A recently-published paper by Wickremasinghe et al assesses the scalability of pilot projects in three countries using the aid effectiveness agenda as an analytical framework. The authors report uneven progress and recommend applying aid effectiveness principles to improve the scalability of projects. This commentary focuses on one key principle of aid effectiveness – country ownership; it desc...

In 2008, the Ontario Long Term Care Association was awarded funding from HealthForceOntario to assist with its nursing recruitment strategy based on research it had initiated in 2007. The research goal was to understand the career motivations and perceptions of students enrolled in registered nursing (RN) and registered practical nursing (RPN) programs in Ontario to develop and test a message t...

Utilitarians are attracted to the idea that an act is morally right iff it leads to the best outcome. But critics have pointed out that in many cases we cannot determine which of our alternatives in fact would lead to the best outcome. So we can’t use the classic principle to determine what we should do. It’s not “practical”; it’s not “action-guiding”. Some take this to be a serious objection t...

As we will see during this talk, the Bayesian and information-theoretic views of variational inference provide complementary and mutually beneficial perspectives to the same problems with two different languages. More specifically, based on the paper by Honkela and Valpola [4], we will provide an interpretation of variational inference based on the MDL principle as a theoretical framework for m...

This paper proposes a two-step graph partitioning method to discover constrained clusters with an objective function that follows the well-known minmax clustering principle. Compared with traditional approaches, the proposed method has several advantages. Firstly, the objective function not only follows the theoretical min-max principle but also reflects certain practical requirements. Secondly...