polymer application for the improvement and modification of the bitumen used in roads surfaces has expanded in recent decades. the roads engineers and constructors, therefore, have used the modified bitumen in asphalts helping in this way to increase roads and pavements service life and improving the durability of the roads and asphalts. the bitumen used in asphalt mixture constitutes only a lo...

The United States is a laboratory with 50 states that differ in how they administer roads, and in the performance that results. This paper examines how road performance varies with governance and organizational structure. The paper aims to provide some insight or perspective on how roads might be better managed. The hypothesis is that state DOTs that operate in a more independent manner will ha...

POMDPs are the models of choice for reinforcement learning (RL) tasks where the environment cannot be observed directly. In many applications we need to learn the POMDP structure and parameters from experience and this is considered to be a difficult problem. In this paper we address this issue by modeling the hidden environment with a novel class of models that are less expressive, but easier ...

Abstract May European Union (EU) member states, in the pursuit of enforcing norms ‘EU justice’, unilaterally adopt harmful policies that are ordinarily impermissible course voluntary cooperation amongst democratic states? Though conditions permissible vigilantism strict and only rarely met, there some basic EU duties compliance with which each individual state is permitted to enforce unilateral...

The Commissioned Corps of the US Public Health Service (USPHS), one of America's seven uniformed services, comprises more than 6700 public health professionals whose mission is to protect, promote, and advance the health and safety of the nation. The Scientist Category, one of 11 professional USPHS categories, includes more than 300 doctoral-level scientists stationed at various state and feder...

two physicians, both grown up in west europe, educated also in this area (supplemented by many visits of the united states), travelled 20 years ago to japan for scientific reasons and they changed thereafter in their mental sight of the world. in a first part, the neurophysiologic basis of sensation from the sensory receptor up to the cerebral cortex (“bottom up”), the mechanisms of building me...

In this paper I present evidence on the effectiveness of AD actions. Using a data set based on the line-item tariff codes identified in the cases, I examine the trade patterns of both countries named in the petition and those countries not subject to the investigation. Several important finding emerge. First, AD duties substantially restrict the volume of trade from named countries, especially ...

We introduce CST, an algorithm for constructing skill trees from demonstration trajectories in continuous reinforcement learning domains. CST uses a changepoint detection method to segment each trajectory into a skill chain by detecting a change of appropriate abstraction, or that a segment is too complex to model as a single skill. The skill chains from each trajectory are then merged to form ...