WorldWideScience

Sample records for constructing majority-rule supertrees

  1. Robinson-Foulds Supertrees

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Eulenstein Oliver

    2010-02-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Supertree methods synthesize collections of small phylogenetic trees with incomplete taxon overlap into comprehensive trees, or supertrees, that include all taxa found in the input trees. Supertree methods based on the well established Robinson-Foulds (RF distance have the potential to build supertrees that retain much information from the input trees. Specifically, the RF supertree problem seeks a binary supertree that minimizes the sum of the RF distances from the supertree to the input trees. Thus, an RF supertree is a supertree that is consistent with the largest number of clusters (or clades from the input trees. Results We introduce efficient, local search based, hill-climbing heuristics for the intrinsically hard RF supertree problem on rooted trees. These heuristics use novel non-trivial algorithms for the SPR and TBR local search problems which improve on the time complexity of the best known (naïve solutions by a factor of Θ(n and Θ(n2 respectively (where n is the number of taxa, or leaves, in the supertree. We use an implementation of our new algorithms to examine the performance of the RF supertree method and compare it to matrix representation with parsimony (MRP and the triplet supertree method using four supertree data sets. Not only did our RF heuristic provide fast estimates of RF supertrees in all data sets, but the RF supertrees also retained more of the information from the input trees (based on the RF distance than the other supertree methods. Conclusions Our heuristics for the RF supertree problem, based on our new local search algorithms, make it possible for the first time to estimate large supertrees by directly optimizing the RF distance from rooted input trees to the supertrees. This provides a new and fast method to build accurate supertrees. RF supertrees may also be useful for estimating majority-rule(- supertrees, which are a generalization of majority-rule consensus trees.

  2. Bad Clade Deletion Supertrees: A Fast and Accurate Supertree Algorithm.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fleischauer, Markus; Böcker, Sebastian

    2017-09-01

    Supertree methods merge a set of overlapping phylogenetic trees into a supertree containing all taxa of the input trees. The challenge in supertree reconstruction is the way of dealing with conflicting information in the input trees. Many different algorithms for different objective functions have been suggested to resolve these conflicts. In particular, there exist methods based on encoding the source trees in a matrix, where the supertree is constructed applying a local search heuristic to optimize the respective objective function. We present a novel heuristic supertree algorithm called Bad Clade Deletion (BCD) supertrees. It uses minimum cuts to delete a locally minimal number of columns from such a matrix representation so that it is compatible. This is the complement problem to Matrix Representation with Compatibility (Maximum Split Fit). Our algorithm has guaranteed polynomial worst-case running time and performs swiftly in practice. Different from local search heuristics, it guarantees to return the directed perfect phylogeny for the input matrix, corresponding to the parent tree of the input trees, if one exists. Comparing supertrees to model trees for simulated data, BCD shows a better accuracy (F1 score) than the state-of-the-art algorithms SuperFine (up to 3%) and Matrix Representation with Parsimony (up to 7%); at the same time, BCD is up to 7 times faster than SuperFine, and up to 600 times faster than Matrix Representation with Parsimony. Finally, using the BCD supertree as a starting tree for a combined Maximum Likelihood analysis using RAxML, we reach significantly improved accuracy (1% higher F1 score) and running time (1.7-fold speedup). © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.

  3. A higher-level MRP supertree of placental mammals

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Bininda-Emonds Olaf RP

    2006-11-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background The higher-level phylogeny of placental mammals has long been a phylogenetic Gordian knot, with disagreement about both the precise contents of, and relationships between, the extant orders. A recent MRP supertree that favoured 'outdated' hypotheses (notably, monophyly of both Artiodactyla and Lipotyphla has been heavily criticised for including low-quality and redundant data. We apply a stringent data selection protocol designed to minimise these problems to a much-expanded data set of morphological, molecular and combined source trees, to produce a supertree that includes every family of extant placental mammals. Results The supertree is well-resolved and supports both polyphyly of Lipotyphla and paraphyly of Artiodactyla with respect to Cetacea. The existence of four 'superorders' – Afrotheria, Xenarthra, Laurasiatheria and Euarchontoglires – is also supported. The topology is highly congruent with recent (molecular phylogenetic analyses of placental mammals, but is considerably more comprehensive, being the first phylogeny to include all 113 extant families without making a priori assumptions of suprafamilial monophyly. Subsidiary analyses reveal that the data selection protocol played a key role in the major changes relative to a previously published higher-level supertree of placentals. Conclusion The supertree should provide a useful framework for hypothesis testing in phylogenetic comparative biology, and supports the idea that biogeography has played a crucial role in the evolution of placental mammals. Our results demonstrate the importance of minimising poor and redundant data when constructing supertrees.

  4. A supertree approach to shorebird phylogeny

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Thomas Gavin H

    2004-08-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Order Charadriiformes (shorebirds is an ideal model group in which to study a wide range of behavioural, ecological and macroevolutionary processes across species. However, comparative studies depend on phylogeny to control for the effects of shared evolutionary history. Although numerous hypotheses have been presented for subsets of the Charadriiformes none to date include all recognised species. Here we use the matrix representation with parsimony method to produce the first fully inclusive supertree of Charadriiformes. We also provide preliminary estimates of ages for all nodes in the tree. Results Three main lineages are revealed: i the plovers and allies; ii the gulls and allies; and iii the sandpipers and allies. The relative position of these clades is unresolved in the strict consensus tree but a 50% majority-rule consensus tree indicates that the sandpiper clade is sister group to the gulls and allies whilst the plover group is placed at the base of the tree. The overall topology is highly consistent with recent molecular hypotheses of shorebird phylogeny. Conclusion The supertree hypothesis presented herein is (to our knowledge the only complete phylogenetic hypothesis of all extant shorebirds. Despite concerns over the robustness of supertrees (see Discussion, we believe that it provides a valuable framework for testing numerous evolutionary hypotheses relating to the diversity of behaviour, ecology and life-history of the Charadriiformes.

  5. Towards a Supertree of Arthropoda: A Species-Level Supertree of the Spiny, Slipper and Coral Lobsters (Decapoda: Achelata).

    Science.gov (United States)

    Davis, Katie E; Hesketh, Thomas W; Delmer, Cyrille; Wills, Matthew A

    2015-01-01

    While supertrees have been built for many vertebrate groups (notably birds, mammals and dinosaurs), invertebrates have attracted relatively little attention. The paucity of supertrees of arthropods is particularly surprising given their economic and ecological importance, as well as their overwhelming contribution to biodiversity. The absence of comprehensive archives of machine-readable source trees, coupled with the need for software implementing repeatable protocols for managing them, has undoubtedly impeded progress. Here we present a supertree of Achelata (spiny, slipper and coral lobsters) as a proof of concept, constructed using new supertree specific software (the Supertree Toolkit; STK) and following a published protocol. We also introduce a new resource for archiving and managing published source trees. Our supertree of Achelata is synthesised from morphological and molecular source trees, and represents the most complete species-level tree of the group to date. Our findings are consistent with recent taxonomic treatments, confirming the validity of just two families: Palinuridae and Scyllaridae; Synaxidae were resolved within Palinuridae. Monophyletic Silentes and Stridentes lineages are recovered within Palinuridae, and all sub-families within Scyllaridae are found to be monophyletic with the exception of Ibacinae. We demonstrate the feasibility of building larger supertrees of arthropods, with the ultimate objective of building a complete species-level phylogeny for the entire phylum using a divide and conquer strategy.

  6. Towards a Supertree of Arthropoda: A Species-Level Supertree of the Spiny, Slipper and Coral Lobsters (Decapoda: Achelata.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Katie E Davis

    Full Text Available While supertrees have been built for many vertebrate groups (notably birds, mammals and dinosaurs, invertebrates have attracted relatively little attention. The paucity of supertrees of arthropods is particularly surprising given their economic and ecological importance, as well as their overwhelming contribution to biodiversity. The absence of comprehensive archives of machine-readable source trees, coupled with the need for software implementing repeatable protocols for managing them, has undoubtedly impeded progress. Here we present a supertree of Achelata (spiny, slipper and coral lobsters as a proof of concept, constructed using new supertree specific software (the Supertree Toolkit; STK and following a published protocol. We also introduce a new resource for archiving and managing published source trees. Our supertree of Achelata is synthesised from morphological and molecular source trees, and represents the most complete species-level tree of the group to date. Our findings are consistent with recent taxonomic treatments, confirming the validity of just two families: Palinuridae and Scyllaridae; Synaxidae were resolved within Palinuridae. Monophyletic Silentes and Stridentes lineages are recovered within Palinuridae, and all sub-families within Scyllaridae are found to be monophyletic with the exception of Ibacinae. We demonstrate the feasibility of building larger supertrees of arthropods, with the ultimate objective of building a complete species-level phylogeny for the entire phylum using a divide and conquer strategy.

  7. COSPEDTree: COuplet Supertree by Equivalence Partitioning of Taxa Set and DAG Formation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bhattacharyya, Sourya; Mukherjee, Jayanta

    2015-01-01

    From a set of phylogenetic trees with overlapping taxa set, a supertree exhibits evolutionary relationships among all input taxa. The key is to resolve the contradictory relationships with respect to input trees, between individual taxa subsets. Formulation of this NP hard problem employs either local search heuristics to reduce tree search space, or resolves the conflicts with respect to fixed or varying size subtree level decompositions. Different approximation techniques produce supertrees with considerable performance variations. Moreover, the majority of the algorithms involve high computational complexity, thus not suitable for use on large biological data sets. Current study presents COSPEDTree, a novel method for supertree construction. The technique resolves source tree conflicts by analyzing couplet (taxa pair) relationships for each source trees. Subsequently, individual taxa pairs are resolved with a single relation. To prioritize the consensus relations among individual taxa pairs for resolving them, greedy scoring is employed to assign higher score values for the consensus relations among a taxa pair. Selected set of relations resolving individual taxa pairs is subsequently used to construct a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Vertices of DAG represents a taxa subset inferred from the same speciation event. Thus, COSPEDTree can generate non-binary supertrees as well. Depth first traversal on this DAG yields final supertree. According to the performance metrics on branch dissimilarities (such as FP, FN and RF), COSPEDTree produces mostly conservative, well resolved supertrees. Specifically, RF metrics are mostly lower compared to the reference approaches, and FP values are lower apart from only strictly conservative (or veto) approaches. COSPEDTree has worst case time and space complexities of cubic and quadratic order, respectively, better or comparable to the reference approaches. Such high performance and low computational costs enable COSPEDTree to be

  8. The Supertree Toolkit 2: a new and improved software package with a Graphical User Interface for supertree construction

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jon Hill

    2014-03-01

    Full Text Available Building large supertrees involves the collection, storage, and processing of thousands of individual phylogenies to create large phylogenies with thousands to tens of thousands of taxa. Such large phylogenies are useful for macroevolutionary studies, comparative biology and in conservation and biodiversity. No easy to use and fully integrated software package currently exists to carry out this task. Here, we present a new Python-based software package that uses well defined XML schema to manage both data and metadata. It builds on previous versions by 1 including new processing steps, such as Safe Taxonomic Reduction, 2 using a user-friendly GUI that guides the user to complete at least the minimum information required and includes context-sensitive documentation, and 3 a revised storage format that integrates both tree- and meta-data into a single file. These data can then be manipulated according to a well-defined, but flexible, processing pipeline using either the GUI or a command-line based tool. Processing steps include standardising names, deleting or replacing taxa, ensuring adequate taxonomic overlap, ensuring data independence, and safe taxonomic reduction. This software has been successfully used to store and process data consisting of over 1000 trees ready for analyses using standard supertree methods. This software makes large supertree creation a much easier task and provides far greater flexibility for further work.

  9. The Supertree Toolkit 2: a new and improved software package with a Graphical User Interface for supertree construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hill, Jon; Davis, Katie E

    2014-01-01

    Building large supertrees involves the collection, storage, and processing of thousands of individual phylogenies to create large phylogenies with thousands to tens of thousands of taxa. Such large phylogenies are useful for macroevolutionary studies, comparative biology and in conservation and biodiversity. No easy to use and fully integrated software package currently exists to carry out this task. Here, we present a new Python-based software package that uses well defined XML schema to manage both data and metadata. It builds on previous versions by 1) including new processing steps, such as Safe Taxonomic Reduction, 2) using a user-friendly GUI that guides the user to complete at least the minimum information required and includes context-sensitive documentation, and 3) a revised storage format that integrates both tree- and meta-data into a single file. These data can then be manipulated according to a well-defined, but flexible, processing pipeline using either the GUI or a command-line based tool. Processing steps include standardising names, deleting or replacing taxa, ensuring adequate taxonomic overlap, ensuring data independence, and safe taxonomic reduction. This software has been successfully used to store and process data consisting of over 1000 trees ready for analyses using standard supertree methods. This software makes large supertree creation a much easier task and provides far greater flexibility for further work.

  10. PhySIC: a veto supertree method with desirable properties.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ranwez, Vincent; Berry, Vincent; Criscuolo, Alexis; Fabre, Pierre-Henri; Guillemot, Sylvain; Scornavacca, Celine; Douzery, Emmanuel J P

    2007-10-01

    This paper focuses on veto supertree methods; i.e., methods that aim at producing a conservative synthesis of the relationships agreed upon by all source trees. We propose desirable properties that a supertree should satisfy in this framework, namely the non-contradiction property (PC) and the induction property (PI). The former requires that the supertree does not contain relationships that contradict one or a combination of the source topologies, whereas the latter requires that all topological information contained in the supertree is present in a source tree or collectively induced by several source trees. We provide simple examples to illustrate their relevance and that allow a comparison with previously advocated properties. We show that these properties can be checked in polynomial time for any given rooted supertree. Moreover, we introduce the PhySIC method (PHYlogenetic Signal with Induction and non-Contradiction). For k input trees spanning a set of n taxa, this method produces a supertree that satisfies the above-mentioned properties in O(kn(3) + n(4)) computing time. The polytomies of the produced supertree are also tagged by labels indicating areas of conflict as well as those with insufficient overlap. As a whole, PhySIC enables the user to quickly summarize consensual information of a set of trees and localize groups of taxa for which the data require consolidation. Lastly, we illustrate the behaviour of PhySIC on primate data sets of various sizes, and propose a supertree covering 95% of all primate extant genera. The PhySIC algorithm is available at http://atgc.lirmm.fr/cgi-bin/PhySIC.

  11. PhySIC_IST: cleaning source trees to infer more informative supertrees.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Scornavacca, Celine; Berry, Vincent; Lefort, Vincent; Douzery, Emmanuel J P; Ranwez, Vincent

    2008-10-04

    Supertree methods combine phylogenies with overlapping sets of taxa into a larger one. Topological conflicts frequently arise among source trees for methodological or biological reasons, such as long branch attraction, lateral gene transfers, gene duplication/loss or deep gene coalescence. When topological conflicts occur among source trees, liberal methods infer supertrees containing the most frequent alternative, while veto methods infer supertrees not contradicting any source tree, i.e. discard all conflicting resolutions. When the source trees host a significant number of topological conflicts or have a small taxon overlap, supertree methods of both kinds can propose poorly resolved, hence uninformative, supertrees. To overcome this problem, we propose to infer non-plenary supertrees, i.e. supertrees that do not necessarily contain all the taxa present in the source trees, discarding those whose position greatly differs among source trees or for which insufficient information is provided. We detail a variant of the PhySIC veto method called PhySIC_IST that can infer non-plenary supertrees. PhySIC_IST aims at inferring supertrees that satisfy the same appealing theoretical properties as with PhySIC, while being as informative as possible under this constraint. The informativeness of a supertree is estimated using a variation of the CIC (Cladistic Information Content) criterion, that takes into account both the presence of multifurcations and the absence of some taxa. Additionally, we propose a statistical preprocessing step called STC (Source Trees Correction) to correct the source trees prior to the supertree inference. STC is a liberal step that removes the parts of each source tree that significantly conflict with other source trees. Combining STC with a veto method allows an explicit trade-off between veto and liberal approaches, tuned by a single parameter.Performing large-scale simulations, we observe that STC+PhySIC_IST infers much more informative

  12. L.U.St: a tool for approximated maximum likelihood supertree reconstruction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Akanni, Wasiu A; Creevey, Christopher J; Wilkinson, Mark; Pisani, Davide

    2014-06-12

    Supertrees combine disparate, partially overlapping trees to generate a synthesis that provides a high level perspective that cannot be attained from the inspection of individual phylogenies. Supertrees can be seen as meta-analytical tools that can be used to make inferences based on results of previous scientific studies. Their meta-analytical application has increased in popularity since it was realised that the power of statistical tests for the study of evolutionary trends critically depends on the use of taxon-dense phylogenies. Further to that, supertrees have found applications in phylogenomics where they are used to combine gene trees and recover species phylogenies based on genome-scale data sets. Here, we present the L.U.St package, a python tool for approximate maximum likelihood supertree inference and illustrate its application using a genomic data set for the placental mammals. L.U.St allows the calculation of the approximate likelihood of a supertree, given a set of input trees, performs heuristic searches to look for the supertree of highest likelihood, and performs statistical tests of two or more supertrees. To this end, L.U.St implements a winning sites test allowing ranking of a collection of a-priori selected hypotheses, given as a collection of input supertree topologies. It also outputs a file of input-tree-wise likelihood scores that can be used as input to CONSEL for calculation of standard tests of two trees (e.g. Kishino-Hasegawa, Shimidoara-Hasegawa and Approximately Unbiased tests). This is the first fully parametric implementation of a supertree method, it has clearly understood properties, and provides several advantages over currently available supertree approaches. It is easy to implement and works on any platform that has python installed. bitBucket page - https://afro-juju@bitbucket.org/afro-juju/l.u.st.git. Davide.Pisani@bristol.ac.uk.

  13. MRL and SuperFine+MRL: new supertree methods

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-01-01

    Background Supertree methods combine trees on subsets of the full taxon set together to produce a tree on the entire set of taxa. Of the many supertree methods, the most popular is MRP (Matrix Representation with Parsimony), a method that operates by first encoding the input set of source trees by a large matrix (the "MRP matrix") over {0,1, ?}, and then running maximum parsimony heuristics on the MRP matrix. Experimental studies evaluating MRP in comparison to other supertree methods have established that for large datasets, MRP generally produces trees of equal or greater accuracy than other methods, and can run on larger datasets. A recent development in supertree methods is SuperFine+MRP, a method that combines MRP with a divide-and-conquer approach, and produces more accurate trees in less time than MRP. In this paper we consider a new approach for supertree estimation, called MRL (Matrix Representation with Likelihood). MRL begins with the same MRP matrix, but then analyzes the MRP matrix using heuristics (such as RAxML) for 2-state Maximum Likelihood. Results We compared MRP and SuperFine+MRP with MRL and SuperFine+MRL on simulated and biological datasets. We examined the MRP and MRL scores of each method on a wide range of datasets, as well as the resulting topological accuracy of the trees. Our experimental results show that MRL, coupled with a very good ML heuristic such as RAxML, produced more accurate trees than MRP, and MRL scores were more strongly correlated with topological accuracy than MRP scores. Conclusions SuperFine+MRP, when based upon a good MP heuristic, such as TNT, produces among the best scores for both MRP and MRL, and is generally faster and more topologically accurate than other supertree methods we tested. PMID:22280525

  14. A fungal phylogeny based on 42 complete genomes derived from supertree and combined gene analysis

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Stajich Jason E

    2006-11-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background To date, most fungal phylogenies have been derived from single gene comparisons, or from concatenated alignments of a small number of genes. The increase in fungal genome sequencing presents an opportunity to reconstruct evolutionary events using entire genomes. As a tool for future comparative, phylogenomic and phylogenetic studies, we used both supertrees and concatenated alignments to infer relationships between 42 species of fungi for which complete genome sequences are available. Results A dataset of 345,829 genes was extracted from 42 publicly available fungal genomes. Supertree methods were employed to derive phylogenies from 4,805 single gene families. We found that the average consensus supertree method may suffer from long-branch attraction artifacts, while matrix representation with parsimony (MRP appears to be immune from these. A genome phylogeny was also reconstructed from a concatenated alignment of 153 universally distributed orthologs. Our MRP supertree and concatenated phylogeny are highly congruent. Within the Ascomycota, the sub-phyla Pezizomycotina and Saccharomycotina were resolved. Both phylogenies infer that the Leotiomycetes are the closest sister group to the Sordariomycetes. There is some ambiguity regarding the placement of Stagonospora nodurum, the sole member of the class Dothideomycetes present in the dataset. Within the Saccharomycotina, a monophyletic clade containing organisms that translate CTG as serine instead of leucine is evident. There is also strong support for two groups within the CTG clade, one containing the fully sexual species Candida lusitaniae, Candida guilliermondii and Debaryomyces hansenii, and the second group containing Candida albicans, Candida dubliniensis, Candida tropicalis, Candida parapsilosis and Lodderomyces elongisporus. The second major clade within the Saccharomycotina contains species whose genomes have undergone a whole genome duplication (WGD, and their close

  15. Building supertrees: an empirical assessment using the grass family (Poaceae).

    Science.gov (United States)

    Salamin, Nicolas; Hodkinson, Trevor R; Savolainen, Vincent

    2002-02-01

    Large and comprehensive phylogenetic trees are desirable for studying macroevolutionary processes and for classification purposes. Such trees can be obtained in two different ways. Either the widest possible range of taxa can be sampled and used in a phylogenetic analysis to produce a "big tree," or preexisting topologies can be used to create a supertree. Although large multigene analyses are often favored, combinable data are not always available, and supertrees offer a suitable solution. The most commonly used method of supertree reconstruction, matrix representation with parsimony (MRP), is presented here. We used a combined data set for the Poaceae to (1) assess the differences between an approach that uses combined data and one that uses different MRP modifications based on the character partitions and (2) investigate the advantages and disadvantages of these modifications. Baum and Ragan and Purvis modifications gave similar results. Incorporating bootstrap support associated with pre-existing topologies improved Baum and Ragan modification and its similarity with a combined analysis. Finally, we used the supertree reconstruction approach on 55 published phylogenies to build one of most comprehensive phylogenetic trees published for the grass family including 403 taxa and discuss its strengths and weaknesses in relation to other published hypotheses.

  16. Future trypanosomatid phylogenies: refined homologies, supertrees and networks

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Stothard JR

    2000-01-01

    Full Text Available There has been good progress in inferring the evolutionary relationships within trypanosomes from DNA data as until relatively recently, many relationships have remained rather speculative. Ongoing molecular studies have provided data that have adequately shown Trypanosoma to be monophyletic and, rather surprisingly, that there are sharply contrasting levels of genetic variation within and between the major trypanosomatid groups. There are still, however, areas of research that could benefit from further development and resolution that broadly fall upon three questions. Are the current statements of evolutionary homology within ribosomal small sub-unit genes in need of refinement? Can the published phylograms be expanded upon to form `supertrees' depicting further relationships? Does a bifurcating tree structure impose an untenable dogma upon trypanosomatid phylogeny where hybridisation or reticulate evolutionary steps have played a part? This article briefly addresses these three questions and, in so doing, hopes to stimulate further interest in the molecular evolution of the group.

  17. Weed management at ArborGen, South Carolina SuperTree Nursery

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mike Arnette

    2009-01-01

    Weed management is vital to producing healthy hardwood seedlings. Several methods are available to each nursery, and it is common knowledge that what works for one situation may not work for another. The weed control methods used in nursery beds of hardwood species at the South Carolina SuperTree Nursery (Blenheim) are listed below.

  18. Mega-phylogeny approach for comparative biology: an alternative to supertree and supermatrix approaches.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Smith, Stephen A; Beaulieu, Jeremy M; Donoghue, Michael J

    2009-02-11

    Biology has increasingly recognized the necessity to build and utilize larger phylogenies to address broad evolutionary questions. Large phylogenies have facilitated the discovery of differential rates of molecular evolution between trees and herbs. They have helped us understand the diversification patterns of mammals as well as the patterns of seed evolution. In addition to these broad evolutionary questions there is increasing awareness of the importance of large phylogenies for addressing conservation issues such as biodiversity hotspots and response to global change. Two major classes of methods have been employed to accomplish the large tree-building task: supertrees and supermatrices. Although these methods are continually being developed, they have yet to be made fully accessible to comparative biologists making extremely large trees rare. Here we describe and demonstrate a modified supermatrix method termed mega-phylogeny that uses databased sequences as well as taxonomic hierarchies to make extremely large trees with denser matrices than supermatrices. The two major challenges facing large-scale supermatrix phylogenetics are assembling large data matrices from databases and reconstructing trees from those datasets. The mega-phylogeny approach addresses the former as the latter is accomplished by employing recently developed methods that have greatly reduced the run time of large phylogeny construction. We present an algorithm that requires relatively little human intervention. The implemented algorithm is demonstrated with a dataset and phylogeny for Asterales (within Campanulidae) containing 4954 species and 12,033 sites and an rbcL matrix for green plants (Viridiplantae) with 13,533 species and 1,401 sites. By examining much larger phylogenies, patterns emerge that were otherwise unseen. The phylogeny of Viridiplantae successfully reconstructs major relationships of vascular plants that previously required many more genes. These demonstrations

  19. 18 CFR 385.104 - Rule of construction (Rule 104).

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... Definitions § 385.104 Rule of construction (Rule 104). To the extent that the text of a rule is inconsistent with its caption, the text of the rule controls. [Order 376, 49 FR 21705, May 23, 1984] ...

  20. The origins of species richness in the Hymenoptera: insights from a family-level supertree

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Davis Robert B

    2010-04-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background The order Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps, sawflies contains about eight percent of all described species, but no analytical studies have addressed the origins of this richness at family-level or above. To investigate which major subtaxa experienced significant shifts in diversification, we assembled a family-level phylogeny of the Hymenoptera using supertree methods. We used sister-group species-richness comparisons to infer the phylogenetic position of shifts in diversification. Results The supertrees most supported by the underlying input trees are produced using matrix representation with compatibility (MRC (from an all-in and a compartmentalised analysis. Whilst relationships at the tips of the tree tend to be well supported, those along the backbone of the tree (e.g. between Parasitica superfamilies are generally not. Ten significant shifts in diversification (six positive and four negative are found common to both MRC supertrees. The Apocrita (wasps, ants, bees experienced a positive shift at their origin accounting for approximately 4,000 species. Within Apocrita other positive shifts include the Vespoidea (vespoid wasps/ants containing 24,000 spp., Anthophila + Sphecidae (bees/thread-waisted wasps; 22,000 spp., Bethylidae + Chrysididae (bethylid/cuckoo wasps; 5,200 spp., Dryinidae (dryinid wasps; 1,100 spp., and Proctotrupidae (proctotrupid wasps; 310 spp.. Four relatively species-poor families (Stenotritidae, Anaxyelidae, Blasticotomidae, Xyelidae have undergone negative shifts. There are some two-way shifts in diversification where sister taxa have undergone shifts in opposite directions. Conclusions Our results suggest that numerous phylogenetically distinctive radiations contribute to the richness of large clades. They also suggest that evolutionary events restricting the subsequent richness of large clades are common. Problematic phylogenetic issues in the Hymenoptera are identified, relating especially to

  1. Mega-phylogeny approach for comparative biology: an alternative to supertree and supermatrix approaches

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Beaulieu Jeremy M

    2009-02-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Biology has increasingly recognized the necessity to build and utilize larger phylogenies to address broad evolutionary questions. Large phylogenies have facilitated the discovery of differential rates of molecular evolution between trees and herbs. They have helped us understand the diversification patterns of mammals as well as the patterns of seed evolution. In addition to these broad evolutionary questions there is increasing awareness of the importance of large phylogenies for addressing conservation issues such as biodiversity hotspots and response to global change. Two major classes of methods have been employed to accomplish the large tree-building task: supertrees and supermatrices. Although these methods are continually being developed, they have yet to be made fully accessible to comparative biologists making extremely large trees rare. Results Here we describe and demonstrate a modified supermatrix method termed mega-phylogeny that uses databased sequences as well as taxonomic hierarchies to make extremely large trees with denser matrices than supermatrices. The two major challenges facing large-scale supermatrix phylogenetics are assembling large data matrices from databases and reconstructing trees from those datasets. The mega-phylogeny approach addresses the former as the latter is accomplished by employing recently developed methods that have greatly reduced the run time of large phylogeny construction. We present an algorithm that requires relatively little human intervention. The implemented algorithm is demonstrated with a dataset and phylogeny for Asterales (within Campanulidae containing 4954 species and 12,033 sites and an rbcL matrix for green plants (Viridiplantae with 13,533 species and 1,401 sites. Conclusion By examining much larger phylogenies, patterns emerge that were otherwise unseen. The phylogeny of Viridiplantae successfully reconstructs major relationships of vascular plants that previously

  2. Nuclear power plant equipment design and construction rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Boiron, P.

    1983-03-01

    Presentation of the AFCEN (French association for nuclear power plant equipment design and construction rules) working, of its edition activity and of somes of its edited documents such as RCC-C (design and construction rules for PWR power plant fuel assemblies) and RCC-E (design and construction rules for nuclear facility electrical equipments) [fr

  3. A Bayesian Supertree Model for Genome-Wide Species Tree Reconstruction

    Science.gov (United States)

    De Oliveira Martins, Leonardo; Mallo, Diego; Posada, David

    2016-01-01

    Current phylogenomic data sets highlight the need for species tree methods able to deal with several sources of gene tree/species tree incongruence. At the same time, we need to make most use of all available data. Most species tree methods deal with single processes of phylogenetic discordance, namely, gene duplication and loss, incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) or horizontal gene transfer. In this manuscript, we address the problem of species tree inference from multilocus, genome-wide data sets regardless of the presence of gene duplication and loss and ILS therefore without the need to identify orthologs or to use a single individual per species. We do this by extending the idea of Maximum Likelihood (ML) supertrees to a hierarchical Bayesian model where several sources of gene tree/species tree disagreement can be accounted for in a modular manner. We implemented this model in a computer program called guenomu whose inputs are posterior distributions of unrooted gene tree topologies for multiple gene families, and whose output is the posterior distribution of rooted species tree topologies. We conducted extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our approach in comparison with other species tree approaches able to deal with more than one leaf from the same species. Our method ranked best under simulated data sets, in spite of ignoring branch lengths, and performed well on empirical data, as well as being fast enough to analyze relatively large data sets. Our Bayesian supertree method was also very successful in obtaining better estimates of gene trees, by reducing the uncertainty in their distributions. In addition, our results show that under complex simulation scenarios, gene tree parsimony is also a competitive approach once we consider its speed, in contrast to more sophisticated models. PMID:25281847

  4. A Bayesian Supertree Model for Genome-Wide Species Tree Reconstruction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    De Oliveira Martins, Leonardo; Mallo, Diego; Posada, David

    2016-05-01

    Current phylogenomic data sets highlight the need for species tree methods able to deal with several sources of gene tree/species tree incongruence. At the same time, we need to make most use of all available data. Most species tree methods deal with single processes of phylogenetic discordance, namely, gene duplication and loss, incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) or horizontal gene transfer. In this manuscript, we address the problem of species tree inference from multilocus, genome-wide data sets regardless of the presence of gene duplication and loss and ILS therefore without the need to identify orthologs or to use a single individual per species. We do this by extending the idea of Maximum Likelihood (ML) supertrees to a hierarchical Bayesian model where several sources of gene tree/species tree disagreement can be accounted for in a modular manner. We implemented this model in a computer program called guenomu whose inputs are posterior distributions of unrooted gene tree topologies for multiple gene families, and whose output is the posterior distribution of rooted species tree topologies. We conducted extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our approach in comparison with other species tree approaches able to deal with more than one leaf from the same species. Our method ranked best under simulated data sets, in spite of ignoring branch lengths, and performed well on empirical data, as well as being fast enough to analyze relatively large data sets. Our Bayesian supertree method was also very successful in obtaining better estimates of gene trees, by reducing the uncertainty in their distributions. In addition, our results show that under complex simulation scenarios, gene tree parsimony is also a competitive approach once we consider its speed, in contrast to more sophisticated models. © The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists.

  5. Construction principles and design rules in the case of circular design

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Romme, A.G.L.; Endenburg, G.

