Life-history theory assumes that traits compete for limited resources, resulting in trade-offs. The most commonly manipulated resource in empirical studies is the quantity or quality of diet. Recent studies using the geometric framework for nutrition, however, suggest that trade-offs are often regulated by the intake of specific nutrients, but a formal approach to identify and quantify the stre...

We develop an ontological account of information security architectures that is inspired by economic models of trade-offs between confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Our approach clarifies the nature of the trade-offs by making a clear distinction between declarative and operational concepts in security. We integrate this approach with a semantically justified mathematical systems mod...

Qualitative probabilistic networks have been designed for probabilistic reasoning in a qualitative way. Due to their coarse level of representation detail, qualitative probabilistic networks do not provide for resolving trade-offs and typically yield ambiguous results upon inference. We present an algorithm for computing more insightful results for unresolved trade-offs. The algorithm builds up...

Versatile dependability is a software architecture that aims to quantify the trade-offs among a system’s fault-tolerance, performance and resource requirements, and that provides system-level “knobs” for tuning these trade-offs. We propose a visual representation of the trade-off space of dependable systems, and discuss design principles that allow the tuning of such trade-offs along multiple d...

Trade-offs are manifestations of the complex dynamics in interdependent social-ecological systems. Addressing tradeoffs involves challenges of perception due to the dynamics of interdependence. We outline the challenges associated with addressing trade-offs and analyze knowledge coproduction as a practice that may contribute to tackling trade-offs in social-ecological systems. We discuss this t...

Dealing with trade-offs lies at the heart of environmental impact assessment (EIA). However, there has been scant reflection to date on the concept of trade-offs within the EIA literature. This paper aims to contribute to the thinking about trade-offs by distilling key learning points from research conducted within the field of psychology. In particular the paper explores three interrelated que...