Following the deaths of Victoria Climbié and of Peter Connelly (Baby P) the media has raged about social work competence, the public have expressed dismay and the government has responded with proposals designed to alter practice procedures. Altering procedures gives…

We study the effects of proximity in the interconnections between Internet providers participating at the three main Italian Internet Exchange Points. We find that geographical proximity plays a role in driving Internet Providers’ interconnection, positively affecting the likelihood of an…

Although we represent other people in terms of both what they look like and how they behave, these two aspects of person knowledge have rarely been studied together. While vision scientists have focused on the processing of faces and bodies,…

This paper presents a proposal for an architecture that integrates knowledge discovery systems (automatic acquisition) and knowledge based systems (experts systems). This work formulates considerations over the viability of the implementation of this architecture according to the advance of the…

After an impressive development throughout the last two decades, supported by a great
amount of research and innovation, science education seemed to be becoming a new scientific domain.
This transformation of Science Education into a specific field of research and…

Une préoccupation essentielle traverse cette thèse: l'indifférence systémique de la Loi internationale sur la propriété intellectuelle a l'égard des savoirs traditionnels autochtones. De manière générale, un écart semble d'ailleurs croissant entre l'importance des accords internationaux sur les questions d'intérêt commercial…

In the restricted single-machine common due date problem the goal is to find a schedule for the n jobs which jointly minimizes the sum of earliness and tardiness penalties, while for the weighted tardiness problem the goal is to find…

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are merely blind search algorithms, which only make use of the relative fitness of solutions, but completely ignore the nature of the problem. Their performance can be improved by using new multirecombinative approaches, which provide a good…

We describe an adaptation of the knowledge gradient, originally developed for discrete ranking and selection problems, to the problem of calibrating continuous parameters for the purpose of tuning a simulator. The knowledge gradient for continuous parameters uses a continuous approximation…

Amidst the disintegration of the Qing Empire (1644-1911), men and women in China began to understand their differences in terms of modern scientific knowledge. Why Sex Mattered provides an explanation for the relatively recent emergence of a psycho-biological notion of…