    2006-01-01

    This paper proposes science-based organization design that uses construction principles and design rules to guide practitioner-academic projects. Organization science implies construction principles for creating and implementing designs. These principles serve to construct design rules that are

  6. Dynamic Programming Approach for Construction of Association Rule Systems

    KAUST Repository

    Alsolami, Fawaz

    2016-11-18

    In the paper, an application of dynamic programming approach for optimization of association rules from the point of view of knowledge representation is considered. The association rule set is optimized in two stages, first for minimum cardinality and then for minimum length of rules. Experimental results present cardinality of the set of association rules constructed for information system and lower bound on minimum possible cardinality of rule set based on the information obtained during algorithm work as well as obtained results for length.

  7. Dynamic Programming Approach for Construction of Association Rule Systems

    KAUST Repository

    Alsolami, Fawaz; Amin, Talha M.; Chikalov, Igor; Moshkov, Mikhail; Zielosko, Beata

    2016-01-01

    In the paper, an application of dynamic programming approach for optimization of association rules from the point of view of knowledge representation is considered. The association rule set is optimized in two stages, first for minimum cardinality and then for minimum length of rules. Experimental results present cardinality of the set of association rules constructed for information system and lower bound on minimum possible cardinality of rule set based on the information obtained during algorithm work as well as obtained results for length.

  8. Greedy algorithms withweights for construction of partial association rules

    KAUST Repository

    Moshkov, Mikhail; Piliszczu, Marcin; Zielosko, Beata Marta

    2009-01-01

    This paper is devoted to the study of approximate algorithms for minimization of the total weight of attributes occurring in partial association rules. We consider mainly greedy algorithms with weights for construction of rules. The paper contains bounds on precision of these algorithms and bounds on the minimal weight of partial association rules based on an information obtained during the greedy algorithm run.

  9. Greedy algorithms withweights for construction of partial association rules

    KAUST Repository

    Moshkov, Mikhail

    2009-09-10

    This paper is devoted to the study of approximate algorithms for minimization of the total weight of attributes occurring in partial association rules. We consider mainly greedy algorithms with weights for construction of rules. The paper contains bounds on precision of these algorithms and bounds on the minimal weight of partial association rules based on an information obtained during the greedy algorithm run.

  10. 26 CFR 48.4216(b)-2 - Constructive sale price; basic rules.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... there is common control, whether or not such control is actually exercised to influence the sale price... 26 Internal Revenue 16 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 true Constructive sale price; basic rules. 48.4216(b... to Manufacturers Taxes § 48.4216(b)-2 Constructive sale price; basic rules. (a) In general. Section...

  11. The Majority Rule Act. EdSource Election Brief: Proposition 26.

    Science.gov (United States)

    EdSource, Inc., Palo Alto, CA.

    This article summarizes "The Majority Rule Act for Smaller Classes, Safer Schools and Financial Accountability" (Proposition 26). The Majority Rule Act deals with the percentage vote that a school district, county office of education, or community college, needs in an election to authorize local general-obligation bonds for school…

  12. 24 CFR 201.4 - Rules of construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... URBAN DEVELOPMENT MORTGAGE AND LOAN INSURANCE PROGRAMS UNDER NATIONAL HOUSING ACT AND OTHER AUTHORITIES TITLE I PROPERTY IMPROVEMENT AND MANUFACTURED HOME LOANS General § 201.4 Rules of construction. As used in this part, and unless the context indicates otherwise, words in the singular include the plural...

  13. Consensus states of local majority rule in stochastic process

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Luo, Yu-Pin [Department of Electronic Engineering, National Formosa University, Huwei, 63201, Taiwan (China); Tang, Chia-Wei; Xu, Hong-Yuan [Department of Physics, Chung-Yuan Christian University, Chungli, 32023, Taiwan (China); Wu, Jinn-Wen [Department of Applied Mathematics, Chung-Yuan Christian University, Chungli, 32023, Taiwan (China); Huang, Ming-Chang, E-mail: mchuang@cycu.edu.tw [Center for Theoretical Science and Department of Physics, Chung-Yuan Christian University, Chungli, 32023, Taiwan (China)

    2015-04-03

    A sufficient condition for a network system to reach a consensus state of the local majority rule is shown. The influence of interpersonal environment on the occurrence probability of consensus states for Watts–Strogatz and scale-free networks with random initial states is analyzed by numerical method. We also propose a stochastic local majority rule to study the mean first passage time from a random state to a consensus and the escape rate from a consensus state for systems in a noisy environment. Our numerical results show that there exists a window of fluctuation strengths for which the mean first passage time from a random to a consensus state reduces greatly, and the escape rate of consensus states obeys the Arrhenius equation in the window. - Highlights: • A sufficient condition for reaching a consensus. • The relation between the geometry of networks and the reachability of a consensus. • Stochastic local majority rule. • The mean first-passage time and the escape rate of consensus states.

  14. Consensus states of local majority rule in stochastic process

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Luo, Yu-Pin; Tang, Chia-Wei; Xu, Hong-Yuan; Wu, Jinn-Wen; Huang, Ming-Chang

    2015-01-01

    A sufficient condition for a network system to reach a consensus state of the local majority rule is shown. The influence of interpersonal environment on the occurrence probability of consensus states for Watts–Strogatz and scale-free networks with random initial states is analyzed by numerical method. We also propose a stochastic local majority rule to study the mean first passage time from a random state to a consensus and the escape rate from a consensus state for systems in a noisy environment. Our numerical results show that there exists a window of fluctuation strengths for which the mean first passage time from a random to a consensus state reduces greatly, and the escape rate of consensus states obeys the Arrhenius equation in the window. - Highlights: • A sufficient condition for reaching a consensus. • The relation between the geometry of networks and the reachability of a consensus. • Stochastic local majority rule. • The mean first-passage time and the escape rate of consensus states

  15. 27 CFR 53.95 - Constructive sale price; basic rules.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... to influence the sale price, or (2) The sale is made pursuant to special arrangements between a... 27 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and Firearms 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Constructive sale price... AMMUNITION Special Provisions Applicable to Manufacturers Taxes § 53.95 Constructive sale price; basic rules...

  16. The majority rule in a fuzzy environment.

    OpenAIRE

    Montero, Javier

    1986-01-01

    In this paper, an axiomatic approach to rational decision making in a fuzzy environment is studied. In particular, the majority rule is proposed as a rational way for aggregating fuzzy opinions in a group, when such agroup is defined as a fuzzy set.

  17. RCC-F: Design and construction rules for PWR fire protection systems

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    2013-01-01

    The RCC-F code defines the rules for designing, building and installing the fire protection systems used to manage the nuclear hazards inherent in the outbreak of a fire inside the facility and thereby control the fundamental nuclear functions. The code provides fire protection recommendations in terms of: the industrial risk (loss of assets and/or operation), personnel safety, the environment. The code is divided into five main sections: generalities, design safety principles, fire protection design bases, construction provisions, rules for installing the fire protection components and equipment. The RCC-F code is available as an ETC-F version specifically for EPR projects (European pressurized reactor). Contents of the 2013 edition of the ETC-F code: Volume A - Generalities: Structure of ETC-F general points, documentation (in progress), chapter (provision) quality assurance; Volume B - Design safety principles: design nuclear safety principles; Volume C - Fire protection design bases: fire protection design bases; Volume D - Construction provisions: construction provisions; Volume E - Installation rules for fire protection: rules for installing the fire protection, components and equipment

  18. Safety leadership at construction sites: the importance of rule-oriented and participative leadership.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Grill, Martin; Pousette, Anders; Nielsen, Kent; Grytnes, Regine; Törner, Marianne

    2017-07-01

    Objectives The construction industry accounted for >20% of all fatal occupational accidents in Europe in 2014. Leadership is an essential antecedent to occupational safety. The aim of the present study was to assess the influence of transformational, active transactional, rule-oriented, participative, and laissez-faire leadership on safety climate, safety behavior, and accidents in the Swedish and Danish construction industry. Sweden and Denmark are similar countries but have a large difference in occupational accidents rates. Methods A questionnaire study was conducted among a random sample of construction workers in both countries: 811 construction workers from 85 sites responded, resulting in site and individual response rates of 73% and 64%, respectively. Results The results indicated that transformational, active transactional, rule-oriented and participative leadership predict positive safety outcomes, and laissez-faire leadership predict negative safety outcomes. For example, rule-oriented leadership predicts a superior safety climate (β=0.40, Pleadership on workers' safety behavior was moderated by the level of participative leadership (β=0.10, Pleadership behaviors on safety outcomes were largely similar in Sweden and Denmark. Rule-oriented and participative leadership were more common in the Swedish than Danish construction industry, which may partly explain the difference in occupational accident rates. Conclusions Applying less laissez-faire leadership and more transformational, active transactional, participative and rule-oriented leadership appears to be an effective way for construction site managers to improve occupational safety in the industry.

  19. 31 CFR 501.703 - Overview of civil penalty process and construction of rules.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... process and construction of rules. (a) The administrative process for enforcing TWEA sanctions programs... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 3 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Overview of civil penalty process and construction of rules. 501.703 Section 501.703 Money and Finance: Treasury Regulations Relating to Money and...

  20. Majority rule on heterogeneous networks

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Lambiotte, R

    2008-01-01

    We focus on the majority rule (MR) applied on heterogeneous networks. When the underlying topology is homogeneous, the system is shown to exhibit a transition from an ordered regime to a disordered regime when the noise is increased. When the network exhibits modular structures, in contrast, the system may also exhibit an asymmetric regime, where the nodes in each community reach an opposite average opinion. Finally, the node degree heterogeneity is shown to play an important role by displacing the location of the order-disorder transition and by making the system exhibit non-equipartition of the average spin

  1. Demographic Variables of Corruption in the Chinese Construction Industry: Association Rule Analysis of Conviction Records.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yu, Yao; Martek, Igor; Hosseini, M Reza; Chen, Chuan

    2018-05-02

    Corruption in the construction industry is a serious problem in China. As such, fighting this corruption has become a priority target of the Chinese government, with the main effort being to discover and prosecute its perpetrators. This study profiles the demographic characteristics of major incidences of corruption in construction. It draws on the database of the 83 complete recorded cases of construction related corruption held by the Chinese National Bureau of Corruption Prevention. Categorical variables were drawn from the database, and 'association rule mining analysis' was used to identify associations between variables as a means of profiling perpetrators. Such profiling may be used as predictors of future incidences of corruption, and consequently to inform policy makers in their fight against corruption. The results signal corruption within the Chinese construction industry to be correlated with age, with incidences rising as managers' approach retirement age. Moreover, a majority of perpetrators operate within government agencies, are department deputies in direct contact with projects, and extort the greatest amounts per case from second tier cities. The relatively lengthy average 6.4-year period before cases come to public attention corroborates the view that current efforts at fighting corruption remain inadequate.

  2. Democracy and Majority Rule in South Africa: Implications for Good Governance

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Samuel Augustine Umezurike

    2017-07-01

    Full Text Available South Africa is a leading example of democracy in Africa though many argue that it has lost its way in meaningful aspects ranging from practice of its majority rule, social cohesion, and neoliberalisation of its political economy and international diplomacy. South Africa could fairly be viewed as an emerging middle power but many of its actions have belied this by allowing certain analysts to consider it as inconsistent, confusing, and even sinister. Some of the core problematic areas of South African democracy include poverty, unemployment, inequality, high level of HIV/AIDS, corruption, fast decaying educational system, electricity (load shedding, fast loss of rand value in the international market and rampant strike actions, especially in the mining industry. However, this paper depends on the documentary method of research to examine the drama surrounding the security upgrade of the President’s home at Nkandla. The findings show that in a democratic society like South Africa, majority rule may sometimes be a limitation of democratic practices. In order to avert the dangers majority rule may pose to the other principles of democracy, the principles of values, such as separation of power among the three levels of government and rule of law, must be respected.

  3. Democracy and Majority Rule in South Africa: Implications for Good Governance

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Samuel Umezurike

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available South Africa is a leading example of democracy in Africa albeit many argue that it has lost meaningful direction in aspects which range from its practice of majority rule, social cohesion, and neoliberalization of its political economy and international diplomacy. South Africa could fairly well be viewed as an emerging middle power but many of its actions have belied this thus allowing certain analysts to consider it as inconsistent, confusing, and even sinister. Some of the core problematic areas of South African democracy include poverty, unemployment, inequality, high level of HIV/AIDS, corruption, fast decaying educational system, electricity (load shedding, fast loss of rand value in the international market and rampant strike actions, especially in the mining industry. However, this paper depends on the documentary method of research to examine the drama surrounding the security upgrade of the President’s home at Nkandla. The findings show that in a democratic society like South Africa, majority rule may sometimes be a limitation of democratic practices. In order to avert the challenges which majority rule may pose to the other principles of democracy, the principles of values, such as separation of power among the three levels of government and rule of law, must be respected.

  4. Presentation of the RCC-M design and construction rule

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Quero, J.R.

    1983-03-01

    Presentation of the French rules for design and construction of nuclear power plant components: stress resistance, material choice, fabrication and quality control, control methodology etc... covering equipments such as pressurized components (tanks, exchangers, pipes, pumps, valves and fittings), internal and support reactor elements and non pressurized small devices [fr

  5. Constructing compact Takagi-Sugeno rule systems: identification of complex interactions in epidemiological data.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhou, Shang-Ming; Lyons, Ronan A; Brophy, Sinead; Gravenor, Mike B

    2012-01-01

    The Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy rule system is a widely used data mining technique, and is of particular use in the identification of non-linear interactions between variables. However the number of rules increases dramatically when applied to high dimensional data sets (the curse of dimensionality). Few robust methods are available to identify important rules while removing redundant ones, and this results in limited applicability in fields such as epidemiology or bioinformatics where the interaction of many variables must be considered. Here, we develop a new parsimonious TS rule system. We propose three statistics: R, L, and ω-values, to rank the importance of each TS rule, and a forward selection procedure to construct a final model. We use our method to predict how key components of childhood deprivation combine to influence educational achievement outcome. We show that a parsimonious TS model can be constructed, based on a small subset of rules, that provides an accurate description of the relationship between deprivation indices and educational outcomes. The selected rules shed light on the synergistic relationships between the variables, and reveal that the effect of targeting specific domains of deprivation is crucially dependent on the state of the other domains. Policy decisions need to incorporate these interactions, and deprivation indices should not be considered in isolation. The TS rule system provides a basis for such decision making, and has wide applicability for the identification of non-linear interactions in complex biomedical data.

  6. Analyzing and synthesizing phylogenies using tree alignment graphs.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Stephen A Smith

    Full Text Available Phylogenetic trees are used to analyze and visualize evolution. However, trees can be imperfect datatypes when summarizing multiple trees. This is especially problematic when accommodating for biological phenomena such as horizontal gene transfer, incomplete lineage sorting, and hybridization, as well as topological conflict between datasets. Additionally, researchers may want to combine information from sets of trees that have partially overlapping taxon sets. To address the problem of analyzing sets of trees with conflicting relationships and partially overlapping taxon sets, we introduce methods for aligning, synthesizing and analyzing rooted phylogenetic trees within a graph, called a tree alignment graph (TAG. The TAG can be queried and analyzed to explore uncertainty and conflict. It can also be synthesized to construct trees, presenting an alternative to supertrees approaches. We demonstrate these methods with two empirical datasets. In order to explore uncertainty, we constructed a TAG of the bootstrap trees from the Angiosperm Tree of Life project. Analysis of the resulting graph demonstrates that areas of the dataset that are unresolved in majority-rule consensus tree analyses can be understood in more detail within the context of a graph structure, using measures incorporating node degree and adjacency support. As an exercise in synthesis (i.e., summarization of a TAG constructed from the alignment trees, we also construct a TAG consisting of the taxonomy and source trees from a recent comprehensive bird study. We synthesized this graph into a tree that can be reconstructed in a repeatable fashion and where the underlying source information can be updated. The methods presented here are tractable for large scale analyses and serve as a basis for an alternative to consensus tree and supertree methods. Furthermore, the exploration of these graphs can expose structures and patterns within the dataset that are otherwise difficult to

  7. Analyzing and synthesizing phylogenies using tree alignment graphs.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Smith, Stephen A; Brown, Joseph W; Hinchliff, Cody E

    2013-01-01

    Phylogenetic trees are used to analyze and visualize evolution. However, trees can be imperfect datatypes when summarizing multiple trees. This is especially problematic when accommodating for biological phenomena such as horizontal gene transfer, incomplete lineage sorting, and hybridization, as well as topological conflict between datasets. Additionally, researchers may want to combine information from sets of trees that have partially overlapping taxon sets. To address the problem of analyzing sets of trees with conflicting relationships and partially overlapping taxon sets, we introduce methods for aligning, synthesizing and analyzing rooted phylogenetic trees within a graph, called a tree alignment graph (TAG). The TAG can be queried and analyzed to explore uncertainty and conflict. It can also be synthesized to construct trees, presenting an alternative to supertrees approaches. We demonstrate these methods with two empirical datasets. In order to explore uncertainty, we constructed a TAG of the bootstrap trees from the Angiosperm Tree of Life project. Analysis of the resulting graph demonstrates that areas of the dataset that are unresolved in majority-rule consensus tree analyses can be understood in more detail within the context of a graph structure, using measures incorporating node degree and adjacency support. As an exercise in synthesis (i.e., summarization of a TAG constructed from the alignment trees), we also construct a TAG consisting of the taxonomy and source trees from a recent comprehensive bird study. We synthesized this graph into a tree that can be reconstructed in a repeatable fashion and where the underlying source information can be updated. The methods presented here are tractable for large scale analyses and serve as a basis for an alternative to consensus tree and supertree methods. Furthermore, the exploration of these graphs can expose structures and patterns within the dataset that are otherwise difficult to observe.

  8. Design and construction rules for electrical equipments of nuclear islands. 3. ed.

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1993-01-01

    The French design and construction for electrical equipments of nuclear islands (RCC-E) deals with equipments of which the failure may have consequences on the safety of persons or appreciable effects on the availability of the power plant. This book presents the rules concerning (1) qualification procedure, (2) the design of functional units, (3) the installation (environmental conditions, protection rules), (4) the constituent elements of equipments, (5) the control and testing methods

  9. A performance benchmark over semantic rule checking approaches in construction industry

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Pauwels, P.; de Farias, T.; Zhang, C.; Roxin, A.; Beetz, J.; De Roo, J.; Nicolle, C.

    2017-01-01

    As more and more architectural design and construction data is represented using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model, it makes sense to take advantage of the logical basis of RDF and implement a semantic rule checking process as it is currently not available in the architectural

  10. Recent evolutions of French design and construction rules

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Lambs, R.; Grandemange, J.M. [Framatome ANP GmbH - NBTT, Erlangen (Germany); Paris, D.; Faidy, C. [Electricite de France (EDF), 75 - Paris (France)

    2001-07-01

    This paper summarises the studies and evaluations made in order to support the recent evolutions of the French Design and Construction Rules, with the objective to improve the competitiveness of nuclear power plants. To this aim, an inquiry was conducted with Suppliers, in order to identify the topics corresponding to cost reduction potentials. Following this inquiry, the RCC-M construction code provisions which may be improved in order to reduce the cost were identified and highlighted compared to the others cost-intensive requirements falling outside the code scope. In parallel, other non-nuclear codes, such as CODAP and CODETI in France for Vessels, heat exchangers and piping, and ASME VIII were analysed in order to evaluate the possibility to refer to more standard alternatives for safety related mechanical components. In such a case, eventual complementary requirements should be specified, and some exercises of application were conducted with the suppliers on typical examples. In order to finalize the overview, return of operating experience was addressed and discussed with the Safety Authority, leading to complementary precautions, in particular on fatigue and fast fracture prevention. The corresponding revisions have been included in the 2000 edition of the RCC-M construction code. (author)

  11. Recent evolutions of French design and construction rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Lambs, R.; Grandemange, J.M.; Paris, D.; Faidy, C.

    2001-01-01

    This paper summarises the studies and evaluations made in order to support the recent evolutions of the French Design and Construction Rules, with the objective to improve the competitiveness of nuclear power plants. To this aim, an inquiry was conducted with Suppliers, in order to identify the topics corresponding to cost reduction potentials. Following this inquiry, the RCC-M construction code provisions which may be improved in order to reduce the cost were identified and highlighted compared to the others cost-intensive requirements falling outside the code scope. In parallel, other non-nuclear codes, such as CODAP and CODETI in France for Vessels, heat exchangers and piping, and ASME VIII were analysed in order to evaluate the possibility to refer to more standard alternatives for safety related mechanical components. In such a case, eventual complementary requirements should be specified, and some exercises of application were conducted with the suppliers on typical examples. In order to finalize the overview, return of operating experience was addressed and discussed with the Safety Authority, leading to complementary precautions, in particular on fatigue and fast fracture prevention. The corresponding revisions have been included in the 2000 edition of the RCC-M construction code. (author)

  12. Systematic construction of qualitative physics-based rules for process diagnostics

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Reifman, J.; Wei, T.Y.C.

    1995-01-01

    A novel first-principles-based expert system is proposed for on-line detection and identification of faulty component candidates during incipient off-normal process operations. The system performs function-oriented diagnostics and can be reused for diagnosing single-component failures in different processes and different plants through the provision of the appropriate process schematics information. The function-oriented and process-independent diagnostic features of the proposed expert system are achieved by constructing a knowledge base containing three distinct types of information, qualitative balance equation rules, functional classification of process components, and the process piping and instrumentation diagram. The various types of qualitative balance equation rules for processes utilizing single-phase liquids are derived and their usage is illustrated through simulation results of a realistic process in a nuclear power plant

  13. Major League Baseball Anti-Trust Immunity: Examining the Legal and Financial Implications of Relocation Rules

    OpenAIRE

    Mark, Nagel; Matt, Brown; Daniel, Rascher; Chad, McEvoy

    2006-01-01

    Major League Baseball (MLB) rules restrict the movement of any franchise into another’s territory. These territorial rules are designed to protect each team’s potential local revenue sources as well as to provide stability throughout the league. Recently, Major League Baseball approved financial compensation for the Washington Nationals’ move into the Baltimore Orioles’ territory – primarily because it was in the best interest of MLB even though it hurt the Orioles. However, the Oakland Athle...

  14. Origami rules for the construction of localized eigenstates of the Hubbard model in decorated lattices

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dias, R. G.; Gouveia, J. D.

    2015-11-01

    We present a method of construction of exact localized many-body eigenstates of the Hubbard model in decorated lattices, both for U = 0 and U → ∞. These states are localized in what concerns both hole and particle movement. The starting point of the method is the construction of a plaquette or a set of plaquettes with a higher symmetry than that of the whole lattice. Using a simple set of rules, the tight-binding localized state in such a plaquette can be divided, folded and unfolded to new plaquette geometries. This set of rules is also valid for the construction of a localized state for one hole in the U → ∞ limit of the same plaquette, assuming a spin configuration which is a uniform linear combination of all possible permutations of the set of spins in the plaquette.

  15. Optimistic Selection Rule Better Than Majority Voting System

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sugiyama, Takuya; Obata, Takuya; Hoki, Kunihito; Ito, Takeshi

    A recently proposed ensemble approach to game-tree search has attracted a great deal of attention. The ensemble system consists of M computer players, where each player uses a different series of pseudo-random numbers. A combination of multiple players under the majority voting system would improve the performance of a Shogi-playing computer. We present a new strategy of move selection based on the search values of a number of players. The move decision is made by selecting one player from all M players. Each move is selected by referring to the evaluation value of the tree search of each player. The performance and mechanism of the strategy are examined. We show that the optimistic selection rule, which selects the player that yields the highest evaluation value, outperforms the majority voting system. By grouping 16 or more computer players straightforwardly, the winning rates of the strongest Shogi programs increase from 50 to 60% or even higher.

  16. Technology development brings sub-majors to N-power construction

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Anon.

    1985-01-01

    In the past, the construction works of almost all reactor buildings were carried out by big five companies, but as the number of joint venture projects increased, the way opened for submajor firms to participate in the construction of main nuclear buildings. When the five major companies alone engaged in the construction of nuclear plant buildings, three submajor firms did most of the civil engineering works needed. The civil engineering works have been carried out also as joint venture. In order to break through the big five barrier, submajor companies have been engaged in the independent and joint development of nuclear-related design and construction techniques, and the gap with major companies has been closing. The typical joint study done by seven submajor companies was on the load-deflection characteristics of building structures. Also they engaged in aseismatic studies. The method of stripping the contaminated surface layer of shielding concrete is a new technique studied by JAERI. The activities of eleven submajor companies are reported. (Kako, I.)

  17. On construction of partial association rules

    KAUST Repository

    Moshkov, Mikhail

    2009-01-01

    This paper is devoted to the study of approximate algorithms for minimization of partial association rule length. It is shown that under some natural assumptions on the class NP, a greedy algorithm is close to the best polynomial approximate algorithms for solving of this NP-hard problem. The paper contains various bounds on precision of the greedy algorithm, bounds on minimal length of rules based on an information obtained during greedy algorithm work, and results of the study of association rules for the most part of binary information systems. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

  18. Inflexibility and independence: Phase transitions in the majority-rule model.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Crokidakis, Nuno; de Oliveira, Paulo Murilo Castro

    2015-12-01

    In this work we study opinion formation in a population participating in a public debate with two distinct choices. We consider three distinct mechanisms of social interactions and individuals' behavior: conformity, nonconformity, and inflexibility. The conformity is ruled by the majority-rule dynamics, whereas the nonconformity is introduced in the population as an independent behavior, implying the failure of attempted group influence. Finally, the inflexible agents are introduced in the population with a given density. These individuals present a singular behavior, in a way that their stubbornness makes them reluctant to change their opinions. We consider these effects separately and all together, with the aim to analyze the critical behavior of the system. We perform numerical simulations in some lattice structures and for distinct population sizes. Our results suggest that the different formulations of the model undergo order-disorder phase transitions in the same universality class as the Ising model. Some of our results are complemented by analytical calculations.

  19. A clinical prediction rule for detecting major depressive disorder in primary care : the PREDICT-NL study

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Zuithoff, Nicolaas P A; Vergouwe, Yvonne; King, Michael; Nazareth, Irwin; Hak, Eelko; Moons, Karel G M; Geerlings, Mirjam I

    BACKGROUND: Major depressive disorder often remains unrecognized in primary care. OBJECTIVE: Development of a clinical prediction rule using easily obtainable predictors for major depressive disorder in primary care patients. METHODS: A total of 1046 subjects, aged 18-65 years, were included from

  20. A New Classification Approach Based on Multiple Classification Rules

    OpenAIRE

    Zhongmei Zhou

    2014-01-01

    A good classifier can correctly predict new data for which the class label is unknown, so it is important to construct a high accuracy classifier. Hence, classification techniques are much useful in ubiquitous computing. Associative classification achieves higher classification accuracy than some traditional rule-based classification approaches. However, the approach also has two major deficiencies. First, it generates a very large number of association classification rules, especially when t...

  1. Collaborative Management of Complex Major Construction Projects: AnyLogic-Based Simulation Modelling

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Na Zhao

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available Complex supply chain system collaborative management of major construction projects effectively integrates the different participants in the construction project. This paper establishes a simulation model based on AnyLogic to reveal the collaborative elements in the complex supply chain management system and the modes of action as well as the transmission problems of the intent information. Thus it is promoting the participants to become an organism with coordinated development and coevolution. This study can help improve the efficiency and management of the complex system of major construction projects.

  2. The construct validity of the Major Depression Inventory

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Nielsen, Marie Germund; Ørnbøl, Eva; Vestergaard, Mogens

    2017-01-01

    Objective We aimed to assess the measurement properties of the ten-item Major Depression Inventory when used on clinical suspicion in general practice by performing a Rasch analysis. Methods General practitioners asked consecutive persons to respond to the web-based Major Depression Inventory...... on clinical suspicion of depression. We included 22 practices and 245 persons. Rasch analysis was performed using RUMM2030 software. The Rasch model fit suggests that all items contribute to a single underlying trait (defined as internal construct validity). Mokken analysis was used to test dimensionality...... for gender, age, work status and education. The Rasch and Mokken analyses revealed two dimensions, but the Major Depression Inventory showed fit to one scale if items 9 and 10 were excluded. Conclusion Our study indicated scalability problems in the current version of the Major Depression Inventory...

  3. 77 FR 49722 - Cranes and Derricks in Construction: Demolition and Underground Construction

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-08-17

    ... underground construction work. Therefore, when OSHA promulgates a new final rule, states and territories with... used in construction work. For most construction work, the final rule replaced a prior cranes and... construction work. Through this direct final rule, OSHA is applying the updated requirements to that work. With...

  4. Automated processing of data for supertree construction

    OpenAIRE

    Hill, Jon; Davis, Katie; Tover, Jaime; Wills, Matthew

    2015-01-01

    Talk given to Evolution2015 on the new autoprocessing functionality of the STK. This involves collecting nomenclature and taxonomic information on the OTUs to create a consistent naming scheme, and following the normal processing.

  5. BROOKHAVEN: Major detectors for RHIC under construction

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Ludlam, Thomas W.

    1994-01-01

    On March 9-10, a cost and schedule review at Brookhaven verified construction readiness for the PHENIX detector (May 1993, page 10). PHENIX thus joins STAR (Solenoidal Tracking at RHIC - November 1991, page 17), whose construction plan was ratified in January 1993, as a major detector to take data when the RHIC heavy ion collider is completed in mid-1999. The goal of both detectors is to search for the transition from ordinary nuclear matter to a new state of matter consisting of (momentarily) unconfined quarks and gluons. This transition to a ''quark-gluon plasma'' (QGP) is predicted to occur under extreme conditions of temperature and energy density, as is likely to be the case in the collision of heavy ions of sufficient energy. RHIC is expected to produce the highest energy densities ever observed on the nuclear scale

  6. 77 FR 49741 - Cranes and Derricks in Construction: Demolition and Underground Construction

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-08-17

    ..., subpart CC, to replace the earlier rule (Sec. 1926.550) for all construction work.\\1\\ In proposing the new... derricks used in construction work. For most construction work, the final rule replaced a prior cranes and... construction work. Through this proposed rule, OSHA is proposing to apply the updated requirements to that work...

  7. Performance of the majority voting rule in solving the density classification problem in high dimensions

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Gomez Soto, Jose Manuel [Unidad Academica de Matematicas, Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas, Calzada Solidaridad entronque Paseo a la Bufa, Zacatecas, Zac. (Mexico); Fuks, Henryk, E-mail: jmgomezgoo@gmail.com, E-mail: hfuks@brocku.ca [Department of Mathematics, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON (Canada)

    2011-11-04

    The density classification problem (DCP) is one of the most widely studied problems in the theory of cellular automata. After it was shown that the DCP cannot be solved perfectly, the research in this area has been focused on finding better rules that could solve the DCP approximately. In this paper, we argue that the majority voting rule in high dimensions can achieve high performance in solving the DCP, and that its performance increases with dimension. We support this conjecture with arguments based on the mean-field approximation and direct computer simulations. (paper)

  8. Performance of the majority voting rule in solving the density classification problem in high dimensions

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Gomez Soto, Jose Manuel; Fuks, Henryk

    2011-01-01

    The density classification problem (DCP) is one of the most widely studied problems in the theory of cellular automata. After it was shown that the DCP cannot be solved perfectly, the research in this area has been focused on finding better rules that could solve the DCP approximately. In this paper, we argue that the majority voting rule in high dimensions can achieve high performance in solving the DCP, and that its performance increases with dimension. We support this conjecture with arguments based on the mean-field approximation and direct computer simulations. (paper)

  9. Rule-bases construction through self-learning for a table-based Sugeno-Takagi fuzzy logic control system

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    C. Boldisor

    2009-12-01

    Full Text Available A self-learning based methodology for building the rule-base of a fuzzy logic controller (FLC is presented and verified, aiming to engage intelligent characteristics to a fuzzy logic control systems. The methodology is a simplified version of those presented in today literature. Some aspects are intentionally ignored since it rarely appears in control system engineering and a SISO process is considered here. The fuzzy inference system obtained is a table-based Sugeno-Takagi type. System’s desired performance is defined by a reference model and rules are extracted from recorded data, after the correct control actions are learned. The presented algorithm is tested in constructing the rule-base of a fuzzy controller for a DC drive application. System’s performances and method’s viability are analyzed.

