Volume 29, Number 4, July/August 1997 better index of acceptability than does the former, they are constrained by the bias of selecting only those women willing to try the device. Selectivity, small sample size and data collection restrictions in previous research have inhibited attempts to differentiate among women unwilling to try the device, those willing to do so and those using the female ...

Materials used in the exterior of buildings and in construction are routinely exposed to solar UV radiation. Especially in the case of wood and plastic building materials, the service life is determined by their weather-induced deterioration. Any further increase in ground-level solar UV radiation, UV-B radiation in particular, will therefore reduce the outdoor service life of these products. A...

As oestrogen deficiency is the main cause in the pathogenesis of osteoporosis hormonereplacement therapy remains the mainstay for prevention. However, prophylaxis by hormonereplacement therapy is limited. Phyto-oestrogens, which are weakly-oestrogenic compounds present in plants, deserve particular mention because emerging data support the suggestion that they may prevent bone loss associated w...

To develop an approach to utilizing continuous statistical information within the Dempster- Shafer framework, we combine methods proposed by Strat and by Shafero We first derive continuous possibility and mass functions from probability-density functions. Then we propose a rule for combining such evidence that is simpler and more efficiently computed than Dempster's rule. We discuss the relatio...

In view of the recent interest in a short proof of the Jacobi identity for the Poisson-brackets, we provide an alternative simple proof for the same. Our derivation is based on the validity of the Leibnitz rule in the context of dynamical evolution.

We analyze a model in which voters learn over time their preferences regarding an irreversible social decision. Voters can either implement the project in the first period, or they can postpone the decision to the second period. We analyze the effects of different majority rules. We show that individual first period voting behavior may become “less conservative” under supermajority rules, and t...

A conflicting knowledge base can be seen abstractly as a set of arguments and a binary relation characterising conflict among them. There may be multiple plausible ways to evaluate conflicting arguments. In this paper, we ask: given a set of agents, each with a legitimate subjective evaluation of a set of arguments, how can they reach a collective evaluation of those arguments? After formally d...

In automotive R&D projects a major part of development cost is caused by tests which utilize expensive experimental vehicles. In this paper, we introduce an approach for scheduling the individual tests such that the number of required experimental vehicles is minimized. The proposed approach is based on a new type of multi-mode resource-constrained project scheduling model with minimum and maxi...