This article identifies the key issues involved in the debate about affirmative action. The June 2003 Supreme Court decisions allowing consideration of race to ensure that there is a "critical mass" of African American, Latino/Latina, and Native American applicants to higher education are addressed. Social psychologists have identified key myths and provided clarifications about the need for an...

The Supreme Court has consistently stated that federal appellate courts may issue the writ of mandamus as an interlocutory remedy only under "extraordinary" circumstances," to correct a lower court order that is "not mere error but usurpation of power."2 The Court has explained that mandamus cannot serve as a substitute for normal appeal and should be available "only where appeal is a clearly i...

F or more than a decade, there has been an intense debate about the ethics and legality of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in the United States. In June 1997, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that there is neither a constitutional right nor a constitutional prohibition to euthanasia or PAS. This permitted Oregon to experiment with legalizing PAS. During this decade, most o...

Although a 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decision affirmed that therapists cannot be compelled to testify in federal proceedings about patients' disclosures, a footnote could be interpreted as creating a "dangerous patient exception" when there is a serious threat of harm. This column describes circuit courts' differing views about whether such an exception exists and the value of an exception. Altho...

In June 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of using race as a factor in higher education admissions decisions. This article considers the impact of the Supreme Court decisions on admissions procedures at selected academic dental institutions (ADI) and their parent institutions. We interviewed fifty-eight leaders considered to be individual stakeholders at seven ADI and the...

In this work, we focus on multi-criteria decision making and in particular, in the case of multiple experts (ME-MCDM). The problem of making decisions when multiple (possibly conflicting) criteria are involved often boils down to identifying an aggregation function that will combine all appreciations of the multiple dimensions of the problem. In the case of Multiple Experts, decisions even alre...

This paper describes the best first search strategy used by U-Plan (Mansell 1993a), a planning system that constructs quantitatively ranked plans given an incomplete description of an uncertain environment. U-Plan uses uncertain and incomplete evidence describing the environment, characterises it using a Dempster­ Shafer interval, and generates a set of possible world states. Plan construction ...

The paper is devoted to the study of a greedy algorithm for construction of approximate tests (super-reducts). This algorithm is applicable to decision tables with many-valued decisions where each row is labeled with a set of decisions. For a given row, we should find a decision from the set attached to this row. The idea of algorithm is connected with so-called boundary subtables. After constr...