INTRODUCTION On 8 June 2017, the Supreme Court in the United Kingdom rejected a legal appeal in the high-profile case of Charlie Gard, a British infant with a severe genetic disorder whose parents had disagreed with medical professionals and were requesting treatment that the doctors believed was futile. The case was the latest in a series of UK legal cases where courts have authorized withdraw...

Environmental sustainability is an important issue for many individuals, businesses, and governments nowadays. One of the road blocks to sustainable practice is cost, which is an important consideration, particularly for business. The eco-efficiency movement was initiated to address this concern. This chapter reviews the eco-efficiency concept and explains why it is becoming a current issue for...

Epoxy ternary systems were prepared from the diglycidylether of bisphenol-A (DGEBA), epoxidized castor oil (ECO), and nano-CaCO3 using a thermally latent initiator. The effects of ECO and the nano-CaCO3 contents on the thermal stability and mechanical interfacial properties of the prepared DGEBA/ECO/nano-CaCO3 ternary systems were examined by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), Izod impact tests,...

1 Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin (UniSZA), Medical Campus, Jalan Sultan Mahmud, 20400 Kuala Terengganu, Terengganu, Malaysia 2 Faculty of Health Sciences, UniSZA, Gong Badak Campus, 21300, Kuala Terengganu, Terengganu, Malaysia. 3 Department of Medical Microbiology and Parasitology, School of Medical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Health Campus, 16150, Kubang Kerian,...

Consider a scenario in which there are multiple employers competing to hire the best possible employee. How does the competition between the employers affect their hiring strategies or their ability to hire one of the best possible candidates? In this paper, we address this question by studying a generalization of the classical secretary problem from optimal stopping theory: a set of ranked emp...

The classical secretary problem is a well known optimal stopping problem from probability theory. It is usually described by different real life examples, notably the process of hiring a secretary. Imagine a company manager in need of a secretary. Our manager wants to hire only the best secretary from a given set of n candidates, where n is known. No candidate is equally as qualified as another...

The Secretary problem is studied with minimal cognitive agents, being a problem that needs memory and judgment. A sequence of values, drawn from an unknown range, is presented; the agent has only one chance to pick a single value as they are presented, and should try to maximize the value chosen. In extension of previous work (Tuci et al. 2002), Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNN)...

In the online random-arrival model, an algorithm receives a sequence of n requests that arrive in a random order. The algorithm is expected to make an irrevocable decision with regard to each request based only on the observed history. We consider the following natural extension of this model: each request arrives k times, and the arrival order is a random permutation of the kn arrivals; the al...

Eco-labeling signals that a product has been eco-certified. While there is increasing use of eco-labeling practices, there is still little understanding of the conditions under which eco-labels can command price premiums. In this paper, we argue that the certification of environmental practices by a third party should be analyzed as a strategy distinct from although related to the advertisement...

Acknowledging and understanding the role that information may play in affecting consumer assessment of eco-marketed products is a key step in improving the effectiveness of eco-labeling initiatives. Consumers who hold preferences for environmentally preferred products may be unable to express their preferences for such goods under current eco-information campaigns. The emerging use of eco-label...