A case is made to wed research on serious leisure and recreation specialization. Before such a marriage can occur, the strengths and differences of the two perspectives must be examined. In this article, four important contributions of the recreation specialization are put forward that will further our understanding of serious leisure and intense forms of leisure. These are (1) there is diversi...

In temporal specialization, the database designer restricts the relationship between the valid t ime-stamp (recording when something is true in the reality being modeled) and the transaction t ime-stamp (recording when a fact is stored in the database). An example is a retroactive temporal event relation, where the event must have occurred before it was stored, i.e., the valid t ime-stamp is re...

Traditional offline program specialization relies on staging of a computation into two levels, static and dynamic. We present a generalization thereof where the static input data of one level is split up in a potentially unknown number of separate fragments. These fragments arrive in an unspecified order and are specialized as they arrive. Potential applications of the technique include separat...

We analyze a multiple-activity, principal-agent model in which the activities are naturally substitutable for the agent and complementary for the principal. A basic result is that the optimal compensation must cause the agent to view the activities as complements. This complementarity is achieved by employing a compensation scheme that is typically nonmonotone and makes success on multiple dime...

Non-price competition strategy is a major health policy concern in many countries. This paper studies the treatment specialization choice and quality level competition among hospitals. We extend a two-stage spatial duopoly model, with the partially altruistic providers firstly choosing specialization and then determining quality level when the treatment price is set exogenously by central plann...

This research applies the Collective Specialization NeuroEvolution (CONE) method to the problem of evolving neural controllers in a simulated multi-robot system. The multi-robot system consists of multiple pursuer (predator) robots, and a single evader (prey) robot. The CONE method is designed to facilitate behavioral specialization in order to increase task performance in collective behavior s...

A popular technique to implement software product-lines is through object-oriented application frameworks. A major problem with application frameworks is the unstructured, cross-cutting character of their specialization interfaces, and the weak connections between the specialization goals of the application developer and the different parts of the specialization interface. In this position pape...

It has often been argued that evolutionary diversification is the result of divergent natural selection for specialization on alternative resources. I provide a comprehensive review of experiments that examine the ecology and genetics of resource specialization and adaptive radiation in microbial microcosms. In these experiments, resource heterogeneity generates divergent selection for speciali...

Specialization is a technique that has the potential to provide operating system clients with the performance and functionality that they need, while still retaining the advantages of a simple generic code base for the operating system maintainer. However, at present the specialization process is labor-intensive and requires the knowledge of an expert in the domain of application behavior. In o...

The emphasis on code re-usability in component-based software development has resulted in degradation of system performance. Component specialization techniques have been proposed to overcome this problem. They mainly specialize components wrt contents of component interfaces. This requires specialization to be performed in either a forward or backward direction. The current state of the art ap...