Veterinarians today face an increased risk for malpractice claims in view of increased client awareness of the benefits of the human-animal bond and advances in preventive and specialized veterinary medicine. An important problem with medical malpractice litigation is the manner in which malpractice claims are resolved. In several countries, thousands of claims have been successfully resolved v...

Role-based access control can be used to support the real-world access control requirements of a distributed system. This article describes a role model as used in the context of a distributed security infrastructure such as SESAME or OSF/DCE security. It is based on practical experience in the use of roles in real product and shows how role-based access control benefits both the user and the s...

This paper analyzes two joint inference approaches for semantic role labeling: re-ranking of candidate semantic frames generated by one local model and combination of two distinct models at argument-level using meta learning. We perform an empirical analysis on two recently released corpora of annotated semantic roles in Spanish and Catalan. This work yields several novel conclusions: (a) the p...

Preferential rewarding of more beneficial partners may stabilize mutualisms against the invasion of less beneficial, that is cheater, genotypes. Recent evidence suggests that both partner choice and sanctioning may play roles in preventing the invasion of less-beneficial rhizobia in legume-rhizobium mutualisms. The importance of these mechanisms in natural communities, however, remains unclear....

Under certain environmental statutes the EPA is required to balance costs and benefits in setting standards, whereas under others this is prohibited. This paper examines EPA regulatory decisions made under three statues, two of which require balancing and one of which does not. Using discrete choice models, we find that costs and benefits are significant explanatory variables for all three sets...

RAED provides a computerised infrastructure to support the development and administration of Vicarious Learning in collaborative learning communities spread across multiple universities and workplaces. The system is based on the OASIS middleware for Role-based Access Control. This paper describes the origins of the model and the approach to implementation and outlines some of its benefits to co...

This paper discusses the Demand Response and Energy Efficiency results from the U.S. Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Regional Business Case (RBC). Demand side management (DSM) is becoming a more accepted and important component of integrated resource planning across international regulatory jurisdictions. At the same time new, smart technologies are increasing the effectiveness and flexibility of ...

Cheating and plagiarism can involve the transgression of intellectual property rights across many areas of life. When a direct financial benefit from such practices is identifiable, the opportunity to seek legal redress is available via civil court action. When it is undertaken by a public official it may constitute malfeasance. Yet in the case of breaches of university regulations (from the gr...