The debate on the impact of the information and communication technologies (ICT) on contemporary democracy has lasted in political science since the beginning of the information revolution. Two dominating and antagonistic standpoints present the electronic democracy as either the cure for democracy crisis, or the factor deepening major problems of democracy. The text questions such a simplified...

This study examined the effect of agriculture faculty training in and practice of methodologies to explicitly teach critical thinking skills related to course content and subsequent change in student critical thinking disposition. Twelve instructors in 14 agriculture courses underwent a year–long program of instruction in effective critical thinking development. Students completed the Universit...

A function f : R → R is referred to as a SparseAdditive Model (SPAM), if it is of the formf(x) =∑l∈S φl(xl), where S ⊂ [d], |S| d.Assuming φl’s and S to be unknown, the prob-lem of estimating f from its samples has beenstudied extensively. In this work, we consider ageneralized SPAM, allowing for second order in-teraction terms. For someS1 ⊂ [d],S2 ⊂<...

This essay turns to ancient sources in order to rethink the relationship between political apathy and democracy. If modern democratic theorists place political apathy entirely outside of democracy – either as a destructive limit upon the full realization of a democratic polity, or, more sanguinely, as a pragmatic necessity which tempers democracy so that it may function in a workable yet watere...

This note generalizes analytical relationships among activity variables of DEA models previously derived by Boussemart, Briec and Leleu (2007). We relax the asumption of constant returns to scale by showing that the key results hold under a weaker asumption of homogeneity. We use the notion of α -returns to scale to extend the analysis to strictly increasing and decreasing returns, covering now...

We model the pursuit problem as a set of distributed agents communicating over a network subject to latency. Latency has serious deleterious effects on solving the pursuit prob lem. In this paper, we present a simple, yet effective way of dealing with latency that yields very good performance. Our method disperses predators within a region in which the prey may move that accounts for network la...

IMPORTANCE Abdominal wall hernia is one of the most common conditions encountered by general surgeons. Rising rates of abdominal wall hernia repair have been described; however, population-based evidence concerning incidence rates of emergent hernia repair and changes with time are unknown. OBJECTIVE To examine trends in rates of emergent abdominal hernia repair within the United States for i...

One of the main aims of contemporary theory o f a d a p t i v e , l e a r n i n g and s e l f l e a r n i n g systems i s the u n i f i c a t i o n o f the p r o b lems of a d a p t a t i o n , l e a r n i n g and s e l f l e a r n i n g from one p o i n t o f v i e w , i . e . t h e de t e r m i n a t i o n o f the a p p r o p r i a t e mathemat i c a l t echn ique which would be ab le to s o ...

The examples of independent games presented in this paper provide fun through strong, innovative and playful game mechanics. The often-resulting combination of retro flair with focused gameplay is what makes the "contemporary retro game”. This paper argues that game and especially level design have evolved over time and provides insights on contemporary level design practice. By a qualitative a...

A significant number of neural architectures for reading comprehension have recently been developed and evaluated on large cloze-style datasets. We present experiments supporting the emergence of “predication structure” in the hidden state vectors of these readers. More specifically, we provide evidence that the hidden state vectors represent atomic formulas Φ[c] where Φ is a semantic property ...