  10. Queuing Rule of Thumb based on M/M/s Queuing Theory with Applications in Construction Management

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Teknomo K.

    2012-01-01

    Full Text Available The current trend of queuing theory development is toward more precision which requires higher mathematical manipulation. In this paper, we attempted to reverve the current trend toward simplification of queuing formulas such that it can be used in more practical purposes, especially in construction industry. Through numerical examples of two case studies on concreting and earth moving, how to model the construction activities as queuing systems is illustrated systematically. Through the numerical examples, it is shown that when the customer cost is much lower than the server cost, queuing system can be simplified only to incorporate the constraint equation. The queueing constraint equation is suggested to be used as queuing rule of thumb. The proposed rule of thumb is rather conservative in term of queuing performance compared to the standard stochastic queuing formula because it is assumed that all the customers arrive at once in the beginning of the service.

  11. Rules and regulations as potential moderator on the relationship between organizational internal and external factors with effective construction risk management in Nigerian construction companies: A proposed framework

    Science.gov (United States)

    Adeleke, A. Q.; Bahaudin, A. Y.; Kamaruddeen, A. M.

    2016-08-01

    Certain organizational internal and external factors have been found to influence effective construction risk management within the construction company which has contributed to massive risk occurrence on the projects. Yet, the influence of the organizational factors such as effective communication, team competency with skills, active leadership, political factor, organizational culture, technology factor and economic factor on effective construction risk management among the construction companies operating in Abuja and Lagos state Nigeria have not received considerable attention. More so, a moderating variable is proposed. This paper proposes rules and regulations as the potential moderator on the relationship between organisational internal factors, external factors and effective construction risk management.

  12. Greedy Algorithm for the Construction of Approximate Decision Rules for Decision Tables with Many-Valued Decisions

    KAUST Repository

    Azad, Mohammad

    2016-10-20

    The paper is devoted to the study of a greedy algorithm for construction of approximate decision rules. This algorithm is applicable to decision tables with many-valued decisions where each row is labeled with a set of decisions. For a given row, we should find a decision from the set attached to this row. We consider bounds on the precision of this algorithm relative to the length of rules. To illustrate proposed approach we study a problem of recognition of labels of points in the plain. This paper contains also results of experiments with modified decision tables from UCI Machine Learning Repository.

  13. Greedy Algorithm for the Construction of Approximate Decision Rules for Decision Tables with Many-Valued Decisions

    KAUST Repository

    Azad, Mohammad; Moshkov, Mikhail; Zielosko, Beata

    2016-01-01

    The paper is devoted to the study of a greedy algorithm for construction of approximate decision rules. This algorithm is applicable to decision tables with many-valued decisions where each row is labeled with a set of decisions. For a given row, we should find a decision from the set attached to this row. We consider bounds on the precision of this algorithm relative to the length of rules. To illustrate proposed approach we study a problem of recognition of labels of points in the plain. This paper contains also results of experiments with modified decision tables from UCI Machine Learning Repository.

  14. The Influence of Organizational External Factors on Construction Risk Management among Nigerian Construction Companies

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    A.Q. Adeleke

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available Background: Substantial empirical research has shown conflicting results regarding the influence of organizational external factors on construction risk management, suggesting the necessity to introduce a moderator into the study. The present research confirmed whether rules and regulations matter on the relationships between organizational external factors and construction risk management. Methods: Based on discouragement and organizational control theory, this research examined the effects of organizational external factors and rules and regulations on construction risk management among 238 employees operating in construction companies in Abuja and Lagos, Nigeria. A personally administered questionnaire was used to acquire the data. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Results: A significant positive relationship between organizational external factors and construction risk management was asserted. This study also found a significant positive relationship between rules and regulations and construction risk management. As anticipated, rules and regulations were found to moderate the relationship between organizational external factors and construction risk management, with a significant positive result. Similarly, a significant interaction effect was also found between rules and regulations and organizational external factors. Implications of the research from a Nigerian point of view have also been discussed. Conclusion: Political, economy, and technology factors helped the construction companies to reduce the chance of risk occurrence during the construction activities. Rules and regulations also helped to lessen the rate of accidents involving construction workers as well as the duration of the projects. Similarly, the influence of the organizational external factors with rules and regulations on construction risk management has proven that most of the construction companies that implement the

  15. Post Rule of Law

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Carlson, Kerstin Bree

    2016-01-01

    The value of developing hybrid international criminal procedure (ICP) is that it is arguably inclusive (representing two major legal traditions) and distinct from any domestic system, thus creating a separate, sui generis realm for international criminal law (ICL) jurists to meet. Since its...... addresses the practice of hybridity in ICP, drawing examples from the construction and evolution of hybrid procedure at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), to argue that the hybridity practiced by international criminal tribunals renders them ‘post rule of law’ institutions...

  16. On construction of partial association rules

    KAUST Repository

    Moshkov, Mikhail; Piliszczuk, Marcin; Zielosko, Beata Marta

    2009-01-01

    This paper is devoted to the study of approximate algorithms for minimization of partial association rule length. It is shown that under some natural assumptions on the class NP, a greedy algorithm is close to the best polynomial approximate

  17. RCC-MRx: Design and construction rules for mechanical components in high-temperature structures, experimental reactors and fusion reactors

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    2015-01-01

    The RCC-MRx code was developed for sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFR), research reactors (RR) and fusion reactors (FR-ITER). It provides the rules for designing and building mechanical components involved in areas subject to significant creep and/or significant irradiation. In particular, it incorporates an extensive range of materials (aluminum and zirconium alloys in response to the need for transparency to neutrons), sizing rules for thin shells and box structures, and new modern welding processes: electron beam, laser beam, diffusion and brazing. The RCC-MR code was used to design and build the prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) developed by IGCAR in India and the ITER Vacuum Vessel. The RCC-Mx code is being used in the current construction of the RJH experimental reactor (Jules Horowitz reactor). The RCC-MRx code is serving as a reference for the design of the ASTRID project (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration), for the design of the primary circuit in MYRRHA (Multi-purpose hybrid Research Reactor for High-tech Applications) and the design of the target station of the ESS project (European Spallation Source). Contents of the 2015 edition of the RCC-MRx code: Section I General provisions; Section II Additional requirements and special provisions; Section III Rules for nuclear installation mechanical components: Volume I: Design and construction rules: Volume A (RA): General provisions and entrance keys, Volume B (RB): Class 1 components and supports, Volume C (RC): Class 2 components and supports, Volume D (RD): Class 3 components and supports, Volume K (RK): Examination, handling or drive mechanisms, Volume L (RL): Irradiation devices, Volume Z (Ai): Technical appendices; Volume II: Materials; Volume III: Examinations methods; Volume IV: Welding; Volume V: Manufacturing operations; Volume VI: Probationary phase rules

  18. 49 CFR 1101.3 - Construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-10-01

    ... 49 Transportation 8 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Construction. 1101.3 Section 1101.3 Transportation Other Regulations Relating to Transportation (Continued) SURFACE TRANSPORTATION BOARD, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION RULES OF PRACTICE DEFINITIONS AND CONSTRUCTION § 1101.3 Construction. The rules of construction...

  19. RCC-M: Design and construction rules for mechanical components of PWR nuclear islands

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    2017-01-01

    AFCEN's RCC-M code concerns the mechanical components designed and manufactured for pressurized water reactors (PWR). It applies to pressure equipment in nuclear islands in safety classes 1, 2 and 3, and certain non-pressure components, such as vessel internals, supporting structures for safety class components, storage tanks and containment penetrations. RCC-M covers the following technical subjects: sizing and design, choice of materials and procurement. Fabrication and control, including: associated qualification requirements (procedures, welders and operators, etc.), control methods to be implemented, acceptance criteria for detected defects, documentation associated with the different activities covered, and quality assurance. The design, manufacture and inspection rules defined in RCC-M leverage the results of the research and development work pioneered in France, Europe and worldwide, and which have been successfully used by industry to design and build PWR nuclear islands. AFCEN's rules incorporate the resulting feedback. Use: France's last 16 nuclear units (P'4 and N4); 4 CP1 reactors in South Africa (2) and Korea (2); 44 M310 (4), CPR-1000 (28), CPR-600 (6), HPR-1000 (4) and EPR (2) reactors in service or undergoing construction in China; 4 EPR reactors in Europe: Finland (1), France (1) and UK (2). Content: Section I - nuclear island components, subsection 'A': general rules, subsection 'B': class 1 components, subsection 'C': class 2 components, subsection 'D': class 3 components, subsection 'E': small components, subsection 'G': core support structures, subsection 'H': supports, subsection 'J': low pressure or atmospheric storage tanks, subsection 'P': containment penetration, subsection 'Q': qualification of active mechanical components, subsection 'Z': technical appendices; section II - materials; section III - examination

  20. Location Prediction Based on Transition Probability Matrices Constructing from Sequential Rules for Spatial-Temporal K-Anonymity Dataset

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Zhao; Zhu, Yunhong; Wu, Chenxue

    2016-01-01

    Spatial-temporal k-anonymity has become a mainstream approach among techniques for protection of users’ privacy in location-based services (LBS) applications, and has been applied to several variants such as LBS snapshot queries and continuous queries. Analyzing large-scale spatial-temporal anonymity sets may benefit several LBS applications. In this paper, we propose two location prediction methods based on transition probability matrices constructing from sequential rules for spatial-temporal k-anonymity dataset. First, we define single-step sequential rules mined from sequential spatial-temporal k-anonymity datasets generated from continuous LBS queries for multiple users. We then construct transition probability matrices from mined single-step sequential rules, and normalize the transition probabilities in the transition matrices. Next, we regard a mobility model for an LBS requester as a stationary stochastic process and compute the n-step transition probability matrices by raising the normalized transition probability matrices to the power n. Furthermore, we propose two location prediction methods: rough prediction and accurate prediction. The former achieves the probabilities of arriving at target locations along simple paths those include only current locations, target locations and transition steps. By iteratively combining the probabilities for simple paths with n steps and the probabilities for detailed paths with n-1 steps, the latter method calculates transition probabilities for detailed paths with n steps from current locations to target locations. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments, and correctness and flexibility of our proposed algorithm have been verified. PMID:27508502

  1. Constructing rule-based models using the belief functions framework

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Almeida, R.J.; Denoeux, T.; Kaymak, U.; Greco, S.; Bouchon-Meunier, B.; Coletti, G.; Fedrizzi, M.; Matarazzo, B.; Yager, R.R.

    2012-01-01

    Abstract. We study a new approach to regression analysis. We propose a new rule-based regression model using the theoretical framework of belief functions. For this purpose we use the recently proposed Evidential c-means (ECM) to derive rule-based models solely from data. ECM allocates, for each

  2. Diagnostic value of C-reactive protein to rule out infectious complications after major abdominal surgery: a systematic review and meta-analysis

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Gans, Sarah L.; Atema, Jasper J.; van Dieren, Susan; Groot Koerkamp, Bas; Boermeester, Marja A.

    2015-01-01

    Infectious complications occur frequently after major abdominal surgery and have a major influence on patient outcome and hospital costs. A marker that can rule out postoperative infectious complications (PICs) could aid patient selection for safe and early hospital discharge. C-reactive protein

  3. Comparison of Heuristics for Inhibitory Rule Optimization

    KAUST Repository

    Alsolami, Fawaz

    2014-09-13

    Knowledge representation and extraction are very important tasks in data mining. In this work, we proposed a variety of rule-based greedy algorithms that able to obtain knowledge contained in a given dataset as a series of inhibitory rules containing an expression “attribute ≠ value” on the right-hand side. The main goal of this paper is to determine based on rule characteristics, rule length and coverage, whether the proposed rule heuristics are statistically significantly different or not; if so, we aim to identify the best performing rule heuristics for minimization of rule length and maximization of rule coverage. Friedman test with Nemenyi post-hoc are used to compare the greedy algorithms statistically against each other for length and coverage. The experiments are carried out on real datasets from UCI Machine Learning Repository. For leading heuristics, the constructed rules are compared with optimal ones obtained based on dynamic programming approach. The results seem to be promising for the best heuristics: the average relative difference between length (coverage) of constructed and optimal rules is at most 2.27% (7%, respectively). Furthermore, the quality of classifiers based on sets of inhibitory rules constructed by the considered heuristics are compared against each other, and the results show that the three best heuristics from the point of view classification accuracy coincides with the three well-performed heuristics from the point of view of rule length minimization.

  4. Verification of business rules programs

    CERN Document Server

    Silva, Bruno Berstel-Da

    2013-01-01

    Rules represent a simplified means of programming, congruent with our understanding of human brain constructs. With the advent of business rules management systems, it has been possible to introduce rule-based programming to nonprogrammers, allowing them to map expert intent into code in applications such as fraud detection, financial transactions, healthcare, retail, and marketing. However, a remaining concern is the quality, safety, and reliability of the resulting programs.  This book is on business rules programs, that is, rule programs as handled in business rules management systems. Its

  5. Decision rules for decision tables with many-valued decisions

    KAUST Repository

    Chikalov, Igor

    2011-01-01

    In the paper, authors presents a greedy algorithm for construction of exact and partial decision rules for decision tables with many-valued decisions. Exact decision rules can be \\'over-fitted\\', so instead of exact decision rules with many attributes, it is more appropriate to work with partial decision rules with smaller number of attributes. Based on results for set cover problem authors study bounds on accuracy of greedy algorithm for exact and partial decision rule construction, and complexity of the problem of minimization of decision rule length. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

  6. Comparison of Heuristics for Inhibitory Rule Optimization

    KAUST Repository

    Alsolami, Fawaz; Chikalov, Igor; Moshkov, Mikhail

    2014-01-01

    Friedman test with Nemenyi post-hoc are used to compare the greedy algorithms statistically against each other for length and coverage. The experiments are carried out on real datasets from UCI Machine Learning Repository. For leading heuristics, the constructed rules are compared with optimal ones obtained based on dynamic programming approach. The results seem to be promising for the best heuristics: the average relative difference between length (coverage) of constructed and optimal rules is at most 2.27% (7%, respectively). Furthermore, the quality of classifiers based on sets of inhibitory rules constructed by the considered heuristics are compared against each other, and the results show that the three best heuristics from the point of view classification accuracy coincides with the three well-performed heuristics from the point of view of rule length minimization.

  7. A clinical prediction rule for detecting major depressive disorder in primary care: the PREDICT-NL study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zuithoff, Nicolaas P A; Vergouwe, Yvonne; King, Michael; Nazareth, Irwin; Hak, Eelko; Moons, Karel G M; Geerlings, Mirjam I

    2009-08-01

    Major depressive disorder often remains unrecognized in primary care. Development of a clinical prediction rule using easily obtainable predictors for major depressive disorder in primary care patients. A total of 1046 subjects, aged 18-65 years, were included from seven large general practices in the center of The Netherlands. All subjects were recruited in the general practice waiting room, irrespective of their presenting complaint. Major depressive disorder according to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Text Revision edition criteria was assessed with the Composite International Diagnostic Interview. Candidate predictors were gender, age, educational level, being single, number of presented complaints, presence of non-somatic complaints, whether a diagnosis was assigned, consultation rate in past 12 months, presentation of depressive complaints or prescription of antidepressants in past 12 months, number of life events in past 6 months and any history of depression. The first multivariable logistic regression model including only predictors that require no confronting depression-related questions had a reasonable degree of discrimination (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve or concordance-statistic (c-statistic) = 0.71; 95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.67-0.76). Addition of three simple though more depression-related predictors, number of life events and history of depression, significantly increased the c-statistic to 0.80 (95% CI: 0.76-0.83). After transforming this second model to an easily to use risk score, the lowest risk category (sum score depression, which increased to 49% in the highest category (sum score > or = 30). A clinical prediction rule allows GPs to identify patients-irrespective of their complaints-in whom diagnostic workup for major depressive disorder is indicated.

  8. RCC-CW - Rules for design and construction of PWR nuclear civil works

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    2016-01-01

    RCC-CW describes the rules for designing, building and testing civil engineering works in PWR reactors. It explains the principles and requirements for the safety, serviceability and durability of concrete and metal frame structures, based on Eurocode design principles (European standards for the structural design of construction works) combined with specific measures for safety-class buildings. The code is produced as part of the RCC-CW Subcommittee, which includes all the parties involved in civil engineering works in the nuclear sector: clients, contractors, general and specialized firms, consultancies and inspection offices. The code covers the following areas relating to the design and construction of civil engineering works that play an important safety role: geotechnical aspects, reinforced concrete structures and galleries, pre-stressed containments with metal liner, metal containment and pool liners, metal frames, anchors, concrete cylinder pipes, containment leak tests. The RCC-CW code is available as an ETC-C version specific to EPR projects (European pressurized reactor). Contents of the 2016 edition of the RCC-CW Code: Part G - General: scope, standards, notations, quality management, general principles; Part D - Design: actions and combinations of actions, geotechnical aspects, pre-stressed or reinforced concrete structures, metal containment liners, metal pool liners, metal frames, anchors; Part C - Construction: geotechnical aspects, concrete, surface finish and formwork, reinforcement for reinforced concrete, pre-stressing processes, prefabricated concrete elements, metal containment liners, metal pool liners, metal frames, anchors, embedded pipelines, joint sealing, survey networks and tolerances; Part M - Maintenance and monitoring: containment integrity and rate tests

  9. Action Rules Mining

    CERN Document Server

    Dardzinska, Agnieszka

    2013-01-01

    We are surrounded by data, numerical, categorical and otherwise, which must to be analyzed and processed to convert it into information that instructs, answers or aids understanding and decision making. Data analysts in many disciplines such as business, education or medicine, are frequently asked to analyze new data sets which are often composed of numerous tables possessing different properties. They try to find completely new correlations between attributes and show new possibilities for users.   Action rules mining discusses some of data mining and knowledge discovery principles and then describe representative concepts, methods and algorithms connected with action. The author introduces the formal definition of action rule, notion of a simple association action rule and a representative action rule, the cost of association action rule, and gives a strategy how to construct simple association action rules of a lowest cost. A new approach for generating action rules from datasets with numerical attributes...

  10. Proposal to modify Rule 6, Rule 10a, and Rule 12c of the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Oren, Aharon; Garrity, George M; Schink, Bernhard

    2014-04-01

    According to the current versions of Rule 10a and Rule 12c of the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes, names of a genus or subgenus and specific epithets may be taken from any source and may even be composed in an arbitrary manner. Based on these rules, names may be composed of any word or any combination of elements derived from any language with a Latin ending. We propose modifying these rules by adding the text, currently part of Recommendation 6, according to which words from languages other than Latin or Greek should be avoided as long as equivalents exist in Latin or Greek or can be constructed by combining word elements from these two languages. We also propose modification of Rule 6 by adopting some of the current paragraphs of Recommendation 6 to become part of the Rule.

  11. Major factors influencing craft productivity in nuclear power plant construction

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Borcherding, J.D.; Sebastian, S.J.

    1980-01-01

    This paper reports on a research study whose objective was to determine the most influential factors adversely affecting craft productivity in nuclear power plant construction from the perspective of the tradesmen employed at the sites. Data were collected through the use of a questionnaire survey and group interview sessions, predominantly with workmen, at six nuclear power plant construction projects. Craftsmen were chosen as the major data base because of their awareness of how their time would actually be spent on the project. Topics considered include the factors influencing craft productivity, material availability, redoing work, crew interfacing, overcrowded work areas, instruction time, inspection delays, craft turnover, craft absenteeism, foreman changes, foreman incompetence, engineering design lead time, comprehensive scheduling of the design function, the responsibility of the utility, value engineering, plant standardization, the effective utilization of the planning and scheduling system, and the labor-management committee

  12. Patients' feelings about ward nursing regimes and involvement in rule construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Alexander, J

    2006-10-01

    This study compared two acute psychiatric ward nursing regimes, focusing on ward rules as a means of investigating the relationship between the flexibility/inflexibility of the regimes and patient outcomes. Previous studies identified an association between ward rules and patient aggression. A link between absconding and nurses' attitudes towards rule enforcement has also been explored. However, an in-depth exploration of ward rules from the perspective of nurses and patients had not been undertaken previously. The study aimed to discover the content of rules within acute psychiatric wards; to explore patients' responses to the rules; to evaluate the impact of rules and rule enforcement on nurse-patient relationships and on ward events; and to investigate the relationship between ward rules, ward atmosphere and ward design. The relevance of sociological theory emerged from the data analysis. During this process, the results were moved up to another conceptual level to represent the meaning of lived experience at the level of theory. For example, nurses' descriptions of their feelings in relation to rule enforcement were merged as role ambivalence. This concept was supported by examples from the transcripts. Other possible explanations for the data and the connections between them were checked by returning to each text unit in the cluster and ensuring that it fitted with the emergent theory. The design centred on a comparative interview study of 30 patients and 30 nurses within two acute psychiatric wards in different hospitals. Non-participant observations provided a context for the interview data. Measures of the Ward Atmosphere Scale, the Hospital-Hostel Practices Profile, ward incidents and levels of as required (PRN) medication were obtained. The analysis of the quantitative data was assisted by spss, and the qualitative analysis by QSR *NUDIST. Thematic and interpretative phenomenological methods were used in the analysis of the qualitative data. A series of

  13. 49 CFR 1100.3 - Liberal construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-10-01

    ... 49 Transportation 8 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Liberal construction. 1100.3 Section 1100.3 Transportation Other Regulations Relating to Transportation (Continued) SURFACE TRANSPORTATION BOARD, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION RULES OF PRACTICE GENERAL PROVISIONS § 1100.3 Liberal construction. The rules will...

  14. The codification of the design and construction rules in nuclear industry ensuring its success in France and for French export activity

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Boiron, P.; Menjon, G.

    1980-10-01

    The codification of the design and construction rules (DCR) for nuclear power stations is presented. In part I, The DCR codifying undertaking is explained. In part II, the DCR-M is presented as is also the significant change that its application entails in contractual practice and the application of the regulations [fr

  15. Design and Analysis of Decision Rules via Dynamic Programming

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha M.

    2017-01-01

    Another area of advancement is the presentation of algorithms for constructing Pareto optimal points for rules and rule systems. This allows us to study the existence of “totally optimal” decision rules

  16. Derived rules for predicative set theory: An application of sheaves

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    van den Berg, B.; Moerdijk, I.

    2012-01-01

    We show how one may establish proof-theoretic results for constructive Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory, such as the compactness rule for Cantor space and the Bar Induction rule for Baire space, by constructing sheaf models and using their preservation properties.

  17. Analysis and minimization of overtraining effect in rule-based classifiers for computer-aided diagnosis

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Li Qiang; Doi Kunio

    2006-01-01

    Computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) schemes have been developed to assist radiologists detect various lesions in medical images. In CAD schemes, classifiers play a key role in achieving a high lesion detection rate and a low false-positive rate. Although many popular classifiers such as linear discriminant analysis and artificial neural networks have been employed in CAD schemes for reduction of false positives, a rule-based classifier has probably been the simplest and most frequently used one since the early days of development of various CAD schemes. However, with existing rule-based classifiers, there are major disadvantages that significantly reduce their practicality and credibility. The disadvantages include manual design, poor reproducibility, poor evaluation methods such as resubstitution, and a large overtraining effect. An automated rule-based classifier with a minimized overtraining effect can overcome or significantly reduce the extent of the above-mentioned disadvantages. In this study, we developed an 'optimal' method for the selection of cutoff thresholds and a fully automated rule-based classifier. Experimental results performed with Monte Carlo simulation and a real lung nodule CT data set demonstrated that the automated threshold selection method can completely eliminate overtraining effect in the procedure of cutoff threshold selection, and thus can minimize overall overtraining effect in the constructed rule-based classifier. We believe that this threshold selection method is very useful in the construction of automated rule-based classifiers with minimized overtraining effect

  18. Decision rules for decision tables with many-valued decisions

    KAUST Repository

    Chikalov, Igor; Zielosko, Beata

    2011-01-01

    In the paper, authors presents a greedy algorithm for construction of exact and partial decision rules for decision tables with many-valued decisions. Exact decision rules can be 'over-fitted', so instead of exact decision rules with many attributes

  19. Length and coverage of inhibitory decision rules

    KAUST Repository

    Alsolami, Fawaz

    2012-01-01

    Authors present algorithms for optimization of inhibitory rules relative to the length and coverage. Inhibitory rules have a relation "attribute ≠ value" on the right-hand side. The considered algorithms are based on extensions of dynamic programming. Paper contains also comparison of length and coverage of inhibitory rules constructed by a greedy algorithm and by the dynamic programming algorithm. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

  20. Accurate phylogenetic tree reconstruction from quartets: a heuristic approach.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Reaz, Rezwana; Bayzid, Md Shamsuzzoha; Rahman, M Sohel

    2014-01-01

    Supertree methods construct trees on a set of taxa (species) combining many smaller trees on the overlapping subsets of the entire set of taxa. A 'quartet' is an unrooted tree over 4 taxa, hence the quartet-based supertree methods combine many 4-taxon unrooted trees into a single and coherent tree over the complete set of taxa. Quartet-based phylogeny reconstruction methods have been receiving considerable attentions in the recent years. An accurate and efficient quartet-based method might be competitive with the current best phylogenetic tree reconstruction methods (such as maximum likelihood or Bayesian MCMC analyses), without being as computationally intensive. In this paper, we present a novel and highly accurate quartet-based phylogenetic tree reconstruction method. We performed an extensive experimental study to evaluate the accuracy and scalability of our approach on both simulated and biological datasets.

  1. Classifiers based on optimal decision rules

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha

    2013-11-25

    Based on dynamic programming approach we design algorithms for sequential optimization of exact and approximate decision rules relative to the length and coverage [3, 4]. In this paper, we use optimal rules to construct classifiers, and study two questions: (i) which rules are better from the point of view of classification-exact or approximate; and (ii) which order of optimization gives better results of classifier work: length, length+coverage, coverage, or coverage+length. Experimental results show that, on average, classifiers based on exact rules are better than classifiers based on approximate rules, and sequential optimization (length+coverage or coverage+length) is better than the ordinary optimization (length or coverage).

  2. Classifiers based on optimal decision rules

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha M.; Chikalov, Igor; Moshkov, Mikhail; Zielosko, Beata

    2013-01-01

    Based on dynamic programming approach we design algorithms for sequential optimization of exact and approximate decision rules relative to the length and coverage [3, 4]. In this paper, we use optimal rules to construct classifiers, and study two questions: (i) which rules are better from the point of view of classification-exact or approximate; and (ii) which order of optimization gives better results of classifier work: length, length+coverage, coverage, or coverage+length. Experimental results show that, on average, classifiers based on exact rules are better than classifiers based on approximate rules, and sequential optimization (length+coverage or coverage+length) is better than the ordinary optimization (length or coverage).

  3. The Equilibrium Rule--A Personal Discovery

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hewitt, Paul G.

    2016-01-01

    Examples of equilibrium are evident everywhere and the equilibrium rule provides a reasoned way to view all things, whether in static (balancing rocks, steel beams in building construction) or dynamic (airplanes, bowling balls) equilibrium. Interestingly, the equilibrium rule applies not just to objects at rest but whenever any object or system of…

  4. An approach to municipality plan’s development of regulation in territorial arrangement and construction: A case study of Valjevo

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Maksin-Mićić Marija

    2005-01-01

    Full Text Available Spatial plan for the territory of municipality is an important strategic document. One of the basic topics while preparation of such a plan relates to dispersal of settlements, present activities and construction within the municipality territorial scope. Through planning conceptions, solutions and proposals with rules for their accomplishment, the municipality spatial plan must address certain issues of development control and territorial arrangement. The analysis is made regarding major issues of preparing the rules for development and territorial arrangement within implementation part of the municipality spatial plan. It has been pointed out to basic rules content and possibilities of their differentiation in terms of their level of obligation, detailing and flexibility. This paper analyses the key aspects of development and arrangement of Valjevo municipality territory. The attention was drawn to potential criteria and application of typology for built-up territories within a settlement’s scope in terms of arrangement and construction, as well as it was pointed to the basic planning standpoints which are of concern for setting up the rules. It was delineated how the key problems in construction and territorial arrangement could be dealt with when certain rules are developed for different zones and protective belts, then for reserving of space and for construction, as well as for their differentiation according to already substantiated typology of settlements.

  5. On minimal inhibitory rules for almost all k-valued information systems

    KAUST Repository

    Moshkov, Mikhail

    2009-07-30

    The minimal inhibitory rules for information systems can be used for construction of classifiers. We show that almost all information systems from a certain large class of information systems have relatively short minimal inhibitory rules. However, the number of such rules is not polynomial in the number of attributes and the number of objects. This class consists of all k-valued information systems, k ≥ 2, with the number of objects polynomial in the number of attributes. Hence, for efficient construction of classifiers some filtration techniques in rule generation are necessary. Another way is to work with lazy classification algorithms based on inhibitory rules.

  6. Online learning algorithm for ensemble of decision rules

    KAUST Repository

    Chikalov, Igor; Moshkov, Mikhail; Zielosko, Beata

    2011-01-01

    We describe an online learning algorithm that builds a system of decision rules for a classification problem. Rules are constructed according to the minimum description length principle by a greedy algorithm or using the dynamic programming approach

  7. Decision and Inhibitory Rule Optimization for Decision Tables with Many-valued Decisions

    KAUST Repository

    Alsolami, Fawaz

    2016-04-25

    ‘If-then’ rule sets are one of the most expressive and human-readable knowledge representations. This thesis deals with optimization and analysis of decision and inhibitory rules for decision tables with many-valued decisions. The most important areas of applications are knowledge extraction and representation. The benefit of considering inhibitory rules is connected with the fact that in some situations they can describe more knowledge than the decision ones. Decision tables with many-valued decisions arise in combinatorial optimization, computational geometry, fault diagnosis, and especially under the processing of data sets. In this thesis, various examples of real-life problems are considered which help to understand the motivation of the investigation. We extend relatively simple results obtained earlier for decision rules over decision tables with many-valued decisions to the case of inhibitory rules. The behavior of Shannon functions (which characterize complexity of rule systems) is studied for finite and infinite information systems, for global and local approaches, and for decision and inhibitory rules. The extensions of dynamic programming for the study of decision rules over decision tables with single-valued decisions are generalized to the case of decision tables with many-valued decisions. These results are also extended to the case of inhibitory rules. As a result, we have algorithms (i) for multi-stage optimization of rules relative to such criteria as length or coverage, (ii) for counting the number of optimal rules, (iii) for construction of Pareto optimal points for bi-criteria optimization problems, (iv) for construction of graphs describing relationships between two cost functions, and (v) for construction of graphs describing relationships between cost and accuracy of rules. The applications of created tools include comparison (based on information about Pareto optimal points) of greedy heuristics for bi-criteria optimization of rules

  8. Online learning algorithm for ensemble of decision rules

    KAUST Repository

    Chikalov, Igor

    2011-01-01

    We describe an online learning algorithm that builds a system of decision rules for a classification problem. Rules are constructed according to the minimum description length principle by a greedy algorithm or using the dynamic programming approach. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

  9. Reliable and adequateengineering surveys for construction: the rule of two D

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Rakitina Natal'ya Nikolaevna

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available In the article the current state of quality supply of engineering surveys for construction is discussed. The main criteria for improving the design quality of buildings and structures for industrial, civil and other purposes is the reliability and adequacy of the results of engineering-geological surveys. The authors show the examples of inadequate study of engineering-geological conditions in the design of structures that led to emergency situations. Consideration of the reasons of accidents in structures showed that they are caused by lack of research conducted, the underestimation of the complexity of geological conditions. In the process of conducting geotechnical investigations the works were focused directly in the enclosure of a designed building, and the features of geological and hydrogeological conditions of the off-site were much more complex. In the process of construction during the sinking of the pit activation suffusion processes occurred, which led to an accident. Underestimation of the use of these geological funds in this example shows that even in the presence of fund materials, which are currently almost not increased, errors may occur due to the notorious savings for research. The requirements to ensuring the reliability and adequacy of engineering-geological surveys, which the authors call "The Rule of two D" (in Russian — Reliability and Adequacy, lie in the existing legal acts. The practice of fulfilling requirements to a large extend shows that the desire to save money at the stage of design and exploration works results in additional costs for additional design, recovery from accidents and works on a new project. The authors critically evaluated the development of engineering and geotechnical engineering instead of geological survey, which is not methodologically and theoretically substantiated and leads to the excluding from engineering surveys the consideration of the off-site geotechnical conditions directly below

  10. RCC-E: Design and construction rules for electrical equipment of PWR nuclear islands

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    2016-01-01

    RCC-E describes the rules for designing, building and installing electrical and I and C systems and equipment for pressurized water reactors. The code was drafted in partnership with industry, engineering firms, manufacturers, building control firms and operators, and represents a collection of best practices in accordance with IAEA requirements and IEC standards. The code's scope covers: architecture and the associated systems, materials engineering and the qualification procedure for normal and accidental environmental conditions, facility engineering and management of common cause failures (electrical and I and C) and electromagnetic interference, testing and inspecting electrical characteristics, quality assurance requirements supplementing ISO 9001 and activity monitoring. Use: RCC-E has been used to build the following power plants: France's last 12 nuclear units (1,300 MWe (8) and 1,450 MWe (4)), 2 M310 reactors in Korea (2), 44 M310 (4), CPR-1000 (28), CPR-600 (6), HPR-1000 (4) and EPR (2) reactors in service or undergoing construction in China, 1 EPR reactor in France. RCC-E is used for maintenance operations in French power plants (58 units) and Chinese M310 and CPR-1000 power plants. RCC-E has been chosen for the construction of the EPR plants in Hinkley Point, UK. Contents of the 2016 edition of the RCC-E code: Volume 1 - General requirements and quality assurance; Volume 2 - Specification of requirements; Volume 3 - I and C systems; Volume 4 - Electrical systems; Volume 5 - Materials engineering; Volume 6 - Installation of electrical and I and C systems; Volume 7 - Inspection and test methods

  11. Thin Capitalization Rules and Multinational Firm Capital Structure

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Blouin, J.; Huizinga, H.P.; Laeven, L.; Nicodeme, G.

