This outline traces the development of a conceptual model of the social license to operate. The development process was a conversation between theory and practice over a number of years. An original study of the levels of acceptance of a local mine across a 15 year period led to the conceptualization of the social license presented in the Thomson and Boutilier (2011) chapter. That was followed ...

Census maps contain important socio-economic information regarding the population of a country. Computing these maps is critical given that policy makers often times make important decisions based upon such information. However, the compilation of census maps requires extensive resources and becomes highly expensive, especially for emerging economies with limited budgets. On the other hand, the...

The make program is widely used in large software projects to reduce compilation time. make skips source files that would have compiled to the same result as in the previous build. (Or so it is hoped.) The crucial issue of safeness of omitting a brute-force build is addressed by defining a semantic model for make. Safeness is shown to hold if a set of criteria are satisfied, including soundness...

Several important modifications to the distributed queue dual bus (DQDB) (IEEE 802.6) protocol for metropolitan area networks (MANs) are proposed. These modifications are aimed at improving not only the throughput and delay performance of the network but also its fairness performance. The first proposal exploits the continuation-of-message (COM) information in a DQDB segment in order to minimiz...

Machine learning systems, which are often used for high-stakes decisions, suffer from two mutually reinforcing problems: unfairness and opaqueness. Many popular models, although generally accurate, cannot express uncertainty about their predictions. Even in regimes where a model is inaccurate, users may trust the model’s predictions too fully, and allow its biases to reinforce the user’s own. I...

Good estimates of development effort play an important role in the successful management of larger software development projects. This paper compares the prediction accuracy of three CBR techniques to estimate the effort to develop Web hypermedia applications. Most comparative studies have used one CBR technique. We believe this may bias the results, as there are several CBR techniques that may...