A t the start of my academic career, a manager of a company that provides independent software verification and validation services to NASA approached me with a deceivingly simple question: Is it possible to predict software reliability before the system is completely implemented and integrated? The manager's question likely came from his knowledge of independent verification and validation's s...

The tradition of the virtues was model for moral practice from Aristotle to Luther. This framed practices living well in relation visions good, and its later Christian version, God. One became good through practice, just as a harpist might play disciplined habits exercise. In Alasdair MacIntyre's extraordinary excavations philosophy intellectual history, Reformation is by large neglected he tra...

Traditionally, genetic algorithms have relied upon 1 and 2-point crossover operators. Many recent empirical studies, however, have shown the benefits of higher numbers of crossover points. Some of the most intriguing recent work has focused on uniform crossover, which involves on the average L/2 crossover points for strings of length L. Theoretical results suggest that, from the view of hyperpl...

The United Kingdom has many bodies that play their part in carrying out the work of national ethics committees, but its nearest equivalent of a U.S. presidential bioethics commission is the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, established in 1991. The Council is charged with examining ethical questions raised by developments in biological and medical research, publishing reports, and making represent...

Article history: Received 20 March 2008 Revised 17 November 2008 Available online 29 January 2009 Wavelet Trees have been introduced by Grossi et al. in SODA 2003 and have been rapidly recognized as a very flexible tool for the design of compressed full-text indexes and data compression algorithms. Although several papers have investigated the properties and usefulness of this data structure in...