    2014-01-01

    Abstract: This paper examines the impact of thin capitalization rules that limit the tax deductibility of interest on the capital structure of the foreign affiliates of US multinationals. We construct a new data set on thin capitalization rules in 54 countries for the period 1982-2004. Using

  12. Agency Construction and Navigation in Oral Narratives of English Learning by Chinese College English Majors

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lin, Qiuming

    2017-01-01

    The current study aims to investigate the discursive construction and navigation of agency in oral narratives of English learning by Chinese college English majors. Based on the theoretical framework integrating Bamberg et. al.'s theory of identity dilemma and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, the study has addressed two research…

  13. A rule-based software test data generator

    Science.gov (United States)

    Deason, William H.; Brown, David B.; Chang, Kai-Hsiung; Cross, James H., II

    1991-01-01

    Rule-based software test data generation is proposed as an alternative to either path/predicate analysis or random data generation. A prototype rule-based test data generator for Ada programs is constructed and compared to a random test data generator. Four Ada procedures are used in the comparison. Approximately 2000 rule-based test cases and 100,000 randomly generated test cases are automatically generated and executed. The success of the two methods is compared using standard coverage metrics. Simple statistical tests showing that even the primitive rule-based test data generation prototype is significantly better than random data generation are performed. This result demonstrates that rule-based test data generation is feasible and shows great promise in assisting test engineers, especially when the rule base is developed further.

  14. Decision Rules, Trees and Tests for Tables with Many-valued Decisions–comparative Study

    KAUST Repository

    Azad, Mohammad; Zielosko, Beata; Moshkov, Mikhail; Chikalov, Igor

    2013-01-01

    In this paper, we present three approaches for construction of decision rules for decision tables with many-valued decisions. We construct decision rules directly for rows of decision table, based on paths in decision tree, and based on attributes contained in a test (super-reduct). Experimental results for the data sets taken from UCI Machine Learning Repository, contain comparison of the maximum and the average length of rules for the mentioned approaches.

  15. Decision Rules, Trees and Tests for Tables with Many-valued Decisions–comparative Study

    KAUST Repository

    Azad, Mohammad

    2013-10-04

    In this paper, we present three approaches for construction of decision rules for decision tables with many-valued decisions. We construct decision rules directly for rows of decision table, based on paths in decision tree, and based on attributes contained in a test (super-reduct). Experimental results for the data sets taken from UCI Machine Learning Repository, contain comparison of the maximum and the average length of rules for the mentioned approaches.

  16. Designing Fuzzy Rule Based Expert System for Cyber Security

    OpenAIRE

    Goztepe, Kerim

    2016-01-01

    The state of cyber security has begun to attract more attention and interest outside the community of computer security experts. Cyber security is not a single problem, but rather a group of highly different problems involving different sets of threats. Fuzzy Rule based system for cyber security is a system consists of a rule depository and a mechanism for accessing and running the rules. The depository is usually constructed with a collection of related rule sets. The aim of this study is to...

  17. Impact of Operating Rules on Planning Capacity Expansion of Urban Water Supply Systems

    Science.gov (United States)

    de Neufville, R.; Galelli, S.; Tian, X.

    2017-12-01

    This study addresses the impact of operating rules on capacity planning of urban water supply systems. The continuous growth of metropolitan areas represents a major challenge for water utilities, which often rely on industrial water supply (e.g., desalination, reclaimed water) to complement natural resources (e.g., reservoirs). These additional sources increase the reliability of supply, equipping operators with additional means to hedge against droughts. How do their rules for using industrial water supply impact the performance of water supply system? How might it affect long-term plans for capacity expansion? Possibly significantly, as demonstrated by the analysis of the operations and planning of a water supply system inspired by Singapore. Our analysis explores the system dynamics under multiple inflow and management scenarios to understand the extent to which alternative operating rules for the use of industrial water supply affect system performance. Results first show that these operating rules can have significant impact on the variability in system performance (e.g., reliability, energy use) comparable to that of hydro-climatological conditions. Further analyses of several capacity expansion exercises—based on our original hydrological and management scenarios—show that operating rules significantly affect the timing and magnitude of critical decisions, such as the construction of new desalination plants. These results have two implications: Capacity expansion analysis should consider the effect of a priori uncertainty about operating rules; and operators should consider how their flexibility in operating rules can affect their perceived need for capacity.

  18. Codification of LMFBR rules and comparison of codes

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Faure, O.; Debaene, J.P.

    1993-01-01

    The first part of this report presents the basic RCC-MR (regles de conception et de construction des materiels mecaniques des ilots nucleaires, reacteurs a neutrons rapides) design rules and their purpose. The second part is a qualitative comparison between RCC-MR, Code case N47 (ASME) and ETSDG Guide (MONJU Guide), made on the following topics: negligible creep test, ratcheting, creep fatigue, buckling, piping rules. An outline is given on improvements to RCC-MR rules now in progress

  19. Rules and routines in organizations and the management of safety rules

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Weichbrodt, J. Ch.

    2013-07-01

    participation in rule creation. Paper 2 makes use of extensive empirical data collected at three different fields of work within SBB (signaling, shunting, and construction and maintenance). Using both interviews and observation methods, four cases of contested safety rules (i.e., rules that are often bent or broken) are analyzed in detail. For each case, the different aspects of the rule and the routine are disentangled and put in relation to one another. In this manner, the precise way in which rules influence routines (as well as the limits of this influence) is uncovered. Additionally, different ways of sensemaking of rules in the different fields of work are identified and put in relation to the cases of contested rules. Finally, in paper 3, most of the research covered so far is built upon in order to address the question of what should be done to adequately manage safety rules in high-risk organizations. Drawing from organization theory, safety rules are conceptualized as instruments for organizational control, as coordination mechanisms, and as a codified forms of organizational knowledge. With these three functions in mind, four common challenges with safety rules are outlined, as well as four typical measures of good rules management. The relationship between these measures and the challenges and their implication for rules as control, coordination and knowledge are discussed. (author)

  20. Rules and routines in organizations and the management of safety rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Weichbrodt, J. Ch.

    2013-01-01

    participation in rule creation. Paper 2 makes use of extensive empirical data collected at three different fields of work within SBB (signaling, shunting, and construction and maintenance). Using both interviews and observation methods, four cases of contested safety rules (i.e., rules that are often bent or broken) are analyzed in detail. For each case, the different aspects of the rule and the routine are disentangled and put in relation to one another. In this manner, the precise way in which rules influence routines (as well as the limits of this influence) is uncovered. Additionally, different ways of sensemaking of rules in the different fields of work are identified and put in relation to the cases of contested rules. Finally, in paper 3, most of the research covered so far is built upon in order to address the question of what should be done to adequately manage safety rules in high-risk organizations. Drawing from organization theory, safety rules are conceptualized as instruments for organizational control, as coordination mechanisms, and as a codified forms of organizational knowledge. With these three functions in mind, four common challenges with safety rules are outlined, as well as four typical measures of good rules management. The relationship between these measures and the challenges and their implication for rules as control, coordination and knowledge are discussed. (author)

  1. Piping design and analysis: Comparison between the Belgian applications of French and American rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Daoust, P.H.; Geraets, L.H.; Lafaille, J.P.

    1987-01-01

    In the process of a feasibility study of a new nuclear power plant in Belgium, the French and American rules for piping design have been compared. The Belgian method rests on the American nuclear set of rules and uses the ASME code. French rules were initially based on the American rules (1978). Subsequent individual development led to a differentiation of the rules. Presently the mechanical part of the French rules is mainly contained in the RCC-P ('Regles de Conception et de Construction relatives aux Procedes') and the RCC-M ('Regles de Conception et de Construction des Materiels Mecaniques'). This paper compares the piping design rules from a general point of view; examples of applications allow to identify benefits or drawbacks of the use of ASME or RCCM codes. (orig.)

  2. Piping design and analysis: comparison between the Belgian applications of French and American rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Daoust, Ph.; Geraets, L.H.; Lafaille, J.P.

    1989-01-01

    In the process of a feasibility study of a new nuclear power plant in Belgium, the French and American rules for piping design have been compared. The Belgian method rests on the American nuclear set of rules and uses the ASME code. French rules were initially based on the American rules (1978). Subsequent individual development led to a differentiation of the rules. Presently, the mechanical part of the French rules is mainly contained in the RCCP ('Regles de Conception et de Construction relatives aux Procedes') and the RCCM ('Regles de Conception et de Construction des materiels Mecaniques'). This paper compares the piping design rules from a general point of view; examples of applications allow benefits or drawbacks of the use of ASME or RCCM codes to identified. (author)

  3. Consequences of subtle chiral effects : from'Majority-Rules' to'Minority-Rules'

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Stals, P.J.M.; Artar, M.; Palmans, A.R.A.; Meijer, E.W.

    2014-01-01

    Mixing experiments were conducted on dilute solutions of asymmetrically substituted benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxamides (BTAs) with stereogenic methyl groups ranging from the a- to the d-position with respect to the amide in one of the three side groups. While normally the majority compound determines the

  4. Personalization of Rule-based Web Services.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Choi, Okkyung; Han, Sang Yong

    2008-04-04

    Nowadays Web users have clearly expressed their wishes to receive personalized services directly. Personalization is the way to tailor services directly to the immediate requirements of the user. However, the current Web Services System does not provide any features supporting this such as consideration of personalization of services and intelligent matchmaking. In this research a flexible, personalized Rule-based Web Services System to address these problems and to enable efficient search, discovery and construction across general Web documents and Semantic Web documents in a Web Services System is proposed. This system utilizes matchmaking among service requesters', service providers' and users' preferences using a Rule-based Search Method, and subsequently ranks search results. A prototype of efficient Web Services search and construction for the suggested system is developed based on the current work.

  5. Correcting Dayton's Oversight: Underpinning Bosnia's Democracy with the Rule of Law

    National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

    Thompson, Lewis

    1998-01-01

    .... The evidence is clear that the rule of law must underpin the construction of democracy, that the path to the rule of law is comprehensive legal reform, and that the police in a formerly authoritarian...

  6. Diagnostic value of C-reactive protein to rule out infectious complications after major abdominal surgery: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gans, Sarah L; Atema, Jasper J; van Dieren, Susan; Groot Koerkamp, Bas; Boermeester, Marja A

    2015-07-01

    Infectious complications occur frequently after major abdominal surgery and have a major influence on patient outcome and hospital costs. A marker that can rule out postoperative infectious complications (PICs) could aid patient selection for safe and early hospital discharge. C-reactive protein (CRP) is a widely available, fast, and cheap marker that might be of value in detecting PIC. Present meta-analysis evaluates the diagnostic value of CRP to rule out PIC following major abdominal surgery, aiding patient selection for early discharge. A systematic literature search of Medline, PubMed, and Cochrane was performed identifying all prospective studies evaluating the diagnostic value of CRP after abdominal surgery. Meta-analysis was performed according to the PRISMA statement. Twenty-two studies were included for qualitative analysis of which 16 studies were eligible for meta-analysis, representing 2215 patients. Most studies analyzed the value of CRP in colorectal surgery (eight studies). The pooled negative predictive value (NPV) improved each day after surgery up to 90% at postoperative day (POD) 3 for a pooled CRP cutoff of 159 mg/L (range 92-200). Maximum predictive values for PICs were reached on POD 5 for a pooled CRP cutoff of 114 mg/L (range 48-150): a pooled sensitivity of 86% (95% confidence interval (CI) 79-91%), specificity of 86% (95% CI 75-92%), and a positive predictive value of 64% (95% CI 49-77%). The pooled sensitivity and specificity were significantly higher on POD 5 than on other PODs (p < 0.001). Infectious complications after major abdominal surgery are very unlikely in patients with a CRP below 159 mg/L on POD 3. This can aid patient selection for safe and early hospital discharge and prevent overuse of imaging.

  7. 18 CFR 401.124 - Construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... 18 Conservation of Power and Water Resources 2 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Construction. 401.124 Section 401.124 Conservation of Power and Water Resources DELAWARE RIVER BASIN COMMISSION ADMINISTRATIVE MANUAL RULES OF PRACTICE AND PROCEDURE General Provisions § 401.124 Construction. This part is...

  8. Finding Exception For Association Rules Via SQL Queries

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Luminita DUMITRIU

    2000-12-01

    Full Text Available Finding association rules is mainly based on generating larger and larger frequent set candidates, starting from frequent attributes in the database. The frequent sets can be organised as a part of a lattice of concepts according to the Formal Concept Analysis approach. Since the lattice construction is database contents-dependent, the pseudo-intents (see Formal Concept Analysis are avoided. Association rules between concept intents (closed sets A=>B are partial implication rules, meaning that there is some data supporting A and (not B; fully explaining the data requires finding exceptions for the association rules. The approach applies to Oracle databases, via SQL queries.

  9. The blameworthiness of health and safety rule violations

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    P. Mascini (Peter)

    2006-01-01

    textabstractMan-made disasters usually lead to the tightening of safety regulations, because rule breaking is seen as a major cause of them. This reaction is based on the presumptions that the safety rules are good and that the rule-breakers are wrong. The reasons the personnel of a coke factory

  10. The Blameworthiness of Health and Safety Rule Violations

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    P. Mascini (Peter)

    2005-01-01

    textabstractMan-made disasters usually lead to the tightening of safety regulations, because rule breaking is seen as a major cause of them. This reaction is based on the assumptions that the safety rules are good and that the rule-breakers are wrong. The reasons the personnel of a coke factory

  11. On minimal inhibitory rules for almost all k-valued information systems

    KAUST Repository

    Moshkov, Mikhail; Skowron, Andrzej; Suraj, Zbigniew

    2009-01-01

    The minimal inhibitory rules for information systems can be used for construction of classifiers. We show that almost all information systems from a certain large class of information systems have relatively short minimal inhibitory rules. However

  12. Ensemble learning with trees and rules: supervised, semi-supervised, unsupervised

    Science.gov (United States)

    In this article, we propose several new approaches for post processing a large ensemble of conjunctive rules for supervised and semi-supervised learning problems. We show with various examples that for high dimensional regression problems the models constructed by the post processing the rules with ...

  13. 43 CFR 4.1102 - Construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-10-01

    ... 43 Public Lands: Interior 1 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Construction. 4.1102 Section 4.1102 Public Lands: Interior Office of the Secretary of the Interior DEPARTMENT HEARINGS AND APPEALS PROCEDURES... Construction. These rules shall be construed to achieve the just, timely, and inexpensive determination of all...

  14. Reservoir Operating Rule Optimization for California's Sacramento Valley

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Timothy Nelson

    2016-03-01

    Full Text Available doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.15447/sfews.2016v14iss1art6Reservoir operating rules for water resource systems are typically developed by combining intuition, professional discussion, and simulation modeling. This paper describes a joint optimization–simulation approach to develop preliminary economically-based operating rules for major reservoirs in California’s Sacramento Valley, based on optimized results from CALVIN, a hydro-economic optimization model. We infer strategic operating rules from the optimization model results, including storage allocation rules to balance storage among multiple reservoirs, and reservoir release rules to determine monthly release for individual reservoirs. Results show the potential utility of considering previous year type on water availability and various system and sub-system storage conditions, in addition to normal consideration of local reservoir storage, season, and current inflows. We create a simple simulation to further refine and test the derived operating rules. Optimization model results show particular insights for balancing the allocation of water storage among Shasta, Trinity, and Oroville reservoirs over drawdown and refill seasons, as well as some insights for release rules at major reservoirs in the Sacramento Valley. We also discuss the applicability and limitations of developing reservoir operation rules from optimization model results.

  15. 33 CFR 86.23 - Construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-01

    ... 33 Navigation and Navigable Waters 1 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Construction. 86.23 Section 86.23 Navigation and Navigable Waters COAST GUARD, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY INLAND NAVIGATION RULES ANNEX III: TECHNICAL DETAILS OF SOUND SIGNAL APPLIANCES Bell or Gong § 86.23 Construction. Bells and gongs...

  16. Light-cone sum rules: A SCET-based formulation

    CERN Document Server

    De Fazio, F; Hurth, Tobias; Feldmann, Th.

    2007-01-01

    We describe the construction of light-cone sum rules (LCSRs) for exclusive $B$-meson decays into light energetic hadrons from correlation functions within soft-collinear effective theory (SCET). As an example, we consider the SCET sum rule for the $B \\to \\pi$ transition form factor at large recoil, including radiative corrections from hard-collinear loop diagrams at first order in the strong coupling constant.

  17. Transforming process models : executable rewrite rules versus a formalized Java program

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Van Gorp, P.M.E.; Eshuis, H.; Petriu, D.C.; Rouquette, N.

    2010-01-01

    In the business process management community, transformations for process models are usually programmed using imperative languages (such as Java). The underlying mapping rules tend to be documented using informal visual rules whereas they tend to be formalized using mathematical set constructs. In

  18. Transforming process models : executable rewrite rules versus a formalized Java program

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Van Gorp, P.M.E.; Eshuis, H.

    2010-01-01

    In the business process management community, transformations for process models are usually programmed using imperative languages. The underlying mapping rules tend to be documented using informal visual rules whereas they tend to be formalized using mathematical set constructs. In the Graph and

  19. Construction safety program for the National Ignition Facility

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Cerruti, S.J.

    1997-06-26

    The Construction Safety Program (CSP) for NIF sets forth the responsibilities, guidelines, rules, policies and regulations for all workers involved in the construction, special equipment installation, acceptance testing, and initial activation and operation of NIF at LLNL during the construction period of NIF.

  20. Construction safety program for the National Ignition Facility

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Cerruti, S.J.

    1997-01-01

    The Construction Safety Program (CSP) for NIF sets forth the responsibilities, guidelines, rules, policies and regulations for all workers involved in the construction, special equipment installation, acceptance testing, and initial activation and operation of NIF at LLNL during the construction period of NIF

  1. Spectral representation and QCD sum rules in hot nuclear matter

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Mallik, S.; Sarkar, Sourav

    2009-01-01

    We construct the spectral representation of spinsor two-point functions in medium, that is, at finite temperature and chemical potential. We first deal with the free spinor two-point function. Then we construct the same for interacting fields leading to the Kaellen-Lehmann representation. It is emphasised that although these two point functions have the structure of 2 x 2 matrices in the real time formulation of field theory, any one component actually suffices to describe the dynamics of the system. Our construction is then applied to write the QCD sum rules for two-point function of nucleon currents in medium. We discuss a subtracted version to increase the sensitivity of such a sum rule and point out how it differs from a conventional one. (author)

  2. Integrals of Lagrange functions and sum rules

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Baye, Daniel, E-mail: dbaye@ulb.ac.be [Physique Quantique, CP 165/82, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, B 1050 Bruxelles (Belgium); Physique Nucleaire Theorique et Physique Mathematique, CP 229, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, B 1050 Bruxelles (Belgium)

    2011-09-30

    Exact values are derived for some matrix elements of Lagrange functions, i.e. orthonormal cardinal functions, constructed from orthogonal polynomials. They are obtained with exact Gauss quadratures supplemented by corrections. In the particular case of Lagrange-Laguerre and shifted Lagrange-Jacobi functions, sum rules provide exact values for matrix elements of 1/x and 1/x{sup 2} as well as for the kinetic energy. From these expressions, new sum rules involving Laguerre and shifted Jacobi zeros and weights are derived. (paper)

  3. Calculus Rules for V-Proximal Subdifferentials in Smooth Banach Spaces

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Messaoud Bounkhel

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available In 2010, Bounkhel et al. introduced new proximal concepts (analytic proximal subdifferential, geometric proximal subdifferential, and proximal normal cone in reflexive smooth Banach spaces. They proved, in p-uniformly convex and q-uniformly smooth Banach spaces, the density theorem for the new concepts of proximal subdifferential and various important properties for both proximal subdifferential concepts and the proximal normal cone concept. In this paper, we establish calculus rules (fuzzy sum rule and chain rule for both proximal subdifferentials and we prove the Bishop-Phelps theorem for the proximal normal cone. The limiting concept for both proximal subdifferentials and for the proximal normal cone is defined and studied. We prove that both limiting constructions coincide with the Mordukhovich constructions under some assumptions on the space. Applications to nonconvex minimisation problems and nonconvex variational inequalities are established.

  4. Fuzzy Rule Suram for Wood Drying

    Science.gov (United States)

    Situmorang, Zakarias

    2017-12-01

    Implemented of fuzzy rule must used a look-up table as defuzzification analysis. Look-up table is the actuator plant to doing the value of fuzzification. Rule suram based of fuzzy logic with variables of weather is temperature ambient and humidity ambient, it implemented for wood drying process. The membership function of variable of state represented in error value and change error with typical map of triangle and map of trapezium. Result of analysis to reach 4 fuzzy rule in 81 conditions to control the output system can be constructed in a number of way of weather and conditions of air. It used to minimum of the consumption of electric energy by heater. One cycle of schedule drying is a serial of condition of chamber to process as use as a wood species.

  5. Construction technique for a chemical plant (II)

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1978-08-01

    This book deals with design and construction for a chemical plant which includes design and building of steel structure for a chemical plant with types, basic regulation, plan, shop fabrication for steel structure and field construction. It explains design and construction of making building for a chemical construction with measurement, types of building and basic rule of the building, design of the building, constructing plumbing for a chemical plant with plan, management of material, checking for construction, construction of electrical installation on plan, know-how to construction and maintenance.

  6. Cellular automata with voting rule

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Makowiec, D.

    1996-01-01

    The chosen local interaction - the voting (majority) rule applied to the square lattice is known to cause the non ergodic cellular automata behaviour. Presented computer simulation results verify two cases of non ergodicity. The first one is implicated by the noise introduced to the local interactions and the second one follows properties of the initial lattice configuration selected at random. For the simplified voting rule - non symmetric voting, the critical behaviour has been explained rigorously. (author)

  7. Choice Rules and Accumulator Networks

    Science.gov (United States)

    2015-01-01

    This article presents a preference accumulation model that can be used to implement a number of different multi-attribute heuristic choice rules, including the lexicographic rule, the majority of confirming dimensions (tallying) rule and the equal weights rule. The proposed model differs from existing accumulators in terms of attribute representation: Leakage and competition, typically applied only to preference accumulation, are also assumed to be involved in processing attribute values. This allows the model to perform a range of sophisticated attribute-wise comparisons, including comparisons that compute relative rank. The ability of a preference accumulation model composed of leaky competitive networks to mimic symbolic models of heuristic choice suggests that these 2 approaches are not incompatible, and that a unitary cognitive model of preferential choice, based on insights from both these approaches, may be feasible. PMID:28670592

  8. Impact of the community of life, financial standing and work ability of the inheritor to the construction of the rules of intestate succession

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Vidić-Trninić Jelena Đ.

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available This paper analyzes the impact of the fact of community of life, financial standing and work ability of the inheritor to the construction of the rules of intestate succession in the contemporary European legal systems. In a certain number of the European countries, these facts have an independent impact to the establishment of the intestate succession rules, while their legal succession significance becomes important even in the countries where it does not represent an independent basis for the acquisition of the capacity of a legal inheritor. A special focus has been given to consideration of the concrete legal solutions and corresponding legal succession ramifications in every legislation where some of the stated facts or even several of such facts, have a corresponding impact to the intestate succession. Bearing in mind that all of these facts have an impact on the legal succession in domestic legislation as well, author points, among other things, on the advantages of this legislation.

  9. Concept for the generation of the model designated for the simulation of interaction between enterprises comprising one major construction company

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Dubovkina Alla Viktorovna

    2014-12-01

    Full Text Available The author offers an original concept designated for the generation of the model designated to simulate interaction between the enterprises comprising one major construction company within the framework of the production and logistics chain, comprising production facilities, transport enterprises, construction and assembly companies. The author has identified the factors that may produce an adverse effect on construction operations or cause untimely commissioning of a construction facility. The author employed methods of mathematics to describe the operations performed by each constituent enterprise. A graphic model describing each operation was compiled through the integration of mathematical functions. The model binds specific operations, performed by constituent companies, to deadlines, drives attention to interaction bottlenecks, and makes adjustments to assure reliable attainment of the main goal, that is, the timely commissioning of a construction facility.

  10. Modular invariants and fusion rule automorphisms from Galois theory

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Fuchs, J.; Gato-Rivera, B.; Schellekens, B.; Nationaal Inst. voor Kernfysica en Hoge-Energiefysica; Schweigert, C.; Nationaal Inst. voor Kernfysica en Hoge-Energiefysica

    1994-05-01

    We show that Galois theory of cyclotomic number fields provides a powerful tool to construct systematically integer-valued matrices commuting with the modular matrix S, as well as automorphisms of the fusion rules. Both of these prescriptions allow the construction of modular invariants and offer new insight in the structure of known exceptional invariants. (orig.)

  11. Genetic Programming for the Generation of Crisp and Fuzzy Rule Bases in Classification and Diagnosis of Medical Data

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Dounias, George; Tsakonas, Athanasios; Jantzen, Jan

    2002-01-01

    This paper demonstrates two methodologies for the construction of rule-based systems in medical decision making. The first approach consists of a method combining genetic programming and heuristic hierarchical rule-base construction. The second model is composed by a strongly-typed genetic...

  12. Rule-based decision making model

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Sirola, Miki

    1998-01-01

    A rule-based decision making model is designed in G2 environment. A theoretical and methodological frame for the model is composed and motivated. The rule-based decision making model is based on object-oriented modelling, knowledge engineering and decision theory. The idea of safety objective tree is utilized. Advanced rule-based methodologies are applied. A general decision making model 'decision element' is constructed. The strategy planning of the decision element is based on e.g. value theory and utility theory. A hypothetical process model is built to give input data for the decision element. The basic principle of the object model in decision making is division in tasks. Probability models are used in characterizing component availabilities. Bayes' theorem is used to recalculate the probability figures when new information is got. The model includes simple learning features to save the solution path. A decision analytic interpretation is given to the decision making process. (author)

  13. Optimization of decision rule complexity for decision tables with many-valued decisions

    KAUST Repository

    Azad, Mohammad

    2013-10-01

    We describe new heuristics to construct decision rules for decision tables with many-valued decisions from the point of view of length and coverage which are enough good. We use statistical test to find leaders among the heuristics. After that, we compare our results with optimal result obtained by dynamic programming algorithms. The average percentage of relative difference between length (coverage) of constructed and optimal rules is at most 6.89% (15.89%, respectively) for leaders which seems to be a promising result. © 2013 IEEE.

  14. EPA, environmentalists feud over land ban waste rule

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Hanson, D.

    1990-01-01

    The publication of the Environmental Protection Agency's final, major hazardous waste regulation marks the end of a five-year effort to control land disposal of waste. This article discusses how the rule has ignited a major fight between the agency and environmental groups that fear the regulation is far too lenient to industry. The rule will affect everyone who handles chemical waste from researchers to truck drivers. Although it is the last, it is also the largest of the hazardous waste regulations, covering a vast array of substances. The rule's provisions encompass almost 350 listed wastes, multisource leachate, mixed radioactive and hazardous waste, alternative treatments for lab packs, and treatment standards for waste that exhibits one or more hazardous characteristics

  15. Design rules to prevent from elasto-plastic bucking

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Autrusson, B.; Acker, D.

    1986-10-01

    The development of fast neutron reactors requires the construction of mechanical structures which are subject to thermal transients. These structures being thin, there is a risk of important buckling. Studies developed in the general framework of dimensioning propose a simplified method. This method is based on the determination of the elastic critical load of the perfect structure and its correction by a reduction coefficient which takes into account the effect of tolerances, plasticity and a possible instable post-critical behavior. This paper presents this method and its experimental validation, as also a comparison with the rules proposed by the CODAP 80 (C4 41) for structures subject to an external pressure load. This method has been introduced in the French Rules of design and construction of fast neutron reactor mechanical components (RCC-MR) [fr

  16. HOW ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES ARE STRUCTURED: A REVIEW ON ECOLOGICAL ASSEMBLY RULES

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Gabriel Jaime Colorado Zuluaga

    Full Text Available Whether biological communities are deterministic or stochastic assemblages of species has long been a central topic of ecology. The widely demonstrated presence of structural patterns in nature may imply the existence of rules that regulate the organization of ecological communities. In this review, I present a compilation of major assembly rules that fundament, in a great proportion, the community assembly theory. Initially, I present a general overview of key concepts associated to the assembly of communities, in particular the origin of assembly rules, definition, the problem of scale and underlying mechanisms in the structure of ecological communities. Subsequently, two major approaches or paradigms (i.e. species-based and trait-based for the assembly of communities are discussed. Finally, major tested assembly rules are explored and discussed under the light of available published literature.

  17. Optimization of β-decision rules relative to number of misclassifications

    KAUST Repository

    Zielosko, Beata

    2012-01-01

    In the paper, we present an algorithm for optimization of approximate decision rules relative to the number of misclassifications. The considered algorithm is based on extensions of dynamic programming and constructs a directed acyclic graph Δ β (T). Based on this graph we can describe the whole set of so-called irredundant β-decision rules. We can optimize rules from this set according to the number of misclassifications. Results of experiments with decision tables from the UCI Machine Learning Repository are presented. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

  18. Sizing rules for the pressure design of pump casings

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Aflalo, C.; Barbarulo, R.; Courcot, M.; Marolles, M. de; Douarin, M.; Grandemange, J.M.; Martin, R.

    1987-01-01

    The paper presents the theoretical and experimental studies undertaken by AFCEN (French Society for Design and Construction Rules for nuclear island components) and SCP (French Union of Pump Manufacturers) in order to develop sizing rules for the pressure design of radially split pump casings. Shape factors used in simplified design formulas have been developed for different configurations using results of finite element analyses and experimental extensometric analyses. (orig.)

  19. Application of American and French rules for the next belgian PWR

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Roch, M.; Cavaco, A.

