Ð This paper explores the reasons why recent evaluations of the empowerment potential of credit programs for rural women in Bangladesh have arrived at very con ̄icting conclusions. Although these evaluations use somewhat di€erent methodologies and have been carried out at di€erent points of time, the paper argues that the primary source of the con ̄ict lies in the very di€erent understandings of ...

The research on open source software has attracted a great deal of attention during the past decades for its wide applications in both academia and industry. Among the research topics related to open source software, the usefulness of software network metrics for fault prediction has been received much attention recently. In order to verify the importance of software network metrics in the perf...

We report on a series of evaluations of text processing and machine learning methods with the goal of building classifiers for social deliberative skills, i.e. the capacity to deal productively with heterogeneous goals, values, or perspectives. Our corpus includes online deliberative dialogue from four diverse domain contexts. We use the LIWC and CohMetrix linquistic analysis tools to (1) asses...

| In this paper the Breeder Genetic Algorithms are compared against both serial and parallel Genetic Algorithms by using a wide range of optimisation functions taken from the literature. The aim is to investigate how the change of the tness function innuences their problem{ solving capabilities. The experimental ndings show that the Breeder Genetic Algorithms outperform the Genetic Algorithms c...

Agent-oriented methodologies, as they have been proposed so far, mainly try to suggest a clean and disciplined approach to analyse, design and develop MASs by using specific methods and techniques. Moreover, different studies have been proposed for the evaluation of agent-oriented methodologies adopting specific types of evaluation and criteria. However, little effort has been devoted to the co...

The sustainable supplier selection process requires consideration of multi-criteria evaluations. In recent years, to prevent the hesitation of different linguistic expressions by the decision makers, and to help the selection of the best one as the solution of different alternatives, researchers have been using several methods such as hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS), hesitant fuzzy ...

2. Additional Articles a. Common patterns, common drivers: comparative analysis of aggregate surplus production across ecosystems b. Comparative analysis of cod and herring production dynamics across thirteen northern marine ecosystems c. Aggregate surplus production models for demersal fishery resources of the Gulf of Maine d. Synthesizing lessons learned from comparing fisheries production in...

In many businesses, including hydrocarbon industries, reducing cost is of high priority. Although hydrocarbon industries appear able to afford the expensive computing infrastructure and software packages used to process seismic data in the search for hydrocarbon traps, it is always imperative to find ways to minimize cost. Seismic processing costs can be significantly reduced by using inexpensi...

We apply an integrated and interdisciplinary conceptual framework to assess the potential for uptake of bycatch reduction measures by small-scale fisheries along the Andaman coast and eastern Gulf of Thailand, and in Sabah, Malaysia. Specifically, we characterize the current governance, socio-economic, ecological, and scientific context for marine megafauna bycatch, and identify the enabling an...

The field of information visualisation has seen tremendous growth over the last decade, with many new methods and approaches presented in the literature. However, evaluations of these new techniques are still rather scarce. This thesis presents a comparative evaluation of four visualisations of hierarchies: TreeView, Information Pyramids, TreeMap, and Hyperbolic Browser. The visualisations are ...