We present a new cross-national measure of de facto judicial independence, which is available for 200 countries from 1948 to 2012. To do so, we introduce a statistical measurement model for uncovering latent concepts commonly encountered in time-series, cross-sectional analyses in comparative politics and international relations. Our approach addresses unique challenges that arise in these data...

In the initial models of economic growth, economic factors entered in to models but in the following models, non-economic factors entered in to models. Many broad studies were done on this subject by the economists, and already considerable results were obtained. Subjects such as corruption in the administrative bodies were new variables entering the literature of economic growth at that stage....

This paper studies connections between two alternatives to the standard probability calculus for representing and reasoning about uncertainty: imprecise comparative probability. The goal is identify complete logics uncertainty in a probabilistic language whose semantics given terms of Comparative operators are interpreted as quantifying over set measures. Modal dynamic added epistemic possibili...

Developers of assistive technology products need to ensure that their offerings meet the requirements of end users, and that usability issues have been discovered prior to manufacture. This may be difficult for SMEs (Small Medium Enterprises) who may lack the necessary skills and resources required to plan and conduct an evaluation. To assist SMEs in the assistive technology market, a stand alo...

Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is becoming increasingly popular with some offering it as a primary screen option in all patients in place of serum screening. Serum screening offers insight into placental function, which NIPT does not. Abnormal levels of analytes in the serum screen have been associated with pregnancy complications.

Decision making under uncertainty is usually based on the comparative evaluation of different alternatives by means of a decision criterion. In a qualitative setting, pessimistic and optimistic criteria have been proposed. In that setting, the whole decision process is compacted into a criterion formula on the basis of which alternatives are compared. It is thus impossible for an end user to un...

This paper provides an overview on the impacts of food aid. We consider its effects on consumption, nutrition, food markets and labour supply, as well as the extent to which it exacerbates or mitigates conflict. We also consider the comparative evidence on alternatives to food aid including evidence on cost, impact, relative risks and beneficiary preferences. We note that there are two large ga...

Applying systematic analysis procedures to early requirements models can test the satisfaction of stakeholder goals and facilitate an evaluation of design alternatives. We introduce a qualitative and interactive model evaluation procedure for goal and agent-oriented models. In applying the procedure to a variety of case studies we found that the interactive nature of the procedure prompts model...

The Pridneprovsky Chemical Plant was one of the largest uranium processing enterprises in the former USSR, producing a huge amount of uranium residues. The Zapadnoe tailings site contains most of these residues. We propose a theoretical framework based on multicriteria decision analysis and fuzzy logic to analyze different remediation alternatives for the Zapadnoe tailings, which simultaneously...

This work surveys existing evaluation methodologies for the task of sentence compression, identifies their shortcomings, and proposes alternatives. In particular, we examine the problems of evaluating paraphrastic compression and comparing the output of different models. We demonstrate that compression rate is a strong predictor of compression quality and that perceived improvement over other m...