    1987-01-01

    The licensing practice in Belgium is evolving from the precedent compliance with the USNRC rules (as applied to the 4 last Belgian PWRs) to a more sophisticated approach applied to the next Belgian PWR (N8), which incorporates a mixed compliance with the USNRC or with French rules, depending on the equipment, the structure or the system considered. In this paper, we present the approach concerning the licensing rules applicable to N8. The following aspects are covered: rules applicable to the NSSS; rules applicable to the BOP (codes of design for systems and structures); rules applicable to the equipment (code of construction for mechanical and electrical components); impact on the lay-out of the plant. Some examples of application of this methodology are given. (author)

  20. Modelling collective foraging by means of individual behaviour rules in honey-bees

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Vries, Han de; Biesmeijer, J.C.

    1998-01-01

    An individual-oriented model is constructed which simulates the collective foraging behaviour of a colony of honey-bees, Apis mellifera. Each bee follows the same set of behavioural rules. Each rule consists of a set of conditions followed by the behavioural act to be performed if the

  1. 26 CFR 1.544-6 - Constructive ownership as actual ownership.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... father the constructive owner of such stock by a second application of the family and partnership rule. ... or of applying the family and partnership rule provided in section 544(a)(2), in order to make...), relating to stock not owned by an individual, or the family and partnership rule provided in section 544(a...

  2. 49 CFR 1150.36 - Exempt construction of connecting track.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-10-01

    ... shippers from abuse of market power; and that the construction of connecting track would be of limited... 49 Transportation 8 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Exempt construction of connecting track. 1150.36... TRANSPORTATION BOARD, DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION RULES OF PRACTICE CERTIFICATE TO CONSTRUCT, ACQUIRE, OR...

  3. Modelling collective foraging by means of individual behaviour rules in honey-bees

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    de Vries, H; Biesmeijer, JC

    1998-01-01

    An individual-oriented model is constructed which simulates the collective foraging behaviour of a colony of honey-bees, Apis mellifera. Each bee follows the same set of behavioural rules. Each rule consists of a set of conditions followed by the behavioural act to be performed if the conditions are

  4. SuperTRI: A new approach based on branch support analyses of multiple independent data sets for assessing reliability of phylogenetic inferences.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ropiquet, Anne; Li, Blaise; Hassanin, Alexandre

    2009-09-01

    Supermatrix and supertree are two methods for constructing a phylogenetic tree by using multiple data sets. However, these methods are not a panacea, as conflicting signals between data sets can lead to misinterpret the evolutionary history of taxa. In particular, the supermatrix approach is expected to be misleading if the species-tree signal is not dominant after the combination of the data sets. Moreover, most current supertree methods suffer from two limitations: (i) they ignore or misinterpret secondary (non-dominant) phylogenetic signals of the different data sets; and (ii) the logical basis of node robustness measures is unclear. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new approach, called SuperTRI, which is based on the branch support analyses of the independent data sets, and where the reliability of the nodes is assessed using three measures: the supertree Bootstrap percentage and two other values calculated from the separate analyses: the mean branch support (mean Bootstrap percentage or mean posterior probability) and the reproducibility index. The SuperTRI approach is tested on a data matrix including seven genes for 82 taxa of the family Bovidae (Mammalia, Ruminantia), and the results are compared to those found with the supermatrix approach. The phylogenetic analyses of the supermatrix and independent data sets were done using four methods of tree reconstruction: Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, and unweighted and weighted maximum parsimony. The results indicate, firstly, that the SuperTRI approach shows less sensitivity to the four phylogenetic methods, secondly, that it is more accurate to interpret the relationships among taxa, and thirdly, that interesting conclusions on introgression and radiation can be drawn from the comparisons between SuperTRI and supermatrix analyses.

  5. 26 CFR 148.1-5 - Constructive sale price.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... 26 Internal Revenue 17 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Constructive sale price. 148.1-5 Section 148.1... § 148.1-5 Constructive sale price. (a) Purpose of this section. The purpose of this section is to set forth temporary rules to be used in determining a constructive sale price under section 4216(b) of the...

  6. Fusion reactor design studies: standard unit costs and cost scaling rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Schulte, S.C.; Bickford, W.E.; Willingham, C.E.; Ghose, S.K.; Walker, M.G.

    1979-09-01

    This report establishes standard unit costs and scaling rules for estimating costs of material, equipment, land, and labor components used in magnetic confinement fusion reactor plant construction and operation. Use of the standard unit costs and scaling rules will add uniformity to cost estimates, and thus allow valid comparison of the economic characteristics of various reactor concepts

  7. A rule-based automatic sleep staging method.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liang, Sheng-Fu; Kuo, Chin-En; Hu, Yu-Han; Cheng, Yu-Shian

    2012-03-30

    In this paper, a rule-based automatic sleep staging method was proposed. Twelve features including temporal and spectrum analyses of the EEG, EOG, and EMG signals were utilized. Normalization was applied to each feature to eliminating individual differences. A hierarchical decision tree with fourteen rules was constructed for sleep stage classification. Finally, a smoothing process considering the temporal contextual information was applied for the continuity. The overall agreement and kappa coefficient of the proposed method applied to the all night polysomnography (PSG) of seventeen healthy subjects compared with the manual scorings by R&K rules can reach 86.68% and 0.79, respectively. This method can integrate with portable PSG system for sleep evaluation at-home in the near future. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  8. Optical Generation of Fuzzy-Based Rules

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gur, Eran; Mendlovic, David; Zalevsky, Zeev

    2002-08-01

    In the last third of the 20th century, fuzzy logic has risen from a mathematical concept to an applicable approach in soft computing. Today, fuzzy logic is used in control systems for various applications, such as washing machines, train-brake systems, automobile automatic gear, and so forth. The approach of optical implementation of fuzzy inferencing was given by the authors in previous papers, giving an extra emphasis to applications with two dominant inputs. In this paper the authors introduce a real-time optical rule generator for the dual-input fuzzy-inference engine. The paper briefly goes over the dual-input optical implementation of fuzzy-logic inferencing. Then, the concept of constructing a set of rules from given data is discussed. Next, the authors show ways to implement this procedure optically. The discussion is accompanied by an example that illustrates the transformation from raw data into fuzzy set rules.

  9. 75 FR 79339 - Notice of Scope Rulings

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-12-20

    ... Trade Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW., Washington... calendar quarter. Scope Rulings Completed Between April 1, 2010, and June 30, 2010: People's Republic of China A-570-502: Iron Construction Castings From the People's Republic of China Requestor: National...

  10. Rules of Thumb for Up-and-Down Economics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kennedy, Peter

    1994-01-01

    Reports that economist Paul Krugman identifies three types of economic writing. Asserts that the major principles of macroeconomics can be synthesized into "Five Rules of Thumb" which can help to interpret economic news. Presents and discusses these five rules and includes a survey summary of journalists and economists on this issue.…

  11. 7 CFR 987.104 - Major marketing promotion.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    ... 7 Agriculture 8 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Major marketing promotion. 987.104 Section 987.104... IN RIVERSIDE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA Administrative Rules Definitions § 987.104 Major marketing promotion. A major marketing promotion program is one requiring the expenditure of more than $500 of Committee...

  12. Evolving fuzzy rules for relaxed-criteria negotiation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sim, Kwang Mong

    2008-12-01

    In the literature on automated negotiation, very few negotiation agents are designed with the flexibility to slightly relax their negotiation criteria to reach a consensus more rapidly and with more certainty. Furthermore, these relaxed-criteria negotiation agents were not equipped with the ability to enhance their performance by learning and evolving their relaxed-criteria negotiation rules. The impetus of this work is designing market-driven negotiation agents (MDAs) that not only have the flexibility of relaxing bargaining criteria using fuzzy rules, but can also evolve their structures by learning new relaxed-criteria fuzzy rules to improve their negotiation outcomes as they participate in negotiations in more e-markets. To this end, an evolutionary algorithm for adapting and evolving relaxed-criteria fuzzy rules was developed. Implementing the idea in a testbed, two kinds of experiments for evaluating and comparing EvEMDAs (MDAs with relaxed-criteria rules that are evolved using the evolutionary algorithm) and EMDAs (MDAs with relaxed-criteria rules that are manually constructed) were carried out through stochastic simulations. Empirical results show that: 1) EvEMDAs generally outperformed EMDAs in different types of e-markets and 2) the negotiation outcomes of EvEMDAs generally improved as they negotiated in more e-markets.

  13. 75 FR 32313 - Specifications and Drawings for Construction Direct Buried Plant

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-06-08

    ... construction units for Fiber-to-the-Home, remove redundant or outdated requirements, and simplify the.... Because of Fiber-to-the-Home construction and advancements made in construction installation methods and... Construction Direct Buried Plant AGENCY: Rural Utilities Service, USDA. ACTION: Proposed Rule. SUMMARY: The...

  14. 22 CFR 228.39 - Special source rules for construction and engineering services.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... engineering services. 228.39 Section 228.39 Foreign Relations AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT RULES ON SOURCE, ORIGIN AND NATIONALITY FOR COMMODITIES AND SERVICES FINANCED BY USAID Conditions Governing the... engineering services. Advanced developing countries, eligible under Geographic Code 941, which have attained a...

  15. Optimal Operational Monetary Policy Rules in an Endogenous Growth Model: a calibrated analysis

    OpenAIRE

    Arato, Hiroki

    2009-01-01

    This paper constructs an endogenous growth New Keynesian model and considers growth and welfare effect of Taylor-type (operational) monetary policy rules. The Ramsey equilibrium and optimal operational monetary policy rule is also computed. In the calibrated model, the Ramseyoptimal volatility of inflation rate is smaller than that in standard exogenous growth New Keynesian model with physical capital accumulation. Optimal operational monetary policy rule makes nominal interest rate respond s...

  16. M&A New Rules May Trigger Merger Wave

    Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

    HUBERT TSE

    2006-01-01

    @@ The Chinese government issued a series of new M&A and takeover rules in July and August 2006 to further regulate and facilitate foreign investors' acquisition activities in China.The new rules are aimed at offering more flexibility, reducing costs and increasing takeover efficiencies for foreign-funded M&As in the world's fastest-growing major economy.

  17. Concurrent approach for evolving compact decision rule sets

    Science.gov (United States)

    Marmelstein, Robert E.; Hammack, Lonnie P.; Lamont, Gary B.

    1999-02-01

    The induction of decision rules from data is important to many disciplines, including artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. To improve the state of the art in this area, we introduced the genetic rule and classifier construction environment (GRaCCE). It was previously shown that GRaCCE consistently evolved decision rule sets from data, which were significantly more compact than those produced by other methods (such as decision tree algorithms). The primary disadvantage of GRaCCe, however, is its relatively poor run-time execution performance. In this paper, a concurrent version of the GRaCCE architecture is introduced, which improves the efficiency of the original algorithm. A prototype of the algorithm is tested on an in- house parallel processor configuration and the results are discussed.

  18. 47 CFR 76.51 - Major television markets.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-10-01

    ... 47 Telecommunication 4 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Major television markets. 76.51 Section 76.51... CABLE TELEVISION SERVICE Carriage of Television Broadcast Signals § 76.51 Major television markets. For purposes of the cable television rules, the following is a list of the major television markets and their...

  19. Dynamic programming approach for partial decision rule optimization

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha

    2012-10-04

    This paper is devoted to the study of an extension of dynamic programming approach which allows optimization of partial decision rules relative to the length or coverage. We introduce an uncertainty measure J(T) which is the difference between number of rows in a decision table T and number of rows with the most common decision for T. For a nonnegative real number γ, we consider γ-decision rules (partial decision rules) that localize rows in subtables of T with uncertainty at most γ. Presented algorithm constructs a directed acyclic graph Δ γ(T) which nodes are subtables of the decision table T given by systems of equations of the kind "attribute = value". This algorithm finishes the partitioning of a subtable when its uncertainty is at most γ. The graph Δ γ(T) allows us to describe the whole set of so-called irredundant γ-decision rules. We can optimize such set of rules according to length or coverage. This paper contains also results of experiments with decision tables from UCI Machine Learning Repository.

  20. Dynamic programming approach for partial decision rule optimization

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha M.; Chikalov, Igor; Moshkov, Mikhail; Zielosko, Beata

    2012-01-01

    This paper is devoted to the study of an extension of dynamic programming approach which allows optimization of partial decision rules relative to the length or coverage. We introduce an uncertainty measure J(T) which is the difference between number of rows in a decision table T and number of rows with the most common decision for T. For a nonnegative real number γ, we consider γ-decision rules (partial decision rules) that localize rows in subtables of T with uncertainty at most γ. Presented algorithm constructs a directed acyclic graph Δ γ(T) which nodes are subtables of the decision table T given by systems of equations of the kind "attribute = value". This algorithm finishes the partitioning of a subtable when its uncertainty is at most γ. The graph Δ γ(T) allows us to describe the whole set of so-called irredundant γ-decision rules. We can optimize such set of rules according to length or coverage. This paper contains also results of experiments with decision tables from UCI Machine Learning Repository.

  1. First Workshop on Design and Construction of Deep Repositories - Theme: Excavation through water-conducting major fracture zones

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Baeckblom, G.; Svemar, C.

    1994-01-01

    Final disposal of high-level nuclear waste has not yet been carried out in any country today. The concepts under development are all based on geological repositories, i.e., disposal at a sufficient depth below the surface to provide stable mechanical, hydrological and chemical conditions during the period the waste needs to be isolated from man. In the cases where crystalline bedrock is considered the proposed repository depths vary between 300-1000 m. The construction, operation and sealing of a deep geological repository must meet various criteria that in many respects are more detailed and more demanding than usual in underground construction projects today. The work shall be done so that occupational safety is ensured. The work also shall conform to whatever restrictions are necessary for ensuring pre-closure operational safety and post-closure long-term safety. March 1993 SKB arranged a two-day international workshop to discuss design and construction of repositories. Close to 40 participants from eight countries shared experiences regarding passage of major water-conducting fracture zones and other matters. This report summarizes the contributions to the workshop

  2. Targeted training of the decision rule benefits rule-guided behavior in Parkinson's disease.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ell, Shawn W

    2013-12-01

    The impact of Parkinson's disease (PD) on rule-guided behavior has received considerable attention in cognitive neuroscience. The majority of research has used PD as a model of dysfunction in frontostriatal networks, but very few attempts have been made to investigate the possibility of adapting common experimental techniques in an effort to identify the conditions that are most likely to facilitate successful performance. The present study investigated a targeted training paradigm designed to facilitate rule learning and application using rule-based categorization as a model task. Participants received targeted training in which there was no selective-attention demand (i.e., stimuli varied along a single, relevant dimension) or nontargeted training in which there was selective-attention demand (i.e., stimuli varied along a relevant dimension as well as an irrelevant dimension). Following training, all participants were tested on a rule-based task with selective-attention demand. During the test phase, PD patients who received targeted training performed similarly to control participants and outperformed patients who did not receive targeted training. As a preliminary test of the generalizability of the benefit of targeted training, a subset of the PD patients were tested on the Wisconsin card sorting task (WCST). PD patients who received targeted training outperformed PD patients who did not receive targeted training on several WCST performance measures. These data further characterize the contribution of frontostriatal circuitry to rule-guided behavior. Importantly, these data also suggest that PD patient impairment, on selective-attention-demanding tasks of rule-guided behavior, is not inevitable and highlight the potential benefit of targeted training.

  3. Provability Calculus of Constructions

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Nyblad, Kasten

    This thesis presents a type system, Provability Calculus of Constructions (PCoC) that can be used for the formalization of logic. In a theorem prover based on the system, the user can extend the prover with new inference rules in a logically consistent manner. This is done by representing PCo...

  4. Work Values and College Major Choice

    Science.gov (United States)

    Balsamo, Michela; Lauriola, Marco; Saggino, Aristide

    2013-01-01

    Our study sought to clarify the nature of the known individual differences in work values associated with academic college major choice, specifically the question whether these precede or follow the choice of an academic major. To rule out environmental influences during academic study, group differences in five value orientations were evaluated…

  5. Evolving rule-based systems in two medical domains using genetic programming.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tsakonas, Athanasios; Dounias, Georgios; Jantzen, Jan; Axer, Hubertus; Bjerregaard, Beth; von Keyserlingk, Diedrich Graf

    2004-11-01

    To demonstrate and compare the application of different genetic programming (GP) based intelligent methodologies for the construction of rule-based systems in two medical domains: the diagnosis of aphasia's subtypes and the classification of pap-smear examinations. Past data representing (a) successful diagnosis of aphasia's subtypes from collaborating medical experts through a free interview per patient, and (b) correctly classified smears (images of cells) by cyto-technologists, previously stained using the Papanicolaou method. Initially a hybrid approach is proposed, which combines standard genetic programming and heuristic hierarchical crisp rule-base construction. Then, genetic programming for the production of crisp rule based systems is attempted. Finally, another hybrid intelligent model is composed by a grammar driven genetic programming system for the generation of fuzzy rule-based systems. Results denote the effectiveness of the proposed systems, while they are also compared for their efficiency, accuracy and comprehensibility, to those of an inductive machine learning approach as well as to those of a standard genetic programming symbolic expression approach. The proposed GP-based intelligent methodologies are able to produce accurate and comprehensible results for medical experts performing competitive to other intelligent approaches. The aim of the authors was the production of accurate but also sensible decision rules that could potentially help medical doctors to extract conclusions, even at the expense of a higher classification score achievement.

  6. ANALISA KEKUATAN KONSTRUKSI BRACKET TOWING HOOK PADA TB. BONTANG DENGAN METODE ELEMEN HINGGA DAN RULES BKI

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Imam Pujo Mulyatno

    2013-01-01

    Full Text Available Bracket towing hook construction planning is to make a construction that has the stress level of the allowable limit and can be accepted by the construction. Requirements for towing hook are structural strength if the stress levels that occur below the elastic region. By calculating the value of the maximum load, maximum stress, von mises stress and deflection (displasment that occur in the construction of bracket towing hook, so that known security level of construction that has been designed. Research on construction of the strength bracket towing hook need to be considered and carried out, where the stress caused by load about them should not exceed the maximum limit σyield materials and σallow based on the rules from the class. The reference to rules used in this research is based on the rules of Bureau Classification Indonesia. Analysis of the strength bracket towing hook construction is done by using finite element methode. The analysis used is a static load analysis to determine the characteristics and location of greatest stress on the construction bracket towing hook based on three variations of loading. Analysis results obtained using finite element methode based program of greatest stress maximum occurs in the condition of the bracket towing hook  with maximum horse power load that is equal to 44,2 N/mm2 where the most critical area occurs at node 457 which is located at frame number 23 lengthwise section and stiffener number 7 cross section. This stress is still in a safe condition because after compared with material σyield of 400 N/mm2 and σallow based BKI rules of 178,12 N/mm2 produce safety factor value of 9,05 and 4,03

  7. Design and Analysis of Decision Rules via Dynamic Programming

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha M.

    2017-04-24

    The areas of machine learning, data mining, and knowledge representation have many different formats used to represent information. Decision rules, amongst these formats, are the most expressive and easily-understood by humans. In this thesis, we use dynamic programming to design decision rules and analyze them. The use of dynamic programming allows us to work with decision rules in ways that were previously only possible for brute force methods. Our algorithms allow us to describe the set of all rules for a given decision table. Further, we can perform multi-stage optimization by repeatedly reducing this set to only contain rules that are optimal with respect to selected criteria. One way that we apply this study is to generate small systems with short rules by simulating a greedy algorithm for the set cover problem. We also compare maximum path lengths (depth) of deterministic and non-deterministic decision trees (a non-deterministic decision tree is effectively a complete system of decision rules) with regards to Boolean functions. Another area of advancement is the presentation of algorithms for constructing Pareto optimal points for rules and rule systems. This allows us to study the existence of “totally optimal” decision rules (rules that are simultaneously optimal with regards to multiple criteria). We also utilize Pareto optimal points to compare and rate greedy heuristics with regards to two criteria at once. Another application of Pareto optimal points is the study of trade-offs between cost and uncertainty which allows us to find reasonable systems of decision rules that strike a balance between length and accuracy.

  8. Current account dynamics with rule of thumb consumers

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Rodrigo M. Pereira

    2011-06-01

    Full Text Available In this paper the idea of rule of thumb consumption, in which some households do not behave according to the Permanent Income Hypothesis, is applied to a small open economy framework. A model of current account with rule of thumb individuals and habit formation is presented and estimated for five different countries. Two parameters of the model are of particular interest: the share of domestic income that accrues to rule of thumb individuals and the coefficient of habit formation. Using current account data, the results obtained here support the view that rule of thumb behavior plays a major role in the economy. Moreover, the estimated habit formation coefficients are mostly small and nonsignificant.

  9. On the consistency of Koomen's fair abstraction rule

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Bergstra, J.A.; Baeten, J.C.M.; Klop, J.W.

    1987-01-01

    We construct a graph model for ACP,, the algebra of communicating processes w%h silent steps, in which Koomen’s Fair Abstraction Rule (KFAR) holds, and also versions of the Approximation Induction Principle (AIP) and the Recursive Definition & Specification Principles (RDP&RSP). We use this model

  10. Debate as Encapsulated Conflict: Ruled Controversy as an Approach to Learning Conflict Management Skills.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lee, David G.; Hensley, Carl Wayne

    Debate can provide a format for the development of communication skills to aid students in managing conflicts, because an understanding of rule-governed communication in conflict situations is invaluable in constructive conflict management. Since in debate procedural rules restrict discussion primarily to substantive and procedural topics, debate…

  11. Associations between general parenting, restrictive snacking rules, and adolescent's snack intake. The roles of fathers and mothers and interparental congruence.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gevers, Dorus W M; van Assema, Patricia; Sleddens, Ester F C; de Vries, Nanne K; Kremers, Stef P J

    2015-04-01

    Little research has been done on the role of fathers and parenting congruence between mothers and fathers. This study aimed to clarify the roles of general parenting and restrictive snacking rules set by fathers and mothers, and to explore parenting congruence in explaining adolescents' snack intake. Adolescents aged 11 to 15 completed a questionnaire assessing their perception of general parenting constructs (i.e. nurturance, structure, behavioral control, coercive control, and overprotection), restrictive snacking rules set by their fathers and mothers, and their own energy-dense snack intakes between meals. Scores for mothers were significantly higher on all constructs than for fathers, except for coercive control. Generally, higher scores on general parenting constructs were associated with higher scores on restrictive snacking rules (most of the associations being significant). Most general parenting constructs were unrelated to the respondents' number of snacks consumed. The use of restrictive snacking rules by both fathers and mothers was significantly and negatively related to respondents' snack intake. Moderation analyses indicated that high levels of incongruence between parents attenuated the favorable impact of fathers' rules and nurturance on their children's snacking, but interactions of congruence with three other paternal scales and all maternal scales were absent. Our findings indicate that both paternal and maternal general parenting and restrictive snacking rules play important roles in adolescents' snacking, and that high parental incongruence regarding restrictive snacking rules and nurturance could be undesirable. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  12. Design and Construction Rules for Mechanical components of FBR nuclear islands: RCC-MR. Tome 1, Volume H: Supports

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1985-06-01

    The present book is the fifth one of a whole set of 12 which constitute the present edition of the RCC-MR. The volume H applies to supports of equipments when these equipments are concerned by the RCC-MR rules in application of the chapter RA 4000 of the Tome 1, Vol A. One defines the field of application of this volume and the classification rules of supports in two levels. One defines the different types of supports and fasteners, as also the classification of the support elements in primary or resistance (or structure) elements and secondary (stability) elements. One defines the documents to be established for the components and their constitutive elements, the modalities of identification of pieces and welded joints, the rules to choose the materials of the support elements, the rules to follow for the support conception, the rules to follow for fabrication and tests, as also other rules than those given in the chapters RH 2000 to RH 4000, to homologate a standard support or a component of a standard support [fr

  13. Efficient FPT Algorithms for (Strict) Compatibility of Unrooted Phylogenetic Trees.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Baste, Julien; Paul, Christophe; Sau, Ignasi; Scornavacca, Celine

    2017-04-01

    In phylogenetics, a central problem is to infer the evolutionary relationships between a set of species X; these relationships are often depicted via a phylogenetic tree-a tree having its leaves labeled bijectively by elements of X and without degree-2 nodes-called the "species tree." One common approach for reconstructing a species tree consists in first constructing several phylogenetic trees from primary data (e.g., DNA sequences originating from some species in X), and then constructing a single phylogenetic tree maximizing the "concordance" with the input trees. The obtained tree is our estimation of the species tree and, when the input trees are defined on overlapping-but not identical-sets of labels, is called "supertree." In this paper, we focus on two problems that are central when combining phylogenetic trees into a supertree: the compatibility and the strict compatibility problems for unrooted phylogenetic trees. These problems are strongly related, respectively, to the notions of "containing as a minor" and "containing as a topological minor" in the graph community. Both problems are known to be fixed parameter tractable in the number of input trees k, by using their expressibility in monadic second-order logic and a reduction to graphs of bounded treewidth. Motivated by the fact that the dependency on k of these algorithms is prohibitively large, we give the first explicit dynamic programming algorithms for solving these problems, both running in time [Formula: see text], where n is the total size of the input.

  14. Supporting the Constructive Use of Existing Hydrological Models in Participatory Settings: a Set of "Rules of the Game"

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Pieter W. G. Bots

    2011-06-01

    Full Text Available When hydrological models are used in support of water management decisions, stakeholders often contest these models because they perceive certain aspects to be inadequately addressed. A strongly contested model may be abandoned completely, even when stakeholders could potentially agree on the validity of part of the information it can produce. The development of a new model is costly, and the results may be contested again. We consider how existing hydrological models can be used in a policy process so as to benefit from both hydrological knowledge and the perspectives and local knowledge of stakeholders. We define a code of conduct as a set of "rules of the game" that we base on a case study of developing a water management plan for a Natura 2000 site in the Netherlands. We propose general rules for agenda management and information sharing, and more specific rules for model use and option development. These rules structure the interactions among actors, help them to explicitly acknowledge uncertainties, and prevent expertise from being neglected or overlooked. We designed the rules to favor openness, protection of core stakeholder values, the use of relevant substantive knowledge, and the momentum of the process. We expect that these rules, although developed on the basis of a water-management issue, can also be applied to support the use of existing computer models in other policy domains. As rules will shape actions only when they are constantly affirmed by actors, we expect that the rules will become less useful in an "unruly" social environment where stakeholders constantly challenge the proceedings.

  15. 75 FR 15765 - Request for Comments on Carriers' Temporary Exemption Requests From DOT's Tarmac Delay Rules for...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-03-30

    ... Comments on Carriers' Temporary Exemption Requests From DOT's Tarmac Delay Rules for JFK, EWR, LGA and PHL.... 46301. Jet Blue, American, and Delta recently requested an exemption from the tarmac delay rules for... from the tarmac delay rules because of the JFK runway construction to ensure that the very purpose of...

  16. Analysis of mesenchymal stem cell differentiation in vitro using classification association rule mining.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wang, Weiqi; Wang, Yanbo Justin; Bañares-Alcántara, René; Coenen, Frans; Cui, Zhanfeng

    2009-12-01

    In this paper, data mining is used to analyze the data on the differentiation of mammalian Mesenchymal Stem Cells (MSCs), aiming at discovering known and hidden rules governing MSC differentiation, following the establishment of a web-based public database containing experimental data on the MSC proliferation and differentiation. To this effect, a web-based public interactive database comprising the key parameters which influence the fate and destiny of mammalian MSCs has been constructed and analyzed using Classification Association Rule Mining (CARM) as a data-mining technique. The results show that the proposed approach is technically feasible and performs well with respect to the accuracy of (classification) prediction. Key rules mined from the constructed MSC database are consistent with experimental observations, indicating the validity of the method developed and the first step in the application of data mining to the study of MSCs.

  17. Forget the rules and innovate: contesting a myopic view on the impact of rules on innovation

    OpenAIRE

    olde Scholtenhuis, Léon Luc; Doree, Andries G.

    2017-01-01

    A persisting stance in practice is that obliteration of rules creates innovation paradise. Although it seems tempting, this view neglects that regulations may also constructively support innovation adoption processes. To stress these different roles that exist between regulation and innovation, scholars call for a careful empirical analysis of innovation contexts. Recent CM case studies, therefore, explore how standards emerge in new practices. Despite this, however, literature limitedly addr...

  18. Dynamic programming approach to optimization of approximate decision rules

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha

    2013-02-01

    This paper is devoted to the study of an extension of dynamic programming approach which allows sequential optimization of approximate decision rules relative to the length and coverage. We introduce an uncertainty measure R(T) which is the number of unordered pairs of rows with different decisions in the decision table T. For a nonnegative real number β, we consider β-decision rules that localize rows in subtables of T with uncertainty at most β. Our algorithm constructs a directed acyclic graph Δβ(T) which nodes are subtables of the decision table T given by systems of equations of the kind "attribute = value". This algorithm finishes the partitioning of a subtable when its uncertainty is at most β. The graph Δβ(T) allows us to describe the whole set of so-called irredundant β-decision rules. We can describe all irredundant β-decision rules with minimum length, and after that among these rules describe all rules with maximum coverage. We can also change the order of optimization. The consideration of irredundant rules only does not change the results of optimization. This paper contains also results of experiments with decision tables from UCI Machine Learning Repository. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  19. Construction completion report

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1990-01-01

    This Construction Completion Report documents the major construction projects at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) site and related information on contracts, schedules, and other areas which affected construction. This report is not intended to be an exhaustive detailed analysis of construction, but is a general overview and summary of the WIPP construction. 10 refs., 29 figs

  20. q-state Potts-glass neural network based on pseudoinverse rule

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Xiong Daxing; Zhao Hong

    2010-01-01

    We study the q-state Potts-glass neural network with the pseudoinverse (PI) rule. Its performance is investigated and compared with that of the counterpart network with the Hebbian rule instead. We find that there exists a critical point of q, i.e., q cr =14, below which the storage capacity and the retrieval quality can be greatly improved by introducing the PI rule. We show that the dynamics of the neural networks constructed with the two learning rules respectively are quite different; but however, regardless of the learning rules, in the q-state Potts-glass neural networks with q≥3 there is a common novel dynamical phase in which the spurious memories are completely suppressed. This property has never been noticed in the symmetric feedback neural networks. Free from the spurious memories implies that the multistate Potts-glass neural networks would not be trapped in the metastable states, which is a favorable property for their applications.

  1. An Experimental Research on the pCI Rule and Causal Judgment (in Chinese)

    OpenAIRE

    Shao, Z. F.; Wang, J.

    2005-01-01

    This research examined the precision of the pCI rule through three experiments. The results show that first , the tendency of the subjects’ casual judgments was basically similar to the pCI rule. But (a + d) / n predicted human’s casual judgments were even better; second, the increase of subjects’ casual judgments was milder than the pCI rule, and the subjects needed time to construct their own way of judging relationship; finally, different people had different ways of causal judgments, and ...

  2. IMPLEMENTATION OF QUALITATIVE RULES IN COMPANY`S INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Anna WOLNOWSKA

    2012-07-01

    Full Text Available In the article there were presented chosen issues of quality management. Important role of information and work processes in companies were emphasized . Based on eight rules of quality management, TQM standards and ideas of discipline pioneers like Deming, Juran, Crosby and Shewart, author has constructed way of using chosen rules and assumptions to company`s information circulation. Analogy, suggested by author, has not only emphasized importance of information as a company`s resource, but also has pointed to possibility of improving ways of managing this information.

  3. A Belief Rule-Based Expert System to Diagnose Influenza

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Hossain, Mohammad Shahadat; Khalid, Md. Saifuddin; Akter, Shamima

    2014-01-01

    , development and application of an expert system to diagnose influenza under uncertainty. The recently developed generic belief rule-based inference methodology by using the evidential reasoning (RIMER) approach is employed to develop this expert system, termed as Belief Rule Based Expert System (BRBES......). The RIMER approach can handle different types of uncertainties, both in knowledge representation, and in inference procedures. The knowledge-base of this system was constructed by using records of the real patient data along with in consultation with the Influenza specialists of Bangladesh. Practical case...

