how society might reasonably resolve the tension between these two objectives as well as evaluate disparate racial impacts. We do so by considering the social benefits and costs of confrontational types of...

In many real-world optimisation problems, we need to find a set of near-optimal solutions from which one can be selected [8, 9]. For instance, multiobjective optimisation problems form an extensive class of problems where multiple criteria need to be satisfied. The multiple objectives are often conflicting and/or incommensurable and the goal is to find a solution which represents a set of good ...

A participatory integrated (social, economic, environmental) approach based on causal loop diagram, Bayesian belief networks and evolutionary multiobjective optimisation is proposed for efficient water resources management. The proposed methodology incorporates all the conflicting objectives in the decision making process. Causal loop diagram allows a range of different factors to be considered...

This paper presents a cooperative coevolutionary approach to path planning for two robotic arms sharing common workspace. Each arm is considered an agent, required to find transition strategy from given initial to final configuration in the work space. Since the robots share workspace, they present dynamic obstacle to each other. To solve the problem of path planning in optimized fashion, we fo...