I defend the idea that a liberal commitment to value neutrality is best honoured by maintaining a pure cardinality component in our rankings of opportunity or liberty sets. I consider two challenges to this idea. The first holds that cardinality rankings are unnecessary for neutrality, because what is valuable about a set of liberties from a liberal point of view is not its size but rather its ...

7 The increasing penetration of uncertain generation such as wind and solar in power systems imposes new challenges to the Unit Commitment (UC) problem, one of the most critical tasks in power systems operations. The two most common approaches to address these challenges — stochastic and robust optimization — have drawbacks that restrict their application to real-world systems. This paper demon...

The 2012 Albert Lasker Special Achievement Award in Medical Science will be shared by Donald Brown and Tom Maniatis for their scientific work leading to the purification and study of single genes by physical and molecular biological methodologies. Brown and Maniatis are also recognized for their extraordinary commitment and generosity in promoting the careers of young scientists. The impact of ...

DEFINITION Sensor networks allow for micro-monitoring of different phenomena of interest in arbitrary physical environments. With this unique capability, sensor networks can capture the events in the real world as they happen in the form of high-resolution spatiotemporal data of various modalities, and provide the opportunity for real-time querying and analysis of the data for immediate respons...

Orchestrating learning is a quite complex task. In fact, it has been identified as one of the grand challenges in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) by the Stellar Network of Excellence. The objective of this article is to provide teachers and students with a tool to help them in their effort of orchestrating learning, that makes use of awareness artefacts. Using this powerful mechanism in lab ...

The grand challenge for the 21st century is to harness the accumulating knowledge of Earth’s biodiversity and the ecosystems that support it. To accomplish this, we must mobilize biological information  assemble it, organize it, and deliver it with dramatically increased capacity. We must elevate the global biological information infrastructure to a new level of capability  a “next generation...

In this paper, we explore the use of the diffusion geometry framework for the fusion of geometric and photometric information in local and global shape descriptors. Our construction is based on the definition of a diffusion process on the shape manifold embedded into a high-dimensional space where the embedding coordinates represent the photometric information. Experimental results show that su...

Government intervention often gives rise to contests in which the possible ‘prizes’ are determined by the existing status-quo and some new publicpolicy proposal . In this paper we study the general class of such two-player public-policy contests and examine the effect of a change in the proposed policy, a change that may affect the payoffs of the two contestants, on their effort and performance...