  4. Landscape scale ecological monitoring as part of an EIA of major construction activities: experience at the Turkish section of the BTC crude oil pipeline project.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sahin, Sükran; Kurum, Ekrem

    2009-09-01

    Ecological monitoring is a complementary component of the overall environmental management and monitoring program of any Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report. The monitoring method should be developed for each project phase and allow for periodic reporting and assessment of compliance with the environmental conditions and requirements of the EIA. Also, this method should incorporate a variance request program since site-specific conditions can affect construction on a daily basis and require time-critical application of alternative construction scenarios or environmental management methods integrated with alternative mitigation measures. Finally, taking full advantage of the latest information and communication technologies can enhance the quality of, and public involvement in, the environmental management program. In this paper, a landscape-scale ecological monitoring method for major construction projects is described using, as a basis, 20 months of experience on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Crude Oil Pipeline Project, covering Turkish Sections Lot B and Lot C. This analysis presents suggestions for improving ecological monitoring for major construction activities.

  5. Performance evaluation of court in construction claims settlement of litigation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hayati, Kemala; Latief, Yusuf; Rarasati, Ayomi Dita; Siddik, Arief

    2017-06-01

    Claim construction has a major influence on the implementation of projects, such as the cost and time. The success of the construction project is highly dependent on the effective resolution of claims. Although it has been recognized that litigation or court is not the best way because it may reduce or eliminate profits and damage the relationship, it is a method of resolving claims and disputes that is common in the world of construction. The method of resolving claims and disputes through litigation or court may solve the problem in an alternative method, namely the implementation of the judgment which can be enforced effectively against the losing party and the ruling which has the force of law of the country where the claims and disputes are examined. However, litigation or court may take longer time and require high cost. Thus, it is necessary to identify factors affecting the performance of the court and to develop a system capable of improving an existing system in order to run more effectively and efficiently. Resolution in the claims management of construction projects with the method of litigation is a procedure that can be used by the courts in order to shorten the time in order to reduce the cost. The scope of this research is directed to all parties involved in the construction, both the owners and the contractors as implementers and practitioners, as well as experts who are experienced in construction law.

  6. Safety early warning research for highway construction based on case-based reasoning and variable fuzzy sets.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Yan; Yi, Ting-Hua; Xu, Zhen-Jun

    2013-01-01

    As a high-risk subindustry involved in construction projects, highway construction safety has experienced major developments in the past 20 years, mainly due to the lack of safe early warnings in Chinese construction projects. By combining the current state of early warning technology with the requirements of the State Administration of Work Safety and using case-based reasoning (CBR), this paper expounds on the concept and flow of highway construction safety early warnings based on CBR. The present study provides solutions to three key issues, index selection, accident cause association analysis, and warning degree forecasting implementation, through the use of association rule mining, support vector machine classifiers, and variable fuzzy qualitative and quantitative change criterion modes, which fully cover the needs of safe early warning systems. Using a detailed description of the principles and advantages of each method and by proving the methods' effectiveness and ability to act together in safe early warning applications, effective means and intelligent technology for a safe highway construction early warning system are established.

  7. Safety Early Warning Research for Highway Construction Based on Case-Based Reasoning and Variable Fuzzy Sets

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yan Liu

    2013-01-01

    Full Text Available As a high-risk subindustry involved in construction projects, highway construction safety has experienced major developments in the past 20 years, mainly due to the lack of safe early warnings in Chinese construction projects. By combining the current state of early warning technology with the requirements of the State Administration of Work Safety and using case-based reasoning (CBR, this paper expounds on the concept and flow of highway construction safety early warnings based on CBR. The present study provides solutions to three key issues, index selection, accident cause association analysis, and warning degree forecasting implementation, through the use of association rule mining, support vector machine classifiers, and variable fuzzy qualitative and quantitative change criterion modes, which fully cover the needs of safe early warning systems. Using a detailed description of the principles and advantages of each method and by proving the methods’ effectiveness and ability to act together in safe early warning applications, effective means and intelligent technology for a safe highway construction early warning system are established.

  8. Forthcoming EU Rules on Exit Taxes for Companies

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    van de Streek, J.

    2015-01-01

    Rules on exit taxation for the EU as a whole are under construction at European Council level. Formally, the work on this piece of EU tax legislation is part of the controversial Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB). But it is also thinkable that even without a CCCTB being established in

  9. TRADING RULES ON A SMALL STOCK MARKET

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Stefán B. Gunnlaugsson

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available In this article, the results of an extensive study of the weak form efficiency of the Iceland stock market are presented. This study almost covers the market’s entire history, with the research starting at the beginning of 1993 and ending in July 2017. Four trading rules based on 70-day moving averages were constructed and compared with the passive investment strategy of buying the market index. All of these trading rules provided significantly better returns than the passive strategy, even when considering trading costs. This result indicates that the Icelandic stock market did not show weak form efficiency, and past returns predicted future returns during the period examined.

  10. 75 FR 59933 - Specifications and Drawings for Construction of Direct Buried Plant

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-09-29

    ... include new construction units for Fiber-to-the-Home, remove redundant or outdated requirements, and... in Fiber-to-the-Home construction as well as installation methods and materials. In order for... for Construction of Direct Buried Plant AGENCY: Rural Utilities Service, USDA. ACTION: Final rule...

  11. Metal/nonmetal diesel particulate matter rule

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Tomko, D.M. [United States Dept. of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration, Pittsburgh, PA (United States). Safety and Health Technology Center; Stackpole, R.P. [United States Dept. of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration, Triadelphia, WV (United States). Approval and Certification Center; Findlay, C.D. [United States Dept. of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration, Arlington, VA (United States). Metal/Nonmetal Safety and Health; Pomroy, W.H. [United States Dept. of Labor, Mine Safety and Health Administration, Duluth, MN (United States). Metal/Nonmetal North Central District

    2010-07-01

    The American Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issued a health standard in January 2001 designed to reduce exposure to diesel particulate matter (DPM) in underground metal and nonmetal mines. The rule established an interim concentration limit for DPM of 400 {mu}g/m{sup 3} of total carbon, to be followed in 2004 by a final limit of 160 {mu}g/m{sup 3} of total carbon. The 2001 rule was challenged in federal court by various mining trade associations and mining companies. The rule was subsequently amended. This paper highlighted the major provisions of the 2006 final rule and summarized MSHAs current compliance sampling procedures. The concentration limit was changed to a permissible exposure limit and the sampling surrogate was changed from total carbon to elemental carbon. The MSHA published a new rule in 2006 which based the final limit on a miner's personal exposure rather than a concentration limit. The final limit was phased in using 3 steps over 2 years. This paper also discussed engineering controls and a recent MSHA report on organic carbon, elemental carbon and total carbon emissions from a diesel engine fueled with various blends of standard diesel and biodiesel. In May 2008, about two-thirds of all underground metal/nonmetal mines achieved and maintained compliance with the rule. 20 refs.

  12. A hierarchical fuzzy rule-based approach to aphasia diagnosis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Akbarzadeh-T, Mohammad-R; Moshtagh-Khorasani, Majid

    2007-10-01

    Aphasia diagnosis is a particularly challenging medical diagnostic task due to the linguistic uncertainty and vagueness, inconsistencies in the definition of aphasic syndromes, large number of measurements with imprecision, natural diversity and subjectivity in test objects as well as in opinions of experts who diagnose the disease. To efficiently address this diagnostic process, a hierarchical fuzzy rule-based structure is proposed here that considers the effect of different features of aphasia by statistical analysis in its construction. This approach can be efficient for diagnosis of aphasia and possibly other medical diagnostic applications due to its fuzzy and hierarchical reasoning construction. Initially, the symptoms of the disease which each consists of different features are analyzed statistically. The measured statistical parameters from the training set are then used to define membership functions and the fuzzy rules. The resulting two-layered fuzzy rule-based system is then compared with a back propagating feed-forward neural network for diagnosis of four Aphasia types: Anomic, Broca, Global and Wernicke. In order to reduce the number of required inputs, the technique is applied and compared on both comprehensive and spontaneous speech tests. Statistical t-test analysis confirms that the proposed approach uses fewer Aphasia features while also presenting a significant improvement in terms of accuracy.

  13. Adding Recursive Constructs to Bialgebraic Semantics

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Klin, Bartek

    2004-01-01

    This paper aims at fitting a general class of recursive equations into the framework of ‘well-behaved' structural operational semantics, formalized as bialgebraic semantics by Turi and Plotkin. Rather than interpreting recursive constructs by means of operational rules, separate recursive equatio...

  14. The business judgement rule – approach and application

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Adina Ponta

    2015-12-01

    Full Text Available The business judgment rule represents a central doctrine of corporate governance, due to its major implications on corporate directors' liability and to its infl uence on the relationship between shareholders and the board of directors. The interpretation of the Rule as a behavioral standard or as an „abstention doctrine” can determinatively influence the liability proceedings against directors who acted in consideration of their fiduciary duties. This paper aims at analyzing the national legal provisions of the Business Judgement Rule and the compatibility of the legal provisions with the established interpretations of the Rule that can be found in the foreign literature. Absent a case law that clarifies de approaches of the Business Judgement Rule by the national courts, the research analyzes the traditional Common Law approaches of the Rule and the obstacles which hinder a faithful transfer of the Rule in Romania. The objective of these identifications is to draw de lege ferenda proposals for an efficient application of the legal provisions in the future. Considering that this Rule is the natural consequence of trust and of the powers granted to corporate directors, the conclusions of the research suggest solutions for the stabilization of the continuous tension of the supreme values of the corporate world: authority and liability.

  15. Can sexual selection drive female life histories? A comparative study on Galliform birds

    OpenAIRE

    Kolm, N.; Stein, R. W.; Mooers, A. O.; Verspoor, J. J.; Cunningham, E. J. A.

    2007-01-01

    Sexual selection has been identified as a major evolutionary force shaping male life history traits but its impact on female life history evolution is less clear. Here we examine the impact of sexual selection on three key female traits (body size, egg size and clutch size) in Galliform birds. Using comparative independent contrast analyses and directional DISCRETE analyses, based on published data and a new genera-level supertree phylogeny of Galliform birds, we investigated how sexual selec...

  16. The N-end rule pathway catalyzes a major fraction of the protein degradation in skeletal muscle

    Science.gov (United States)

    Solomon, V.; Lecker, S. H.; Goldberg, A. L.

    1998-01-01

    In skeletal muscle, overall protein degradation involves the ubiquitin-proteasome system. One property of a protein that leads to rapid ubiquitin-dependent degradation is the presence of a basic, acidic, or bulky hydrophobic residue at its N terminus. However, in normal cells, substrates for this N-end rule pathway, which involves ubiquitin carrier protein (E2) E214k and ubiquitin-protein ligase (E3) E3alpha, have remained unclear. Surprisingly, in soluble extracts of rabbit muscle, we found that competitive inhibitors of E3alpha markedly inhibited the 125I-ubiquitin conjugation and ATP-dependent degradation of endogenous proteins. These inhibitors appear to selectively inhibit E3alpha, since they blocked degradation of 125I-lysozyme, a model N-end rule substrate, but did not affect the degradation of proteins whose ubiquitination involved other E3s. The addition of several E2s or E3alpha to the muscle extracts stimulated overall proteolysis and ubiquitination, but only the stimulation by E3alpha or E214k was sensitive to these inhibitors. A similar general inhibition of ubiquitin conjugation to endogenous proteins was observed with a dominant negative inhibitor of E214k. Certain substrates of the N-end rule pathway are degraded after their tRNA-dependent arginylation. We found that adding RNase A to muscle extracts reduced the ATP-dependent proteolysis of endogenous proteins, and supplying tRNA partially restored this process. Finally, although in muscle extracts the N-end rule pathway catalyzes most ubiquitin conjugation, it makes only a minor contribution to overall protein ubiquitination in HeLa cell extracts.

  17. Comparison of some classification algorithms based on deterministic and nondeterministic decision rules

    KAUST Repository

    Delimata, Paweł

    2010-01-01

    We discuss two, in a sense extreme, kinds of nondeterministic rules in decision tables. The first kind of rules, called as inhibitory rules, are blocking only one decision value (i.e., they have all but one decisions from all possible decisions on their right hand sides). Contrary to this, any rule of the second kind, called as a bounded nondeterministic rule, can have on the right hand side only a few decisions. We show that both kinds of rules can be used for improving the quality of classification. In the paper, two lazy classification algorithms of polynomial time complexity are considered. These algorithms are based on deterministic and inhibitory decision rules, but the direct generation of rules is not required. Instead of this, for any new object the considered algorithms extract from a given decision table efficiently some information about the set of rules. Next, this information is used by a decision-making procedure. The reported results of experiments show that the algorithms based on inhibitory decision rules are often better than those based on deterministic decision rules. We also present an application of bounded nondeterministic rules in construction of rule based classifiers. We include the results of experiments showing that by combining rule based classifiers based on minimal decision rules with bounded nondeterministic rules having confidence close to 1 and sufficiently large support, it is possible to improve the classification quality. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.

  18. Rules for the analysis of mechanical structures at elevated temperatures

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Jakubowicz, H.; Petrequin, P.; Schaller, K.

    1979-01-01

    This paper describes how the experience gained by the CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission) in design, construction and operation of pool type LMFBR, as well as in research an development, is used to establish rules for the analysis of mechanical structures at elevated temperatures. These rules are written by different working groups and approved by a committee named RAMSES. The working methods of the RAMSES committee are described. Some of the approved recommendations are presented. The ongoing work and futur topics are also described

  19. 78 FR 32110 - Cranes and Derricks in Construction: Revising the Exemption for Digger Derricks

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-05-29

    ... Construction rule, OSHA's primary concern about extending the digger- derrick exemption beyond pole work was... require OSHA to submit a new proposed ICR when OSHA issued the proposed rule, and OSHA does not believe it... rule do not impose any new requirements on employers. Accordingly, State Plan States need not amend...

  20. RCC-M - Design and Conception Rules for Mechanical Components of PWR Nuclear Islands

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    2007-01-01

    The design and construction rules applicable to mechanical components of PWR Nuclear Islands (RCC-M) are a part of the collection of design and construction rules for nuclear power plants. It covers the rules applicable to the design and manufacture of pressure boundaries of mechanical equipment of pressurized water reactors (PWR). The pressure components subject to the RCC-M are specified in A 4000. They include the reactor fluid systems (primary, secondary and auxiliary systems) and other components which are not subject to pressure: vessel internals, supports for pressure components subject to the RCC-M, nuclear island storage tanks. When a pressure equipment is subject to the RCC-M, all its elements subject to pressure are also, in accordance with the provisions of A 4000, and these elements are the same class as the component. In this case all the provisions of the RCC-M are applicable: design, procurement, manufacture, inspection and pressure testing. Elements which are not subject to pressure and which are subject to the RCC-M may be covered within the Code by limited specific provisions (procurement of materials for example). The other rules applicable to this equipment must be in contractual form. The assemblies comprising pressure equipment assembled by a manufacturer to constitute an integrated and functional whole, shall be subject to the rules indicated in this Code. Main objectives of Code Requirements are to ensure the integrity and mechanical stability over the equipment design life. Function ability and operability of equipment are not directly addressed in the Code. The RCC-M contributes to ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. These requirements depend on the applicable regulatory context. The RCC-M is representative of the state of the art as concerns the design and manufacture of PWR components, ensuring an overall safety level tested through experience. The RCC-M consists of five sections, which provide rules for the design and

  1. Optimization of approximate decision rules relative to number of misclassifications

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha M.; Chikalov, Igor; Moshkov, Mikhail; Zielosko, Beata

    2012-01-01

    In the paper, we study an extension of dynamic programming approach which allows optimization of approximate decision rules relative to the number of misclassifications. We introduce an uncertainty measure J(T) which is a difference between the number of rows in a decision table T and the number of rows with the most common decision for T. For a nonnegative real number γ, we consider γ-decision rules that localize rows in subtables of T with uncertainty at most γ. The presented algorithm constructs a directed acyclic graph Δγ(T). Based on this graph we can describe the whole set of so-called irredundant γ-decision rules. We can optimize rules from this set according to the number of misclassifications. Results of experiments with decision tables from the UCI Machine Learning Repository are presented. © 2012 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved.

  2. Optimization of approximate decision rules relative to number of misclassifications

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha

    2012-12-01

    In the paper, we study an extension of dynamic programming approach which allows optimization of approximate decision rules relative to the number of misclassifications. We introduce an uncertainty measure J(T) which is a difference between the number of rows in a decision table T and the number of rows with the most common decision for T. For a nonnegative real number γ, we consider γ-decision rules that localize rows in subtables of T with uncertainty at most γ. The presented algorithm constructs a directed acyclic graph Δγ(T). Based on this graph we can describe the whole set of so-called irredundant γ-decision rules. We can optimize rules from this set according to the number of misclassifications. Results of experiments with decision tables from the UCI Machine Learning Repository are presented. © 2012 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved.

  3. Learning the Rules of the Game

    Science.gov (United States)

    Smith, Donald A.

    2018-03-01

    Games have often been used in the classroom to teach physics ideas and concepts, but there has been less published on games that can be used to teach scientific thinking. D. Maloney and M. Masters describe an activity in which students attempt to infer rules to a game from a history of moves, but the students don't actually play the game. Giving the list of moves allows the instructor to emphasize the important fact that nature usually gives us incomplete data sets, but it does make the activity less immersive. E. Kimmel suggested letting students attempt to figure out the rules to Reversi by playing it, but this game only has two players, which makes it difficult to apply in a classroom setting. Kimmel himself admits the choice of Reversi is somewhat arbitrary. There are games, however, that are designed to make the process of figuring out the rules an integral aspect of play. These games involve more people and require only a deck or two of cards. I present here an activity constructed around the card game Mao, which can be used to help students recognize aspects of scientific thinking. The game is particularly good at illustrating the importance of falsification tests (questions designed to elicit a negative answer) over verification tests (examples that confirm what is already suspected) for illuminating the underlying rules.

  4. Design of joints in steel and composite structures Eurocode 3 : design of steel structures : part 1-8 : design of joints, Eurocode 4 : design of composite steel and concrete structures : part 1-1 : general rules and rules for buildings

    CERN Document Server

    Jaspart, Jean-Pierre

    2016-01-01

    This book details the basic concepts and the design rules included in Eurocode 3 Design of steel structures Part 1-8 Design of joints. Joints in composite construction are also addressed through references to Eurocode 4 Design of composite steel and concrete structures Part 1-1 General rules and rules for buildings. Attention has to be duly paid to the joints when designing a steel or composite structure, in terms of the global safety of the construction, and also in terms of the overall cost, including fabrication, transportation and erection. Therefore, in this book, the design of the joints themselves is widely detailed, and aspects of selection of joint configuration and integration of the joints into the analysis and the design process of the whole construction are also fully covered. Connections using mechanical fasteners, welded connections, simple joints, moment-resisting joints and lattice girder joints are considered. Various joint configurations are treated, including beam-to-column, beam-to-beam, ...

  5. Olap and data mining technologies' integration in the construction of interdimensional associative rules in multidimensional data

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Микола Тихонович Фісун

    2015-06-01

    Full Text Available The features of associative rules in multidimensional data searching are presented in the article, specifically theoretical basis of association searching between different dimensions in OLAP cubes and formulas of their significance characteristics (support, confidence, lift, leverage calculation are shown. The method of interdimensional association rules generation is proposed. The implementation of this method as a component of operative and intellectual data analysis information system on database management system Caché platform is described.

  6. A Belief Rule-Based Expert System to Assess Bronchiolitis Suspicion from Signs and Symptoms Under Uncertainty

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Karim, Rezuan; Hossain, Mohammad Shahadat; Khalid, Md. Saifuddin

    2017-01-01

    developed generic belief rule-based inference methodology by using evidential reasoning (RIMER) acts as the inference engine of this BRBES while belief rule base as the knowledge representation schema. The knowledge base of the system is constructed by using real patient data and expert opinion from...

  7. Rule-Based Design of Plant Expression Vectors Using GenoCAD.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Coll, Anna; Wilson, Mandy L; Gruden, Kristina; Peccoud, Jean

    2015-01-01

    Plant synthetic biology requires software tools to assist on the design of complex multi-genic expression plasmids. Here a vector design strategy to express genes in plants is formalized and implemented as a grammar in GenoCAD, a Computer-Aided Design software for synthetic biology. It includes a library of plant biological parts organized in structural categories and a set of rules describing how to assemble these parts into large constructs. Rules developed here are organized and divided into three main subsections according to the aim of the final construct: protein localization studies, promoter analysis and protein-protein interaction experiments. The GenoCAD plant grammar guides the user through the design while allowing users to customize vectors according to their needs. Therefore the plant grammar implemented in GenoCAD will help plant biologists take advantage of methods from synthetic biology to design expression vectors supporting their research projects.

  8. TEDxCERN breaks the rules

    CERN Document Server

    Katarina Anthony

    2015-01-01

    On Friday, 9 October, TEDxCERN brought together 14 ‘rule-breakers’ to explore ideas that push beyond the boundaries of academia. They addressed a full house of 600 audience members, as well as thousands watching the event online.   TEDxCERN broke all the rules this year - starting with its choice of venue. The CMS construction hall at Point 5 was converted into a gala-centre, complete with soundstage and dance floor. It was a stunning transformation that also brought to life the hall’s to-scale photo of the CMS detector. The image served as the back-drop to a light-projection show entitled “Turbulence” by artist François Moncarey (see the video). From star-singer Imogen Heap to CERN’s own Edda Gschwendtner, the line-up of speakers was as diverse as it was educational. They discussed using tangible interfaces that allow human interaction via e-devices and the potential of 3D technology as a means of revo...

  9. 7 CFR 29.3119 - Rule 16.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    ... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Rule 16. 29.3119 Section 29.3119 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards, Inspections, Marketing... from the major color shall be classified as “mixed” and designated by the color symbol “M.” ...

  10. 7 CFR 29.1122 - Rule 16.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    ... 7 Agriculture 2 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Rule 16. 29.1122 Section 29.1122 Agriculture Regulations of the Department of Agriculture AGRICULTURAL MARKETING SERVICE (Standards, Inspections, Marketing... major color shall be classified as mixed color and designated by the color symbol “KM”. Any lot of...

  11. QUASI-ARBITRATION WITH REFERENCE TO FIDIC RULES

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Vjekoslav Puljko

    2016-07-01

    Full Text Available Quasi-arbitration is a way of settling a dispute without going to court. While it is increasingly present in modern business practices, in Croatia only a few university professors have dealt with it. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to describe the procedure and its rules and bring it closer to potential users. In the introductory part, we briefly analyse the term quasi- arbitration. As the term has a lot in common with arbitration, we also analyse its relation with arbitration. The paper focuses on recent changes to the rules on technical arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC because they can be used as a great guide for finding possible Croatian solutions. On the other hand, special attention has been paid to FIDIC rules since they exemplify the presence of quasi-arbitration clauses applied in Croatia, and the authors believe that they have become the standard for construction and engineering works financed by the cohesion and structural funds, which are of crucial importance for co-financing of infrastructure projects in Croatia. The authors’ opinion is that familiarising both experts and the general public with these rules may contribute to more transparent public procurement not only in public investment but also in private projects as they greatly facilitate business operation.

  12. Fuzzy rule-based model for hydropower reservoirs operation

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Moeini, R.; Afshar, A.; Afshar, M.H. [School of Civil Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran (Iran, Islamic Republic of)

    2011-02-15

    Real-time hydropower reservoir operation is a continuous decision-making process of determining the water level of a reservoir or the volume of water released from it. The hydropower operation is usually based on operating policies and rules defined and decided upon in strategic planning. This paper presents a fuzzy rule-based model for the operation of hydropower reservoirs. The proposed fuzzy rule-based model presents a set of suitable operating rules for release from the reservoir based on ideal or target storage levels. The model operates on an 'if-then' principle, in which the 'if' is a vector of fuzzy premises and the 'then' is a vector of fuzzy consequences. In this paper, reservoir storage, inflow, and period are used as premises and the release as the consequence. The steps involved in the development of the model include, construction of membership functions for the inflow, storage and the release, formulation of fuzzy rules, implication, aggregation and defuzzification. The required knowledge bases for the formulation of the fuzzy rules is obtained form a stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) model with a steady state policy. The proposed model is applied to the hydropower operation of ''Dez'' reservoir in Iran and the results are presented and compared with those of the SDP model. The results indicate the ability of the method to solve hydropower reservoir operation problems. (author)

  13. General rules applicable to civil works

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1981-07-01

    RFS or Regles Fondamentales de Surete (Basic Safety Rules) applicable to certain types of nuclear facilities lay down requirements with which compliance, for the type of facilities and within the scope of application covered by the RFS, is considered to be equivalent to compliance with technical French regulatory practice. The object of the RFS is to take advantage of standardization in the field of safety, while allowing for technical progress in that field. They are designed to enable the operating utility and contractors to know the rules pertaining to various subjects which are considered to be acceptable by the Service Central de Surete des Installations Nucleaires, or the SCSIN (Central Department for the Safety of Nuclear Facilities). These RFS should make safety analysis easier and lead to better understanding between experts and individuals concerned with the problems of nuclear safety. The SCSIN reserves the right to modify, when considered necessary, any RFS and specify, if need be, the terms under which a modification is deemed retroactive. For civil works, the use of the RCC. G (Design and Construction Rules for Civil works of 900 MWe PWR Nuclear Power Plants) is accepted with conditions described in this RFS

  14. Improving the Interpretability of Classification Rules Discovered by an Ant Colony Algorithm: Extended Results

    OpenAIRE

    Otero, Fernando E.B.; Freitas, Alex A.

    2016-01-01

    The vast majority of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithms for inducing classification rules use an ACO-based procedure to create a rule in an one-at-a-time fashion. An improved search strategy has been proposed in the cAnt-MinerPB algorithm, where an ACO-based procedure is used to create a complete list of rules (ordered rules)-i.e., the ACO search is guided by the quality of a list of rules, instead of an individual rule. In this paper we propose an extension of the cAnt-MinerPB algorith...

  15. Research on Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Rule Base Neural Network

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Zheng Ni

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available The relationship between fault phenomenon and fault cause is always nonlinear, which influences the accuracy of fault location. And neural network is effective in dealing with nonlinear problem. In order to improve the efficiency of uncertain fault diagnosis based on neural network, a neural network fault diagnosis method based on rule base is put forward. At first, the structure of BP neural network is built and the learning rule is given. Then, the rule base is built by fuzzy theory. An improved fuzzy neural construction model is designed, in which the calculated methods of node function and membership function are also given. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of this method.

  16. Business rules for creating process flexibility : Mapping RIF rules and BDI rules

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Gong, Y.; Overbeek, S.J.; Janssen, M.

    2011-01-01

    Business rules and software agents can be used for creating flexible business processes. The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is a new W3C recommendation standard for exchanging rules among disparate systems. Yet, the impact that the introduction of RIF has on the design of flexible business processes

  17. 78 FR 40351 - Procedural Rule To Establish Supervisory Authority Over Certain Nonbank Covered Persons Based on...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-07-03

    ... the construction of time limits, change of time limits, and effect of deadlines. Under the final rule... provides transparency and ensures consistency regarding the procedures that the Bureau intends to use in... above, the purpose of the final rule is to provide transparency and ensure consistency regarding the...

  18. 76 FR 71465 - Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Management of Manufacturing Risk in Major...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-11-18

    ... Government procurement. Mary Overstreet, Editor, Defense Acquisition Regulations System. Interim Rule Adopted... Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement: Management of Manufacturing Risk in Major Defense Acquisition...). ACTION: Final rule. SUMMARY: DoD is adopting as final, without change, an interim rule amending the...

  19. Construction Management.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Abbott, James F.

    This article provides a detailed discussion of a team approach to building that involves a construction manager, an architect, and a contractor. Bidding methods are outlined; the major components in construction management -- value engineering and fast track scheduling -- and the use of performance specifications are discussed. The construction…

  20. Rule-Based Event Processing and Reaction Rules

    Science.gov (United States)

    Paschke, Adrian; Kozlenkov, Alexander

    Reaction rules and event processing technologies play a key role in making business and IT / Internet infrastructures more agile and active. While event processing is concerned with detecting events from large event clouds or streams in almost real-time, reaction rules are concerned with the invocation of actions in response to events and actionable situations. They state the conditions under which actions must be taken. In the last decades various reaction rule and event processing approaches have been developed, which for the most part have been advanced separately. In this paper we survey reaction rule approaches and rule-based event processing systems and languages.

  1. A Simple Decision Rule for Recognition of Poly(A) Tail Signal Motifs in Human Genome

    KAUST Repository

    AbouEisha, Hassan M.

    2015-05-12

    Background is the numerous attempts were made to predict motifs in genomic sequences that correspond to poly (A) tail signals. Vast portion of this effort has been directed to a plethora of nonlinear classification methods. Even when such approaches yield good discriminant results, identifying dominant features of regulatory mechanisms nevertheless remains a challenge. In this work, we look at decision rules that may help identifying such features. Findings are we present a simple decision rule for classification of candidate poly (A) tail signal motifs in human genomic sequence obtained by evaluating features during the construction of gradient boosted trees. We found that values of a single feature based on the frequency of adenine in the genomic sequence surrounding candidate signal and the number of consecutive adenine molecules in a well-defined region immediately following the motif displays good discriminative potential in classification of poly (A) tail motifs for samples covered by the rule. Conclusions is the resulting simple rule can be used as an efficient filter in construction of more complex poly(A) tail motifs classification algorithms.

  2. Creep-fatigue rules in the RCC-MR code

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Drubay, B.

    1988-01-01

    In 1978, CEA, Electricite de France (EDF) and NOVATOME decided to draw up a complete set of design and construction rules for LMFBR components. This RCC-MR code issued in June 1985 and completed in November 1987 was chosen as a sound basis for the next European Fast Reactor (EFR). The purpose of this paper is to describe the present RCC-MR creep-fatigue design rules to be applied with elastic analysis including the modifications adopted in the first addenda. This method is based on a separate evaluation of a fatigue usage fraction V and creep rupture usage fraction W with the common linear summation rule. The fatigue usage fraction is obtained from continuous fatigue curves (without hold times) and from total strain ranges (elastic + plastic + creep). The creep rupture usage fraction W is obtained from stress to rupture curves and a stress σk evaluating the stress generated during the cycle. (author)

  3. Major factors contributing to the construction waste generation in building projects of Iraq

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Khaleel Tareq

    2018-01-01

    Full Text Available Due to the economic growth and improvement of the construction industry witnessed by most countries, there has become a crucial need for employing modern possibilities in the construction sector to build taller, longer and deeper structures. However, one aspect that heads forward with the same intensity is the generation of 100 million tons of construction waste every year. This generation has occurred due to several factors with different levels of importance. Hence, this study reveals 15 factors influencing construction waste generation and categorizes them into 3 groups, (materials management on site, (materials handling, transportation and storage and (site management and practices. A questionnaire survey of 100 respondents was distributed among different engineers to assess the construction waste factors. Results showed that damage of materials on site, double handling of materials and incompetent contractor’s technical staff were the most significant factors of each category with Relative Importance Indexes (RII of 0.866, 0.844 and 0.83, respectively. These findings will help the practitioners to reduce construction waste quantities in sites and improve waste management performance factors to control the construction waste problems.

  4. Mechanisms of rule acquisition and rule following in inductive reasoning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Crescentini, Cristiano; Seyed-Allaei, Shima; De Pisapia, Nicola; Jovicich, Jorge; Amati, Daniele; Shallice, Tim

    2011-05-25

    Despite the recent interest in the neuroanatomy of inductive reasoning processes, the regional specificity within prefrontal cortex (PFC) for the different mechanisms involved in induction tasks remains to be determined. In this study, we used fMRI to investigate the contribution of PFC regions to rule acquisition (rule search and rule discovery) and rule following. Twenty-six healthy young adult participants were presented with a series of images of cards, each consisting of a set of circles numbered in sequence with one colored blue. Participants had to predict the position of the blue circle on the next card. The rules that had to be acquired pertained to the relationship among succeeding stimuli. Responses given by subjects were categorized in a series of phases either tapping rule acquisition (responses given up to and including rule discovery) or rule following (correct responses after rule acquisition). Mid-dorsolateral PFC (mid-DLPFC) was active during rule search and remained active until successful rule acquisition. By contrast, rule following was associated with activation in temporal, motor, and medial/anterior prefrontal cortex. Moreover, frontopolar cortex (FPC) was active throughout the rule acquisition and rule following phases before a rule became familiar. We attributed activation in mid-DLPFC to hypothesis generation and in FPC to integration of multiple separate inferences. The present study provides evidence that brain activation during inductive reasoning involves a complex network of frontal processes and that different subregions respond during rule acquisition and rule following phases.

