One of the barriers to ending the prohibition on compensated organ donations is that people do not have a good idea what a legal, compensated system would look like. The ban on compensation is nearly global, and has existed, de facto or de jure, almost since the development of immunosuppressive drugs made donations from unrelated individuals feasible. The resulting dearth of first-hand knowledg...

In this paper we propose a formal language for writing electronic contracts, based on the deontic notions of obligation, permission, and prohibition. We take an ought-to-do approach, where deontic operators are applied to actions instead of state-of-a airs. We propose an extension of the μ-calculus in order to capture the intuitive meaning of the deontic notions and to express concurrent action...

Various elegant and powerful theories for network performance evaluation have to assume independence to be efficient. While traffic sources are often supposed to be independent, the implications of this assumption regarding flows in arbitrary networks are largely unknown. Recently, turn-prohibition was proposed to solve a related problem concerning feed-forward networks. In this paper we extend...

This latter group includes Professor Steven Duke, who, both in his recent book with Albert Gross [FN3] and in his lead commentary [FN4] here, displays an unremitting commitment to redefining the debate on drugs. He powerfully catalogues how possibly cynical legislators have turned drug-prohibition statutes into dangerous instruments permitting use of the death penalty and other "savage" crimina...

In the present article we apply and adjust some techniques and methodologies for detecting faults in a Fluidized Catalytic Cracking refinery process (FCC) UOP model, initially performing a reliability analysis that defines the level of criticality of each equipment and identify potential fault modes and their effect on the operation of the process, with the information provided by this analysis...

Many multi-agent systems (MAS) and other kinds of dynamic systems may be modeled as transition systems, in which actions are associated with transitions between different system states. This paper presents an approach to normative systems in this context, in which the permission or prohibition of actions is related to the permission or prohibition of different types of state transitions with re...

Today’s international law regime leaves little room for lawful use of nuclear weapons.1 At the same time, there is no prohibition of these weapons per se.2 This situation distinguishes them from biological and chemical weapons, which are subject to comprehensive bans under the 1972 Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, respectively. The ‘legal ga...