This article argues that population policies need to be evaluated from macro and micro perspectives and to consider individual rights. Ecological arguments that are stringent conditions of liberal democracy are assessed against a moral standard. The moral standard is applied to a series of reasons for limiting procreative rights in the cause of sustainability. The focus is directly on legall...

background: hiv/aids control are one of the most important goals of the health systems. the aim of this study was to determine how hiv/aids control was initiated among policy makers' agenda setting in iran.   methods: a qualitative research (semi-structured interview) was conducted using kingdon's framework (problem, policy and politics streams, and policy windows and policy entrepreneurs) to a...

In this work we develop a SD model for a make-to-order (MTO) three-stage capacitated production/inventory system. We employ a production order release mechanism affiliated with the automated pipeline inventory and order based production control system (APIOBPCS) policies family. The production rates at each stage are defined under alternative policies. One of the policies considers the human be...

Origin-destination (OD) matrices are essential for various analyses in the field of traffic planning, and they are often estimated from link flow observations. We compare strategies for allocating link flow detectors to a traffic network with respect to the quality of the estimated OD-matrix. First, an overview of allocation strategies proposed in the literature is presented. Second, we give an...

This paper deals with sustainability in forestry management. We study a dynamic control system within the mathematical framework of viability analysis. In particular, we use the concept of viability kernel to reveal sustainable harvesting policies and sustainable resource states. An example illustrates the general statements.

We study how diversity evolves at a firm with entry-level and upper-level employees who vary in ability and "type" (gender or ethnicity). The ability of entry-level employees is increased by mentoring. An employee receives more mentoring when more upper-level employees have the same type. Optimal promotions are biased by type, and this bias may favor either the minority or the majority. We char...

4 Literature review 6 4.1 Review of fixed to mobile substitution in developed countries for broadband services . . . . . 6 4.2 Measurement of fixed and mobile substitution in developing countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 4.3 Evaluations of open access policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4.4 Methodological problems with empirical studies on FMS and ope...

Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a way of behaving, or policy, while following a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD and TDC/GQ [13], converge even when using function approximation and incremental updates. However, they have been developed for the case of a fixed behavior policy. In control problems, one would ...