  5. Rule of Law Dynamics in an Era of International and Transnational Governance

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Zürn, M.; Nollkaemper, A.; Peerenboom, R.

    2011-01-01

    The international and transnational nature of modern governance presents major challenges for the rule of law promotion agenda, at a time when the less than stellar results of traditional state-oriented rule of law promotion have led to increased doubts about the wisdom and feasibility of the

  6. Policy or poverty trap? Attitude of goat farmers towards the conservation rule on goat rearing in Bhutan

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Kesang Wangchuk

    2016-11-01

    Full Text Available Abstract The study objectives were to gather feedback and opinions of goat farmers on the Forest and Nature Conservation Rule on goat rearing in Bhutan and identify field constraints arising from the conservation rule. Focus group and individual farmer survey methods were employed, and a semi-structured questionnaire was used to interview 180 goat farmers of six districts. All respondents were aware of the conservation rule. Majority of respondents knew goats as a threat to forest and crops. The vast majority of respondents felt that the conservation rule is not relevant in modern times, and all respondents felt the need to revise the rule. The main problem faced by farmers was difficulty in maintaining their goat numbers to four. The other problems faced were frequent conflicts with Forest personnel and restricted opportunities to earn more income. While the expected changes in the conservation rule included provisions to allow a farmer to rear more number of goats under stall-fed conditions, the additional rule suggested by farmers was allowing goats to browse freely in the forest. Majority of farmers reared goats under stall-fed conditions. The most common practice of managing goat populations was selling goats to fellow farmers. Despite the constraints, a majority of farmers expressed their willingness to continue goat rearing in the future, mainly to generate more income. The study findings suggest revision of the rule on goat rearing, with strong consideration of the needs of the modern farming system and growing economic demands. In revising the rule, the study recommends balanced representation from stakeholders and technical experts from both forest and livestock disciplines.

  7. Design and Construction Rules for Mechanical equipments of FBR nuclear islands: RCC-MR. Tome 1, Volume Z: Other technical appendixes

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1985-06-01

    This book is the 7th of a whole set of 12 which constitute the present edition of the RCC-MR. The technical appendixes of this volume deal with the following characteristics and rules: calculation of screwed assemblies, analysis taking into account creep, welded joint characteristics, elastoplastic analysis of a structure under cyclic loads, elasto-visco-plastic analysis under cyclic loads, calculation rules of revolution shells under external presure and of cylinders under axial compression, design rules of linear supports, calculation rules of convex bottoms under internal pressure [fr

  8. Histories of Cyprus : the disputed years of Ottoman Rule 1571-1878

    OpenAIRE

    Smilden, Jan-Erik

    2007-01-01

    Summary Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots have their respective versions of the history of Cyprus during the Ottoman rule from 1571 to 1878. This thesis examines how this period is presented and constructed by present Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot historians.

  9. Phonological reduplication in sign language: rules rule

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Iris eBerent

    2014-06-01

    Full Text Available Productivity—the hallmark of linguistic competence—is typically attributed to algebraic rules that support broad generalizations. Past research on spoken language has documented such generalizations in both adults and infants. But whether algebraic rules form part of the linguistic competence of signers remains unknown. To address this question, here we gauge the generalization afforded by American Sign Language (ASL. As a case study, we examine reduplication (X→XX—a rule that, inter alia, generates ASL nouns from verbs. If signers encode this rule, then they should freely extend it to novel syllables, including ones with features that are unattested in ASL. And since reduplicated disyllables are preferred in ASL, such rule should favor novel reduplicated signs. Novel reduplicated signs should thus be preferred to nonreduplicative controls (in rating, and consequently, such stimuli should also be harder to classify as nonsigns (in the lexical decision task. The results of four experiments support this prediction. These findings suggest that the phonological knowledge of signers includes powerful algebraic rules. The convergence between these conclusions and previous evidence for phonological rules in spoken language suggests that the architecture of the phonological mind is partly amodal.

  10. Y-12 Construction/Demolition Landfill VII: Permit application: Part 1 and 2

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1992-04-01

    The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has three major operating facilities on the DOE Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) at Oak Ridge, Tennessee: the Y-12 Plant, the K-25 Site, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Operations associated with the DOE energy research and production facilities at Oak Ridge result in the production of several types of waste materials. Disposal of solid waste (as defined in the Solid Waste Processing and Disposal Rules for Tennessee) in disposal facilities operated by the Y-12 Plant is the responsibility of Y-12 Waste Management Division (MWD). The WMD is proposing to develop a facility that will include two new disposal units: one for construction/demolition waste and spoil and one for industrial solid waste. This manual describes the closure and post-closure plans for the construction/demolition waste and spoil disposal unit. This disposal unit is referred to as the Y-12 Construction/Demolition Landfill VII (CD-VII) and is to be operated by the Y-12 Plant for the DOE. This will be a Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation/Division of Solid Waste Management (TDEC/DSWM) Class IV disposal unit

  11. Ising percolation in a three-state majority vote model

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Balankin, Alexander S., E-mail: abalankin@ipn.mx [Grupo Mecánica Fractal, ESIME, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, México D.F., 07738 (Mexico); Martínez-Cruz, M.A.; Gayosso Martínez, Felipe [Grupo Mecánica Fractal, ESIME, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, México D.F., 07738 (Mexico); Mena, Baltasar [Laboratorio de Ingeniería y Procesos Costeros, Instituto de Ingeniería, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Sisal, Yucatán, 97355 (Mexico); Tobon, Atalo; Patiño-Ortiz, Julián; Patiño-Ortiz, Miguel; Samayoa, Didier [Grupo Mecánica Fractal, ESIME, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, México D.F., 07738 (Mexico)

    2017-02-05

    Highlights: • Three-state non-consensus majority voter model is introduced. • Phase transition in the absorbing state non-consensus is revealed. • The percolation transition belongs to the universality class of Ising percolation. • The effect of an updating rule for a tie between voter neighbors is highlighted. - Abstract: In this Letter, we introduce a three-state majority vote model in which each voter adopts a state of a majority of its active neighbors, if exist, but the voter becomes uncommitted if its active neighbors are in a tie, or all neighbors are the uncommitted. Numerical simulations were performed on square lattices of different linear size with periodic boundary conditions. Starting from a random distribution of active voters, the model leads to a stable non-consensus state in which three opinions coexist. We found that the “magnetization” of the non-consensus state and the concentration of uncommitted voters in it are governed by an initial composition of system and are independent of the lattice size. Furthermore, we found that a configuration of the stable non-consensus state undergoes a second order percolation transition at a critical concentration of voters holding the same opinion. Numerical simulations suggest that this transition belongs to the same universality class as the Ising percolation. These findings highlight the effect of an updating rule for a tie between voter neighbors on the critical behavior of models obeying the majority vote rule whenever a strict majority exists.

  12. Ising percolation in a three-state majority vote model

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Balankin, Alexander S.; Martínez-Cruz, M.A.; Gayosso Martínez, Felipe; Mena, Baltasar; Tobon, Atalo; Patiño-Ortiz, Julián; Patiño-Ortiz, Miguel; Samayoa, Didier

    2017-01-01

    Highlights: • Three-state non-consensus majority voter model is introduced. • Phase transition in the absorbing state non-consensus is revealed. • The percolation transition belongs to the universality class of Ising percolation. • The effect of an updating rule for a tie between voter neighbors is highlighted. - Abstract: In this Letter, we introduce a three-state majority vote model in which each voter adopts a state of a majority of its active neighbors, if exist, but the voter becomes uncommitted if its active neighbors are in a tie, or all neighbors are the uncommitted. Numerical simulations were performed on square lattices of different linear size with periodic boundary conditions. Starting from a random distribution of active voters, the model leads to a stable non-consensus state in which three opinions coexist. We found that the “magnetization” of the non-consensus state and the concentration of uncommitted voters in it are governed by an initial composition of system and are independent of the lattice size. Furthermore, we found that a configuration of the stable non-consensus state undergoes a second order percolation transition at a critical concentration of voters holding the same opinion. Numerical simulations suggest that this transition belongs to the same universality class as the Ising percolation. These findings highlight the effect of an updating rule for a tie between voter neighbors on the critical behavior of models obeying the majority vote rule whenever a strict majority exists.

  13. Consideration of creep in design rules of AFCEN RCC-MRx 2012 code

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Lebarbe, T.; Petesch, C.; Lejeail, Y.; Lamagnere, P.; Dubiez-Le Goff, S.

    2014-01-01

    The 2012 edition of the RCC-MRx Code has been issued in French and English versions by AFCEN (Association Francaise pour les regles de Conception et de Construction des Materiels des Chaudieres Electro-nucleaires). This Code is the result of the merger of the RCC-MX 2008 developed in the context of the research reactor Jules Horowitz Reactor project, in the RCC-MR 2007 which set up rules applicable to the design of components operating at high temperature and to the Vacuum Vessel of ITER. This new edition is the opportunity to publish also the background of the rules. This paper is one illustration of what may be such a document, on a dedicated example, the creep rules. It contains an overview of the design rules associated to the creep damage and explains the purpose and the origins of these rules. This type of exercise is going to be generalized to all the parts of the code in AFCEN technical publications, the criteria. (authors)

  14. Design and Construction Rules for Mechanical components of FBR nuclear islands: RCC-MR. Tome 1, Volume A: generalities

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1985-06-01

    The French Rules of Mechanical equipments of Fast Neutron nuclear Reactors (RCC-MR) aims at equipments included in a safety classification. The equipments concerned are those of the nuclear boiler and its auxiliaries: tanks, vessels, internal equipments of the reactor, exchangers, pumps, fittings, pipes, and supports. The present edition of the RCC-MR comprises 12 books presented in the present one in the volume A. The chapter RA 3000 defines the documents to be established in application of the RCC-MR rules. The chapter RA 5000 defines the requirements to take into account to establish and carry out quality Assurance programs according to the RCC-MR rules [fr

  15. Evolving Rule-Based Systems in two Medical Domains using Genetic Programming

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Tsakonas, A.; Dounias, G.; Jantzen, Jan

    2004-01-01

    We demonstrate, compare and discuss the application of two genetic programming methodologies for the construction of rule-based systems in two medical domains: the diagnosis of Aphasia's subtypes and the classification of Pap-Smear Test examinations. The first approach consists of a scheme...

  16. FeynRules - Feynman rules made easy

    OpenAIRE

    Christensen, Neil D.; Duhr, Claude

    2008-01-01

    In this paper we present FeynRules, a new Mathematica package that facilitates the implementation of new particle physics models. After the user implements the basic model information (e.g. particle content, parameters and Lagrangian), FeynRules derives the Feynman rules and stores them in a generic form suitable for translation to any Feynman diagram calculation program. The model can then be translated to the format specific to a particular Feynman diagram calculator via F...

  17. Design rules for high temperature plant - the implications of recent research in relation to current practice

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Townley, C.H.A.

    1977-01-01

    An historical summary is presented of design rules for high temperature plant, leading to the rules applicable to high temperature reactors, particularly the liquid metal fast breeder reactor. Special attention is given to creep rupture properties of ferritic and austenitic materials used for the construction of components such as boilers and pressure vessels. (author)

  18. Optimization of decision rule complexity for decision tables with many-valued decisions

    KAUST Repository

    Azad, Mohammad; Chikalov, Igor; Moshkov, Mikhail

    2013-01-01

    compare our results with optimal result obtained by dynamic programming algorithms. The average percentage of relative difference between length (coverage) of constructed and optimal rules is at most 6.89% (15.89%, respectively) for leaders which seems

  19. A history of slide rules for blackbody radiation computations

    Science.gov (United States)

    Johnson, R. Barry; Stewart, Sean M.

    2012-10-01

    During the Second World War the importance of utilizing detection devices capable of operating in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum was firmly established. Up until that time, laboriously constructed tables for blackbody radiation needed to be used in calculations involving the amount of radiation radiated within a given spectral region or for other related radiometric quantities. To rapidly achieve reasonably accurate calculations of such radiometric quantities, a blackbody radiation calculator was devised in slide rule form first in Germany in 1944 and soon after in England and the United States. In the immediate decades after its introduction, the radiation slide rule was widely adopted and recognized as a useful and important tool for engineers and scientists working in the infrared field. It reached its pinnacle in the United States in 1970 in a rule introduced by Electro Optical Industries, Inc. With the onset in the latter half of the 1970s of affordable, hand-held electronic calculators, the impending demise of the radiation slide rule was evident. No longer the calculational device of choice, the radiation slide rule all but disappeared within a few short years. Although today blackbody radiation calculations can be readily accomplished using anything from a programmable pocket calculator upwards, with each device making use of a wide variety of numerical approximations to the integral of Planck's function, radiation slide rules were in the early decades of infrared technology the definitive "workhorse" for those involved in infrared systems design and engineering. This paper presents a historical development of radiation slide rules with many versions being discussed.

  20. Assessment of noise environment during construction of a major bridge and associated approach road.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Roy, T K; Mukhopadhyay, A R; Ghosh, S K; Majumder, G

    2011-10-01

    In this paper a methodology to quantify the noise environment, during a major bridge construction and upgrading approach road connectivity, has been provided. Noise levels were monitored at eleven sites. These eleven sites have been classified into three categories - commercial, residential and silence zones. The study was carried out to measure the ambient noise levels in all the eleven sites falling in the above three categories during both day and night times considering both "working" and "non-working" days. It was found that the mean noise level during night time was more, compared to that during day time for commercial, residential as well as silence zones. The likely causes of more noise during night time have been explored. Appropriate remedial measures have been suggested to reduce the noise levels. In addition, the noise levels in the above three zones have been compared, wherever feasible statistically, with the respective zonal standards. Significance has been found in all the cases. The underlying causes and remedies have been provided.

  1. Discursive mobile phone practices and informal rules

    OpenAIRE

    Lloyd, Clare

    2010-01-01

    This paper uses Discourse Analysis (DA) to investigate the socially constructed discursive practices of mobile phone use; specifically it examines the informal rules of mobile phone use. It qualitatively investigates mobile phone use within an Australian cultural context. „Discourse theory begins with the assumption that all objects and actions are meaningful, and that their meaning is a product of historically specific systems of rules‟ (Howarth 2000, p. 8). Evidence of soc...

  2. Traffic incident management in construction and maintenance work zones.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2009-01-01

    In 2004, the Federal Highway Administration published updated rules governing work zone safety and mobility; all highway construction and maintenance projects using federal-aid highway funds are required to develop transportation management plans (TM...

  3. Design and practice of a comprehensively functional integrated management information system for major construction

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Yuling; Wang, Xiaoping; Zhu, Yuhui; Fei, Lanlan

    2017-08-01

    This paper introduces a Comprehensively Functional Integrated Management Information System designed for the Optical Engineering Major by the College of Optical Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, which combines the functions of teaching, students learning, educational assessment and management. The system consists of 5 modules, major overview, online curriculum, experiment teaching management, graduation project management and teaching quality feedback. The major overview module introduces the development history, training program, curriculums and experiment syllabus and teaching achievements of optical engineering major in Zhejiang University. The Management Information System is convenient for students to learn in a mobile and personalized way. The online curriculum module makes it very easy for teachers to setup a website for new curriculums. On the website, teachers can help students on their problems about the curriculums in time and collect their homework online. The experiment teaching management module and the graduation project management module enables the students to fulfill their experiment process and graduation thesis under the help of their supervisors. Before students take an experiment in the lab, they must pass the pre-experiment quiz on the corresponding module. After the experiment, students need to submit the experiment report to the web server. Moreover, the module contains experiment process video recordings, which are very helpful to improve the effect of the experiment education. The management of the entire process of a student's graduation program, including the project selection, mid-term inspection, progress report of every two weeks, final thesis, et al, is completed by the graduation project management module. The teaching quality feedback module is not only helpful for teachers to know whether the education effect of curriculum is good or not, but also helpful for the administrators of the college to know whether the

  4. Domain XML semantic integration based on extraction rules and ontology mapping

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Huayu LI

    2016-08-01

    Full Text Available A plenty of XML documents exist in petroleum engineering field, but traditional XML integration solution can’t provide semantic query, which leads to low data use efficiency. In light of WeXML(oil&gas well XML data semantic integration and query requirement, this paper proposes a semantic integration method based on extraction rules and ontology mapping. The method firstly defines a series of extraction rules with which elements and properties of WeXML Schema are mapped to classes and properties in WeOWL ontology, respectively; secondly, an algorithm is used to transform WeXML documents into WeOWL instances. Because WeOWL provides limited semantics, ontology mappings between two ontologies are then built to explain class and property of global ontology with terms of WeOWL, and semantic query based on global domain concepts model is provided. By constructing a WeXML data semantic integration prototype system, the proposed transformational rule, the transfer algorithm and the mapping rule are tested.

  5. Systematization of the major stages of the client in certain branches of construction production

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Kuzmina Tatyana

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available The article contains substantiation of the need for investment and construction projects in various sectors of the construction production. On the basis of domestic and foreign experience it describes the concept of the client (customer and his functions and tasks in the implementation of such projects. It also systematizes the main stages of the customer’s activities, which are presented as a preparation for the construction, development of construction sites, monitoring the progress of the construction, commis-sioning and commissioning of facilities. There is also a determination of time intervals at each stage, the final formula for calculating the duration of the investment project due to the given the shared stages. The article also gives optimization variants in some sectors of construction production.

  6. Influence of fuzzy norms and other heuristics on "Mixed fuzzy rule formation" - [Corrigendum

    OpenAIRE

    Gabriel, Thomas R.; Berthold, Michael R.

    2008-01-01

    We hereby correct an error in Ref. [2], in which we studied the influence of various parameters that affect the generalization performance of fuzzy models constructed using the mixed fuzzy rule formation method [1].

  7. Construction of adjoint operators for coupled equations depending on different variables

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Hoogenboom, J.E.

    1986-01-01

    A procedure is described for the construction of the adjoint operator matrix in case of coupled equations defining quantities that depend on different sets of variables. This case is not properly treated in the literature. From this procedure a simple rule can be deduced for the construction of such adjoint operator matrices

  8. Optimization of decision rules based on dynamic programming approach

    KAUST Repository

    Zielosko, Beata

    2014-01-14

    This chapter is devoted to the study of an extension of dynamic programming approach which allows optimization of approximate decision rules relative to the length and coverage. We introduce an uncertainty measure that is the difference between number of rows in a given decision table and the number of rows labeled with the most common decision for this table divided by the number of rows in the decision table. We fix a threshold γ, such that 0 ≤ γ < 1, and study so-called γ-decision rules (approximate decision rules) that localize rows in subtables which uncertainty is at most γ. Presented algorithm constructs a directed acyclic graph Δ γ T which nodes are subtables of the decision table T given by pairs "attribute = value". The algorithm finishes the partitioning of a subtable when its uncertainty is at most γ. The chapter contains also results of experiments with decision tables from UCI Machine Learning Repository. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.

  9. Rule-based land cover classification from very high-resolution satellite image with multiresolution segmentation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Haque, Md. Enamul; Al-Ramadan, Baqer; Johnson, Brian A.

    2016-07-01

    Multiresolution segmentation and rule-based classification techniques are used to classify objects from very high-resolution satellite images of urban areas. Custom rules are developed using different spectral, geometric, and textural features with five scale parameters, which exploit varying classification accuracy. Principal component analysis is used to select the most important features out of a total of 207 different features. In particular, seven different object types are considered for classification. The overall classification accuracy achieved for the rule-based method is 95.55% and 98.95% for seven and five classes, respectively. Other classifiers that are not using rules perform at 84.17% and 97.3% accuracy for seven and five classes, respectively. The results exploit coarse segmentation for higher scale parameter and fine segmentation for lower scale parameter. The major contribution of this research is the development of rule sets and the identification of major features for satellite image classification where the rule sets are transferable and the parameters are tunable for different types of imagery. Additionally, the individual objectwise classification and principal component analysis help to identify the required object from an arbitrary number of objects within images given ground truth data for the training.

  10. French codes and standards for design, construction and in-service inspection of nuclear power plants

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Hugot, G.; Grandemange, J. M.

    1995-01-01

    In 1970, France decided that its future power plants would be of the Pressurized Water Reactor type. This choice proved to be successful since it resulted in more than 60 PWR units in operation or under construction in France and abroad. At the beginning of such a program, the French engineering and manufacturing industry, the national electrical utility and the Safety Authorities had to face the many challenges imposed by the implementation of an imported technology. The government reorganised the licensing process. FRAMATOME, the NSSS vendor, and EDF (Electricite de France), the national utility, decided to create 'AFCEN', the French Association for Design and Construction Rules for Nuclear Island Components. These rules, the RCC's (Regles de Construction et de conception), which are approved by French Safety Authorities deal with mechanical and electrical equipment as well as with nuclear fuel and civil works. They are now being supplemented by in service inspection rules, the RSE's (Regles d'inspection en Service). The paper presents these Codes and their main updating following experience of application, technical progress and evolution of standards. Status of discussion concerning reference to European standardisation and developments of rules applicable to the EPR project will also be discussed

  11. The rules of the Rue Morgue

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Vanzi, M. [Univ. of Cagliari (Italy)

    1995-12-31

    This paper, it is evident, is mostly a joke, based on the fascinating (but not original) consideration of any failure analysis as a detective story. The Poe`s tale is a perfect instrument (but surely not the only possible one) for playing the game. If any practical application of ``The Rules of the Rue Morgue`` may be expected, it is on the possibility of defining what leaves us unsatisfied when a Failure Analyst`s result sounds out of tune. The reported Violations to the Dupin Postulate summarize the objections that the author would like to repeat for his own analyses, and for those cases in which he is required to review the work of other. On the constructive side, the proposed Rules, it has been repeatedly said, are common sense indications, and are surely not exhaustive, on a practical ground. Skill, patience, luck and memory are also required, but, unfortunately, not always and not together available. It should be of the greatest aid for the Failure Analyst community, in any case, that each public report could point out how it obeyed to a widely accepted set of failure analysis rules. Maybe -- why not? -- the Rules of the Rue Morgue. As a last consideration, for concluding the joke, the author invites his readers to open the original Poe`s tale at the very beginning of the story, when Monsieur Dupin is introduced. Thinking of the Failure Analyst as a member of the excellent family of the Scientists, many of us will sigh and smile.

  12. From Human Activity to Conceptual Understanding of the Chain Rule

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jojo, Zingiswa Mybert Monica; Maharaj, Aneshkumar; Brijlall, Deonarain

    2013-01-01

    This article reports on a study which investigated first year university engineering students' construction of the definition of the concept of the chain rule in differential calculus at a University of Technology in South Africa. An APOS (Action-Process-Objects-Schema) approach was used to explore conceptual understanding displayed by students in…

  13. New Safety rules

    CERN Multimedia

    Safety Commission

    2008-01-01

    The revision of CERN Safety rules is in progress and the following new Safety rules have been issued on 15-04-2008: Safety Procedure SP-R1 Establishing, Updating and Publishing CERN Safety rules: http://cern.ch/safety-rules/SP-R1.htm; Safety Regulation SR-S Smoking at CERN: http://cern.ch/safety-rules/SR-S.htm; Safety Regulation SR-M Mechanical Equipment: http://cern.ch/safety-rules/SR-M.htm; General Safety Instruction GSI-M1 Standard Lifting Equipment: http://cern.ch/safety-rules/GSI-M1.htm; General Safety Instruction GSI-M2 Standard Pressure Equipment: http://cern.ch/safety-rules/GSI-M2.htm; General Safety Instruction GSI-M3 Special Mechanical Equipment: http://cern.ch/safety-rules/GSI-M3.htm. These documents apply to all persons under the Director General’s authority. All Safety rules are available at the web page: http://www.cern.ch/safety-rules The Safety Commission

  14. Approaching safety in the Swedish and Danish construction industry

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Grill, Martin; Grytnes, Regine; Törner, Marianne

    2015-01-01

    in accidents rates, especially in construction, and as such offer an opportunity to explore organizational and managerial issues related to safety outcomes. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were carried out with five construction managers and four construction workers in Danish and Swedish construction...... industry. The transcripts were analysed using semantic thematic analysis. Results: Seven safety related themes were distinguished, conveying safety culture differences between Swedish and Danish construction industry concerning: participatory or directive management; challenge or obey; compliance or non...... identifies seven factors perceived by the professionals as related to lower occupational accident rates in the construction industry. Engaging in participatory management, promoting long-term planning and long-term tenures, encouraging cooperation, cautiousness and compliance to rules as well as challenging...

  15. Design, construction, qualification and reliability of main components, from the safety aspect

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Crette, J.P.

    1982-01-01

    In FRANCE, the design and construction of reliable components, which condition the safe operation and availability of breeder plants, is based on the experience acquired during the operation of RAPSODIE, PHENIX and the various test facilities. The technical progress achieved on all main components is illustrated by examples taken from the CREYS-MALVILLE plant. In parallel with the development of these components, an extensive program covering research, development and the definition of design, construction and inspection rules, together with scheduling and quality assurance methods, prepares the industrialization of this reactor system, in compliance with the rules and recommendations issued by the pertinent safety authorities

  16. 12 CFR 533.11 - Other definitions and rules of construction used in this part.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    ... THE TREASURY DISCLOSURE AND REPORTING OF CRA-RELATED AGREEMENTS § 533.11 Other definitions and rules... party to the agreement makes a CRA communication, as described in § 533.3 of this part. (b) Control. Control is defined in section 2(a) of the Bank Holding Company Act (12 U.S.C. 1841(a)). (c) CRA affiliate...

  17. 12 CFR 35.11 - Other definitions and rules of construction used in this part.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    ... TREASURY DISCLOSURE AND REPORTING OF CRA-RELATED AGREEMENTS § 35.11 Other definitions and rules of... party to the agreement makes a CRA communication, as described in § 35.3. (b) Control. “Control” is defined in section 2(a) of the Bank Holding Company Act (12 U.S.C. 1841(a)). (c) CRA affiliate. A “CRA...

  18. Hierarchy-associated semantic-rule inference framework for classifying indoor scenes

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yu, Dan; Liu, Peng; Ye, Zhipeng; Tang, Xianglong; Zhao, Wei

    2016-03-01

    Typically, the initial task of classifying indoor scenes is challenging, because the spatial layout and decoration of a scene can vary considerably. Recent efforts at classifying object relationships commonly depend on the results of scene annotation and predefined rules, making classification inflexible. Furthermore, annotation results are easily affected by external factors. Inspired by human cognition, a scene-classification framework was proposed using the empirically based annotation (EBA) and a match-over rule-based (MRB) inference system. The semantic hierarchy of images is exploited by EBA to construct rules empirically for MRB classification. The problem of scene classification is divided into low-level annotation and high-level inference from a macro perspective. Low-level annotation involves detecting the semantic hierarchy and annotating the scene with a deformable-parts model and a bag-of-visual-words model. In high-level inference, hierarchical rules are extracted to train the decision tree for classification. The categories of testing samples are generated from the parts to the whole. Compared with traditional classification strategies, the proposed semantic hierarchy and corresponding rules reduce the effect of a variable background and improve the classification performance. The proposed framework was evaluated on a popular indoor scene dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness.

  19. 78 FR 1991 - Major Capital Investment Projects

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-01-09

    ... Administration 49 CFR Part 611 Major Capital Investment Projects; Notice of Availability of Proposed New Starts... Capital Investment Projects AGENCY: Federal Transit Administration (FTA), DOT. ACTION: Final rule. SUMMARY... capital investments seeking funding under the discretionary ``New Starts'' and ``Small Starts'' programs...

  20. 75 FR 39820 - Procedures for Abatement of Highway Traffic Noise and Construction Noise

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-13

    ...-2008-0114] RIN 2125-AF26 Procedures for Abatement of Highway Traffic Noise and Construction Noise... the Federal regulations on the Procedures for Abatement of Highway Traffic Noise and Construction Noise. The final rule clarifies and adds definitions, the applicability of this regulation, certain...

  1. A programmable rules engine to provide clinical decision support using HTML forms.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Heusinkveld, J; Geissbuhler, A; Sheshelidze, D; Miller, R

    1999-01-01

    The authors have developed a simple method for specifying rules to be applied to information on HTML forms. This approach allows clinical experts, who lack the programming expertise needed to write CGI scripts, to construct and maintain domain-specific knowledge and ordering capabilities within WizOrder, the order-entry and decision support system used at Vanderbilt Hospital. The clinical knowledge base maintainers use HTML editors to create forms and spreadsheet programs for rule entry. A test environment has been developed which uses Netscape to display forms; the production environment displays forms using an embedded browser.

  2. Psychosocial Predictors of Rule Following in Hostels for Women Experiencing Homelessness

    Science.gov (United States)

    White, Katherine; Wood, Maria

    2011-01-01

    This study examined the psychosocial factors impacting upon the rule-following behaviour of residents of a hostel providing crisis accommodation to women who are homeless. After their arrival, residents of a women's hostel (N=83) completed questionnaires assessing the theory of planned behaviour constructs of attitude, subjective norm, perceived…

  3. Understanding How Domestic Violence Shelter Rules May Influence Survivor Empowerment.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gregory, Katie; Nnawulezi, Nkiru; Sullivan, Cris M

    2017-10-01

    Domestic violence shelters have historically gone beyond providing emergency residential space for survivors by assisting in obtaining future housing, employment, health care, child care, or legal services. Domestic violence shelters are expected to operate within an empowerment philosophy, with an understanding that survivors are self-determining, can identify their needs, and know what it takes to meet those needs. Recent research has indicated that, as many shelters have become more rigid in creating rules that survivors must follow to access and retain free temporary housing, the result has been survivors' feelings of disempowerment, the complete opposite of what was originally intended. This study builds on the small amount of research conducted regarding survivors' experiences of shelter rules by specifically examining how rules were perceived to affect empowerment. Seventy-three survivors from two domestic violence shelters were asked about their experiences around specific shelter rules relating to curfew, parenting, chores, time limits, food, alcohol, drugs, and medications. A transcendental phenomenological approach was used to analyze the qualitative data, seeking explanations of how survivors made meaning of the rules and how those rules influenced their empowerment. Among those survivors who found the rules problematic, three major themes emerged: (a) rules acted as barriers to carrying out their normal, day-to-day activities; (b) the shelter staff's flexibility with rules was based on contingencies; and (c) rules negatively affected their psychological well-being, and required them to engage in protective behaviors. Recommendations are made for the reexamination and restructuring of rules within domestic violence shelters.

  4. Part-time Labor, Work Rules, and Transit Costs

    Science.gov (United States)

    1981-01-01

    This report examines two major issues: (1)the impact of labor union work rules : on bus transit operating costs and (2)the magnitude of cost savings that can be : expected from the use of part-time drivers. These issues are examined within : the cont...

  5. Association Rule-based Predictive Model for Machine Failure in Industrial Internet of Things

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kwon, Jung-Hyok; Lee, Sol-Bee; Park, Jaehoon; Kim, Eui-Jik

    2017-09-01

    This paper proposes an association rule-based predictive model for machine failure in industrial Internet of things (IIoT), which can accurately predict the machine failure in real manufacturing environment by investigating the relationship between the cause and type of machine failure. To develop the predictive model, we consider three major steps: 1) binarization, 2) rule creation, 3) visualization. The binarization step translates item values in a dataset into one or zero, then the rule creation step creates association rules as IF-THEN structures using the Lattice model and Apriori algorithm. Finally, the created rules are visualized in various ways for users’ understanding. An experimental implementation was conducted using R Studio version 3.3.2. The results show that the proposed predictive model realistically predicts machine failure based on association rules.

  6. Rule Extracting based on MCG with its Application in Helicopter Power Train Fault Diagnosis

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Wang, M; Hu, N Q; Qin, G J

    2011-01-01

    In order to extract decision rules for fault diagnosis from incomplete historical test records for knowledge-based damage assessment of helicopter power train structure. A method that can directly extract the optimal generalized decision rules from incomplete information based on GrC was proposed. Based on semantic analysis of unknown attribute value, the granule was extended to handle incomplete information. Maximum characteristic granule (MCG) was defined based on characteristic relation, and MCG was used to construct the resolution function matrix. The optimal general decision rule was introduced, with the basic equivalent forms of propositional logic, the rules were extracted and reduction from incomplete information table. Combined with a fault diagnosis example of power train, the application approach of the method was present, and the validity of this method in knowledge acquisition was proved.

  7. Rule Extracting based on MCG with its Application in Helicopter Power Train Fault Diagnosis

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Wang, M; Hu, N Q; Qin, G J, E-mail: hnq@nudt.edu.cn, E-mail: wm198063@yahoo.com.cn [School of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation, National University of Defense Technology, ChangSha, Hunan, 410073 (China)

    2011-07-19

    In order to extract decision rules for fault diagnosis from incomplete historical test records for knowledge-based damage assessment of helicopter power train structure. A method that can directly extract the optimal generalized decision rules from incomplete information based on GrC was proposed. Based on semantic analysis of unknown attribute value, the granule was extended to handle incomplete information. Maximum characteristic granule (MCG) was defined based on characteristic relation, and MCG was used to construct the resolution function matrix. The optimal general decision rule was introduced, with the basic equivalent forms of propositional logic, the rules were extracted and reduction from incomplete information table. Combined with a fault diagnosis example of power train, the application approach of the method was present, and the validity of this method in knowledge acquisition was proved.

  8. On the Universality and Non-Universality of Spiking Neural P Systems With Rules on Synapses.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Song, Tao; Xu, Jinbang; Pan, Linqiang

    2015-12-01

    Spiking neural P systems with rules on synapses are a new variant of spiking neural P systems. In the systems, the neuron contains only spikes, while the spiking/forgetting rules are moved on the synapses. It was obtained that such system with 30 neurons (using extended spiking rules) or with 39 neurons (using standard spiking rules) is Turing universal. In this work, this number is improved to 6. Specifically, we construct a Turing universal spiking neural P system with rules on synapses having 6 neurons, which can generate any set of Turing computable natural numbers. As well, it is obtained that spiking neural P system with rules on synapses having less than two neurons are not Turing universal: i) such systems having one neuron can characterize the family of finite sets of natural numbers; ii) the family of sets of numbers generated by the systems having two neurons is included in the family of semi-linear sets of natural numbers.

  9. 78 FR 77334 - Small Business Size Standards: Construction

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-12-23

    ... enrollment in the System of Award Management's (SAM) Dynamic Small Business Search database, and more firms... SMALL BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION 13 CFR Part 121 RIN 3245-AG37 Small Business Size Standards: Construction AGENCY: U.S. Small Business Administration. ACTION: Final rule. SUMMARY: The United States Small...

  10. Deriving CSW rules for massive scalar legs and pure Yang-Mills loops

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Boels, Rutger; Schwinn, Christian

    2008-01-01

    This article provides two complementary detailed derivations of Cachazo-Svrcek-Witten-style Feynman rules for Yang-Mills gauge theory coupled to a massive coloured scalar as presented in earlier work. These proceed through a direct canonical transformation method on space-time and through a gauge transformation in an action constructed on twistor space. It is shown explicitly that the field transformations are identical in both cases. Some simple tree-level examples of our rules are given and we comment on the application of them to the calculation of the rational part of one-loop pure glue amplitudes. A possible direct quantum completion of pure glue CSW rules based on dimensional regularisation motivated by these results is sketched. Finally, it is shown how to derive CSW rules for effective Higgs-gluon and Higgs-matter couplings proposed in the literature directly from the action. This derivation yields additional towers of vertices which generate a subset of the contributions to effective multi-Higgs scattering amplitudes.

  11. Reliability of the CARE rule and the HEART score to rule out an acute coronary syndrome in non-traumatic chest pain patients.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Moumneh, Thomas; Richard-Jourjon, Vanessa; Friou, Emilie; Prunier, Fabrice; Soulie-Chavignon, Caroline; Choukroun, Jacques; Mazet-Guilaumé, Betty; Riou, Jérémie; Penaloza, Andréa; Roy, Pierre-Marie

    2018-03-02

    In patients consulting in the Emergency Department for chest pain, a HEART score ≤ 3 has been shown to rule out an acute coronary syndrome (ACS) with a low risk of major adverse cardiac event (MACE) occurrence. A negative CARE rule (≤ 1) that stands for the first four elements of the HEART score may have similar rule-out reliability without troponin assay requirement. We aim to prospectively assess the performance of the CARE rule and of the HEART score to predict MACE in a chest pain population. Prospective two-center non-interventional study. Patients admitted to the ED for non-traumatic chest pain were included, and followed-up at 6 weeks. The main study endpoint was the 6-week rate of MACE (myocardial infarction, coronary angioplasty, coronary bypass, and sudden unexplained death). 641 patients were included, of whom 9.5% presented a MACE at 6 weeks. The CARE rule was negative for 31.2% of patients, and none presented a MACE during follow-up [0, 95% confidence interval: (0.0-1.9)]. The HEART score was ≤ 3 for 63.0% of patients, and none presented a MACE during follow-up [0% (0.0-0.9)]. With an incidence below 2% in the negative group, the CARE rule seemed able to safely rule out a MACE without any biological test for one-third of patients with chest pain and the HEART score for another third with a single troponin assay.

  12. S.I. 1987 No. 2182, The Electricity Generating Stations and Overhead Lines (Inquiries Procedure) Rules 1987

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1987-01-01

    These Rules, which came into force on 14 January 1988, make new provision for the procedure for any public inquiry held pursuant to Section 34 of the Electricity Act 1957 in relation to applications for consent to construct or extend a generating station (including nuclear stations). The Rules were made pursuant to Section 11 of the Tribunals and Inquiries Act 1971. They revoke the previous Electricity Generating Stations and Overhead Line (Inquiries Procedures) Rules 1981. These new Rules cover the same topics as the previous Rules but aim to shorten the potential length and thus cost of inquiries. They will apply to the Inquiry to be held into the application by the Central Electricity Generating Board to build a pressurised water reactor at Hinkley Point in Somerset. (NEA) [fr

  13. Worldwide construction

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Williamson, M.

    1994-01-01

    The paper lists major construction projects in worldwide processing and pipelining, showing capacities, contractors, estimated costs, and time of construction. The lists are divided into refineries, petrochemical plants, sulfur recovery units, gas processing plants, pipelines, and related fuel facilities. This last classification includes cogeneration plants, coal liquefaction and gasification plants, biomass power plants, geothermal power plants, integrated coal gasification combined-cycle power plants, and a coal briquetting plant

  14. Exploration of SWRL Rule Bases through Visualization, Paraphrasing, and Categorization of Rules

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hassanpour, Saeed; O'Connor, Martin J.; Das, Amar K.

    Rule bases are increasingly being used as repositories of knowledge content on the Semantic Web. As the size and complexity of these rule bases increases, developers and end users need methods of rule abstraction to facilitate rule management. In this paper, we describe a rule abstraction method for Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules that is based on lexical analysis and a set of heuristics. Our method results in a tree data structure that we exploit in creating techniques to visualize, paraphrase, and categorize SWRL rules. We evaluate our approach by applying it to several biomedical ontologies that contain SWRL rules, and show how the results reveal rule patterns within the rule base. We have implemented our method as a plug-in tool for Protégé-OWL, the most widely used ontology modeling software for the Semantic Web. Our tool can allow users to rapidly explore content and patterns in SWRL rule bases, enabling their acquisition and management.

  15. 75 FR 68429 - Cranes and Derricks in Construction; Approval of Information Collection Requirements

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-11-08

    .... OSHA-2007-0066] RIN 1218-AC01 Cranes and Derricks in Construction; Approval of Information Collection... requirements. SUMMARY: On August 9, 2010, OSHA published a final rule revising the Cranes and Derricks Standard... necessary to protect employees during the use of cranes and derricks in construction. That final standard...

  16. European Regulation on Major Shareholdings and Takeovers

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Sørensen, Karsten Engsig; Clausen, Nis Jul

    2002-01-01

    Even though the rules on disclosure of major shareholdings in listed companies has been partly harmonised in the EU large difference remains. This is documented in the article and it is further debated whether these difference are acceptable, especially in light of the ongoing efforts to harmonise...

  17. Australian road rules

    Science.gov (United States)

    2009-02-01

    *These are national-level rules. Australian Road Rules - 2009 Version, Part 18, Division 1, Rule 300 "Use of Mobile Phones" describes restrictions of mobile phone use while driving. The rule basically states that drivers cannot make or receive calls ...

  18. SYSTEM OF STANDARTIZATION OF CONSTRUCTION OPERATIONS ARRANGEMENT

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Oleynik Pavel Pavlovich

    2012-10-01

    Full Text Available In the proposed article, management of construction operations is represented as a multi-level system; it is considered with the framework of projects including new construction, restructuring and overhaul of buildings and structures. The system of management of construction operations is to be composed of the following three constituent parts. They include a construction and assembling entity, project and operations, and a procurement base. Such matters as the quality of construction products, purchase (lease of building machinery and vehicles are incorporated into the level of the construction and assembling entity. The project level comprises such components of construction operations management as pre-construction preparation of a project, methods and forms of construction management, preparatory works, management of construction activities, real-time operations control, construction quality control, etc. The level of operations and the procurement base covers the needs for materials and equipment, their purchase and procurement, as well as the warehouse management. The main elements of the standardization system are identified. Standards of construction operations management are explained, including 1. General Provisions; 2. Preparation and performance of construction and assembling works; 3. New construction. Building site organization; 4. Demolition (dismantling of buildings and structures; 5. Rules of preparation for acceptance and commissioning of completed residential buildings. The prospects for the further development of the system of standardization of construction operations management are outlined

  19. Construction Technology of Long Span Bridges

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Gimsing, Niels Jørgen

    2000-01-01

    A large variety of construction methods are used during construction of major bridges, and in many cases the final structural system must be chosen with due respect to the construction process. Today the preferred construction methods are: the free-cantilever method, the launching method...

  20. Rule Versus the Causality Rule in Insurance Law

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Lando, Henrik

    When the Buyer of insurance has negligently kept silent or misrepresented a (material) fact to the Seller, one of two rules will determine the extent to which cover will consequently be reduced. The pro-rata rule lowers cover in proportion to how much the Seller would have increased the premium had...... he been correctly informed; the causality rule provides either zero cover if the omitted fact has caused the insurance event, or full cover if the event would have occurred regardless of the fact. This article explores which rule is more efficient. Using the framework proposed by Picard and Dixit...... it subjects the risk averse Buyer of insurance to less variance. This implies that the pro rata rule should apply when there is significant risk for a Buyer of unintentional misrepresentation, and when the incentive to intentionally misrepresent can be curtailed through frequent verification of the Buyer...

  1. Constructing identities in the media: newspaper coverage analysis of a major UK Clostridium difficile outbreak.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Burnett, Emma; Johnston, Bridget; Corlett, Joanne; Kearney, Nora

    2014-07-01

    To examine how a major Clostridium difficile outbreak in the UK was represented in the media. Clostridium difficile is a serious health care-associated infection with significant global prevalence. As major outbreaks have continued to occur worldwide over the last few decades, it has also resulted in increasing media coverage. Newspaper journalists are, however, frequently criticized for sensationalized and inaccurate reporting and alarming the public. Despite such criticisms, nothing is known about how the media frame Clostridium difficile related coverage. Qualitative interpretive descriptive study. An interpretive analysis of newspaper articles from the national press that reported about the outbreak from the first day of coverage over 3 weeks (12 June-3 July 2008). Twenty-eight newspaper articles were included in the study from tabloids, broadsheets, a regional and a Sunday newspaper. Monster and war metaphors were frequently adopted to portray the severity of Clostridium difficile and the impact it can have on patient safety. In addition, the positioning of the affected patients, their families, healthcare professionals and the Government produced representations of victims, villains and heroes. This subsequently evoked notions of vulnerability, blame and conflict. The media are and will remain critical convectors of public information and, as such, are hugely influential in risk perceptions and responses. Rather than simply dismissing media coverage, further understanding around how such stories in specific contexts are constructed and represented is needed so that it can help inform future communication and management strategies. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  2. ‘I Never Held Money with my Teeth’: Constructions of Exemplarity in Abul Fazl Farooqi’s Nasheb-o-Faraz

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Laurent Gayer

    2010-12-01

    Full Text Available Although life-stories have been playing a central role in the construction of exemplarity in South Asia for centuries, the autobiographical genre was a latecomer on the region’s literary scene. It only developed in the late nineteenth, early 20th century and was constrained by conventional ‘rules of reticence’, which discouraged narratives of self-aggrandizement. Nasheb-o-Faraz (Ups and Downs, the autobiography of the Delhi-based real estate entrepreneur Mohammad Abul Fazl Farooqi (born ca. 1940, which constitutes the focus of this paper, is not immune to such ‘rules of reticence.’ Nevertheless, Farooqi takes some liberty with these moral and literary codes, and his narrative is a deeply subjective one, through which he aims to project himself as a role model, and more specifically as a moral achiever. This endeavour is not free of internal tensions and, all along the text, Farooqi seems hesitant about the example he ambitions to set. The reception of the text, within his family and beyond, also points to the limits of self-constructions of exemplarity in contemporary India, where the economy of greatness is undergoing major changes in a context of economic liberalization and political democratization.

  3. Construction of closed fermionic string models in four dimensions

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Lewellen, D.C.

    1987-01-01

    It is possible to construct consistent closed string models directly in four space-time dimensions if reparametrization invariance, conformal invariance and world sheet supersymmetry are properly accounted for. In the context of string models whose internal degrees of freedom are represented by free world sheet fermions, it is possible to completely solve for the above requirements, providing a simple set of rules for constructing string models. N = 1 supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric heterotic type string models with chiral fermions and realistic gauge groups, as well as generalized type II models with realistic gauge groups, can easily be constructed. Many other string models can be constructed using similar methods based on free world sheet bosons

  4. BIM – New rules of measurement ontology for construction cost estimation

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    F.H. Abanda

    2017-04-01

    Full Text Available For generations, the process of cost estimation has been manual, time-consuming and error-prone. Emerging Building Information Modelling (BIM can exploit standard measurement methods to automate cost estimation process and improve inaccuracies. Structuring standard measurement methods in an ontologically and machine readable format for a BIM software can greatly facilitate the process of improving inaccuracies in cost estimation. This study explores the development of an ontology based on New Rules of Measurement (NRM for cost estimation during the tendering stages. The methodology adopted is methontology, one of the most widely used ontology engineering methodologies. To ensure the ontology is fit for purpose, cost estimation experts are employed to check the semantics, descriptive logic-based reasoners are used to syntactically check the ontology and a leading 4D BIM modelling software is used on a case study building to test/validate the proposed ontology.

  5. Digital fabrication in architecture, engineering and construction

    CERN Document Server

    Caneparo, Luca

    2014-01-01

    Digital technologies are changing the relationship between design and construction: with computer models, CAD/CAM, and prototyping, designers can gain direct control of building and construction processes. The ability to digitally model designs, and thus to use those models directly in the context of production, creates a synthesis between design and construction in keeping with the tradition of the close relationship between design and craftsmanship, between the quality of the design and the rules of the craft. The evolution of the culture of design and construction is the underlying theme of this book. The aim is to discuss the direction that innovation is now taking, with a particular focus on today’s cutting-edge architectures. The method addresses the ways in which different societies have dealt with the issues of their age regarding design and construction, the different contributions provided by various techniques, and with them the meanings expressed by the architecture. As building design using dig...

  6. A Belief Rule-Based (BRB) Decision Support System for Assessing Clinical Asthma Suspicion

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Hossain, Mohammad Shahadat; Hossain, Emran; Khalid, Md. Saifuddin

    2014-01-01

    conditions of uncertainty. The Belief Rule-Based Inference Methodology Using the Evidential Reasoning (RIMER) approach was adopted to develop this expert system; which is named the Belief Rule-Based Expert System (BRBES). The system can handle various types of uncertainty in knowledge representation...... and inference procedures. The knowledge base of this system was constructed by using real patient data and expert opinion. Practical case studies were used to validate the system. The system-generated results are more effective and reliable in terms of accuracy than the results generated by a manual system....

  7. Rules of Engagement: Toward an Analysis of Staff Responses to Challenging Behavior.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hastings, Richard P.; Remington, Bob

    1994-01-01

    This article reviews literature on the responses of direct care staff to challenging behaviors of individuals with mental retardation. The paper constructs a behavior analytic description of the functions of care staff behavior in relation to their clients' challenging behaviors, draws a distinction between contingency-shaped and rule-governed…

  8. Ontology-based concept map learning path reasoning system using SWRL rules

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Chu, K.-K.; Lee, C.-I. [National Univ. of Tainan, Taiwan (China). Dept. of Computer Science and Information Learning Technology

    2010-08-13

    Concept maps are graphical representations of knowledge. Concept mapping may reduce students' cognitive load and extend simple memory function. The purpose of this study was on the diagnosis of students' concept map learning abilities and the provision of personally constructive advice dependant on their learning path and progress. Ontology is a useful method with which to represent and store concept map information. Semantic web rule language (SWRL) rules are easy to understand and to use as specific reasoning services. This paper discussed the selection of grade 7 lakes and rivers curriculum for which to devise a concept map learning path reasoning service. The paper defined a concept map e-learning ontology and two SWRL semantic rules, and collected users' concept map learning path data to infer implicit knowledge and to recommend the next learning path for users. It was concluded that the designs devised in this study were feasible and advanced and the ontology kept the domain knowledge preserved. SWRL rules identified an abstraction model for inferred properties. Since they were separate systems, they did not interfere with each other, while ontology or SWRL rules were maintained, ensuring persistent system extensibility and robustness. 15 refs., 1 tab., 8 figs.

  9. Growing but not transforming: Fragmented ruling coalitions and economic developments in Uganda

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Kjær, Anne Mette; Katusiimeh, Mesharch

    been stable enough to maintain macro-economic stability, attract aid and ensure the one-off gains from introducing peace. However, the fact that it has proved so challenging to hold the ruling coalition together has hindered the ruling elite in implementing initiatives to support transformation......In spite of decades of GDP growth, Uganda remains an agricultural economy still awaiting an economic transformation. Sustained state initiatives to promote such a transformation have been lacking. We find that the explanation for this is to be found in the nature of the ruling coalition, which has...... is to use state resources to hold the ruling coalition together. This, however, is not likely to result in an economic transformation and hence in job creation for the poor majority of Ugandans....

  10. Rule-based topology system for spatial databases to validate complex geographic datasets

    Science.gov (United States)

    Martinez-Llario, J.; Coll, E.; Núñez-Andrés, M.; Femenia-Ribera, C.

    2017-06-01

    A rule-based topology software system providing a highly flexible and fast procedure to enforce integrity in spatial relationships among datasets is presented. This improved topology rule system is built over the spatial extension Jaspa. Both projects are open source, freely available software developed by the corresponding author of this paper. Currently, there is no spatial DBMS that implements a rule-based topology engine (considering that the topology rules are designed and performed in the spatial backend). If the topology rules are applied in the frontend (as in many GIS desktop programs), ArcGIS is the most advanced solution. The system presented in this paper has several major advantages over the ArcGIS approach: it can be extended with new topology rules, it has a much wider set of rules, and it can mix feature attributes with topology rules as filters. In addition, the topology rule system can work with various DBMSs, including PostgreSQL, H2 or Oracle, and the logic is performed in the spatial backend. The proposed topology system allows users to check the complex spatial relationships among features (from one or several spatial layers) that require some complex cartographic datasets, such as the data specifications proposed by INSPIRE in Europe and the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) for Cadastral data.

  11. 76 FR 80410 - Pendency of Request for Approval of Special Withdrawal Liability Rules; the Cultural Institutions...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-12-23

    ...This notice advises interested persons that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (``PBGC'') has received a request from The Cultural Institutions Pension Plan for approval of a plan amendment providing for special withdrawal liability rules. Under Sec. 4203(f) of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 and PBGC's regulation on Extension of Special Withdrawal Liability Rules, a multiemployer pension plan may, with PBGC approval, be amended to provide for special withdrawal liability rules similar to those that apply to the construction and entertainment industries. Such approval is granted only if PBGC determines that the rules apply to an industry with characteristics that make use of the special rules appropriate and that the rules will not pose a significant risk to PBGC. Before granting an approval, PBGC's regulations require PBGC to give interested persons an opportunity to comment on the request. The purpose of this notice is to advise interested persons of the request and to solicit their views on it.

  12. Construction safety program for the National Ignition Facility Appendix A: Safety Requirements

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Cerruti, S.J.

    1997-01-01

    These rules apply to all LLNL employees, non-LLNL employees (including contract labor, supplemental labor, vendors, personnel matrixed/assigned from other National Laboratories, participating guests, visitors and students) and construction contractors/subcontractors. The General Safety and Health rules shall be used by management to promote accident prevention through indoctrination, safety and health training and on-the-job application. As a condition for contracts award, all contractors and subcontractors and their employees must certify on Form S ampersand H A-1 that they have read and understand, or have been briefed and understand, the National Ignition Facility OCIP Project General Safety Rules

  13. Construction safety program for the National Ignition Facility Appendix A: Safety Requirements

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Cerruti, S.J.

    1997-01-14

    These rules apply to all LLNL employees, non-LLNL employees (including contract labor, supplemental labor, vendors, personnel matrixed/assigned from other National Laboratories, participating guests, visitors and students) and construction contractors/subcontractors. The General Safety and Health rules shall be used by management to promote accident prevention through indoctrination, safety and health training and on-the-job application. As a condition for contracts award, all contractors and subcontractors and their employees must certify on Form S & H A-1 that they have read and understand, or have been briefed and understand, the National Ignition Facility OCIP Project General Safety Rules.

  14. Multiword Constructions in the Grammar.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Culicover, Peter W; Jackendoff, Ray; Audring, Jenny

    2017-07-01

    There is ample evidence that speakers' linguistic knowledge extends well beyond what can be described in terms of rules of compositional interpretation stated over combinations of single words. We explore a range of multiword constructions (MWCs) to get a handle both on the extent of the phenomenon and on the grammatical constraints that may govern it. We consider idioms of various sorts, collocations, compounds, light verbs, syntactic nuts, and assorted other constructions, as well as morphology. Our conclusion is that MWCs highlight the central role that grammar plays in licensing MWCs in the lexicon and the creation of novel MWCs, and they help to clarify how the lexicon articulates with the rest of the grammar. Copyright © 2017 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

  15. Optimized reaction mechanism rate rules for ignition of normal alkanes

    KAUST Repository

    Cai, Liming

    2016-08-11

    The increasing demand for cleaner combustion and reduced greenhouse gas emissions motivates research on the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels and their surrogates. Accurate detailed chemical kinetic models are an important prerequisite for high fidelity reacting flow simulations capable of improving combustor design and operation. The development of such models for many new fuel components and/or surrogate molecules is greatly facilitated by the application of reaction classes and rate rules. Accurate and versatile rate rules are desirable to improve the predictive accuracy of kinetic models. A major contribution in the literature is the recent work by Bugler et al. (2015), which has significantly improved rate rules and thermochemical parameters used in kinetic modeling of alkanes. In the present study, it is demonstrated that rate rules can be used and consistently optimized for a set of normal alkanes including n-heptane, n-octane, n-nonane, n-decane, and n-undecane, thereby improving the predictive accuracy for all the considered fuels. A Bayesian framework is applied in the calibration of the rate rules. The optimized rate rules are subsequently applied to generate a mechanism for n-dodecane, which was not part of the training set for the optimized rate rules. The developed mechanism shows accurate predictions compared with published well-validated mechanisms for a wide range of conditions.

  16. Delayed rule following

    OpenAIRE

    Schmitt, David R.

    2001-01-01

    Although the elements of a fully stated rule (discriminative stimulus [SD], some behavior, and a consequence) can occur nearly contemporaneously with the statement of the rule, there is often a delay between the rule statement and the SD. The effects of this delay on rule following have not been studied in behavior analysis, but they have been investigated in rule-like settings in the areas of prospective memory (remembering to do something in the future) and goal pursuit. Discriminative even...

  17. The 1% rule in four digital health social networks: an observational study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    van Mierlo, Trevor

    2014-02-04

    In recent years, cyberculture has informally reported a phenomenon named the 1% rule, or 90-9-1 principle, which seeks to explain participatory patterns and network effects within Internet communities. The rule states that 90% of actors observe and do not participate, 9% contribute sparingly, and 1% of actors create the vast majority of new content. This 90%, 9%, and 1% are also known as Lurkers, Contributors, and Superusers, respectively. To date, very little empirical research has been conducted to verify the 1% rule. The 1% rule is widely accepted in digital marketing. Our goal was to determine if the 1% rule applies to moderated Digital Health Social Networks (DHSNs) designed to facilitate behavior change. To help gain insight into participatory patterns, descriptive data were extracted from four long-standing DHSNs: the AlcoholHelpCenter, DepressionCenter, PanicCenter, and StopSmokingCenter sites. During the study period, 63,990 actors created 578,349 posts. Less than 25% of actors made one or more posts. The applicability of the 1% rule was confirmed as Lurkers, Contributors, and Superusers accounted for a weighted average of 1.3% (n=4668), 24.0% (n=88,732), and 74.7% (n=276,034) of content. The 1% rule was consistent across the four DHSNs. As social network sustainability requires fresh content and timely interactions, these results are important for organizations actively promoting and managing Internet communities. Superusers generate the vast majority of traffic and create value, so their recruitment and retention is imperative for long-term success. Although Lurkers may benefit from observing interactions between Superusers and Contributors, they generate limited or no network value. The results of this study indicate that DHSNs may be optimized to produce network effects, positive externalities, and bandwagon effects. Further research in the development and expansion of DHSNs is required.

  18. The 1% Rule in Four Digital Health Social Networks: An Observational Study

    Science.gov (United States)

    2014-01-01

    Background In recent years, cyberculture has informally reported a phenomenon named the 1% rule, or 90-9-1 principle, which seeks to explain participatory patterns and network effects within Internet communities. The rule states that 90% of actors observe and do not participate, 9% contribute sparingly, and 1% of actors create the vast majority of new content. This 90%, 9%, and 1% are also known as Lurkers, Contributors, and Superusers, respectively. To date, very little empirical research has been conducted to verify the 1% rule. Objective The 1% rule is widely accepted in digital marketing. Our goal was to determine if the 1% rule applies to moderated Digital Health Social Networks (DHSNs) designed to facilitate behavior change. Methods To help gain insight into participatory patterns, descriptive data were extracted from four long-standing DHSNs: the AlcoholHelpCenter, DepressionCenter, PanicCenter, and StopSmokingCenter sites. Results During the study period, 63,990 actors created 578,349 posts. Less than 25% of actors made one or more posts. The applicability of the 1% rule was confirmed as Lurkers, Contributors, and Superusers accounted for a weighted average of 1.3% (n=4668), 24.0% (n=88,732), and 74.7% (n=276,034) of content. Conclusions The 1% rule was consistent across the four DHSNs. As social network sustainability requires fresh content and timely interactions, these results are important for organizations actively promoting and managing Internet communities. Superusers generate the vast majority of traffic and create value, so their recruitment and retention is imperative for long-term success. Although Lurkers may benefit from observing interactions between Superusers and Contributors, they generate limited or no network value. The results of this study indicate that DHSNs may be optimized to produce network effects, positive externalities, and bandwagon effects. Further research in the development and expansion of DHSNs is required. PMID:24496109

  19. Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nowak, Martin A.

    2006-12-01

    Cooperation is needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization. Genomes, cells, multicellular organisms, social insects, and human society are all based on cooperation. Cooperation means that selfish replicators forgo some of their reproductive potential to help one another. But natural selection implies competition and therefore opposes cooperation unless a specific mechanism is at work. Here I discuss five mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. For each mechanism, a simple rule is derived that specifies whether natural selection can lead to cooperation.

  20. Ising percolation in a three-state majority vote model

    Science.gov (United States)

    Balankin, Alexander S.; Martínez-Cruz, M. A.; Gayosso Martínez, Felipe; Mena, Baltasar; Tobon, Atalo; Patiño-Ortiz, Julián; Patiño-Ortiz, Miguel; Samayoa, Didier

    2017-02-01

    In this Letter, we introduce a three-state majority vote model in which each voter adopts a state of a majority of its active neighbors, if exist, but the voter becomes uncommitted if its active neighbors are in a tie, or all neighbors are the uncommitted. Numerical simulations were performed on square lattices of different linear size with periodic boundary conditions. Starting from a random distribution of active voters, the model leads to a stable non-consensus state in which three opinions coexist. We found that the "magnetization" of the non-consensus state and the concentration of uncommitted voters in it are governed by an initial composition of system and are independent of the lattice size. Furthermore, we found that a configuration of the stable non-consensus state undergoes a second order percolation transition at a critical concentration of voters holding the same opinion. Numerical simulations suggest that this transition belongs to the same universality class as the Ising percolation. These findings highlight the effect of an updating rule for a tie between voter neighbors on the critical behavior of models obeying the majority vote rule whenever a strict majority exists.

  1. Simulation of operating rules and discretional decisions using a fuzzy rule-based system integrated into a water resources management model

    Science.gov (United States)

    Macian-Sorribes, Hector; Pulido-Velazquez, Manuel

    2013-04-01

    Water resources systems are operated, mostly, using a set of pre-defined rules not regarding, usually, to an optimal allocation in terms of water use or economic benefits, but to historical and institutional reasons. These operating policies are reproduced, commonly, as hedging rules, pack rules or zone-based operations, and simulation models can be used to test their performance under a wide range of hydrological and/or socio-economic hypothesis. Despite the high degree of acceptation and testing that these models have achieved, the actual operation of water resources systems hardly follows all the time the pre-defined rules with the consequent uncertainty on the system performance. Real-world reservoir operation is very complex, affected by input uncertainty (imprecision in forecast inflow, seepage and evaporation losses, etc.), filtered by the reservoir operator's experience and natural risk-aversion, while considering the different physical and legal/institutional constraints in order to meet the different demands and system requirements. The aim of this work is to expose a fuzzy logic approach to derive and assess the historical operation of a system. This framework uses a fuzzy rule-based system to reproduce pre-defined rules and also to match as close as possible the actual decisions made by managers. After built up, the fuzzy rule-based system can be integrated in a water resources management model, making possible to assess the system performance at the basin scale. The case study of the Mijares basin (eastern Spain) is used to illustrate the method. A reservoir operating curve regulates the two main reservoir releases (operated in a conjunctive way) with the purpose of guaranteeing a high realiability of supply to the traditional irrigation districts with higher priority (more senior demands that funded the reservoir construction). A fuzzy rule-based system has been created to reproduce the operating curve's performance, defining the system state (total

  2. When weight management lasts. Lower perceived rule complexity increases adherence.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mata, Jutta; Todd, Peter M; Lippke, Sonia

    2010-02-01

    Maintaining behavior change is one of the major challenges in weight management and long-term weight loss. We investigated the impact of the cognitive complexity of eating rules on adherence to weight management programs. We studied whether popular weight management programs can fail if participants find the rules too complicated from a cognitive perspective, meaning that individuals are not able to recall or process all required information for deciding what to eat. The impact on program adherence of participants' perceptions of eating rule complexity and other behavioral factors known to influence adherence (including previous weight management, self-efficacy, and planning) was assessed via a longitudinal online questionnaire given to 390 participants on two different popular weight management regimens. As we show, the regimens, Weight Watchers and a popular German recipe diet (Brigitte), strongly differ in objective rule complexity and thus their cognitive demands on the dieter. Perceived rule complexity was the strongest factor associated with increased risk of quitting the cognitively demanding weight management program (Weight Watchers); it was not related to adherence length for the low cognitive demand program (Brigitte). Higher self-efficacy generally helped in maintaining a program. The results emphasize the importance of considering rule complexity to promote long-term weight management. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  3. A high-level language for rule-based modelling.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pedersen, Michael; Phillips, Andrew; Plotkin, Gordon D

    2015-01-01

    Rule-based languages such as Kappa excel in their support for handling the combinatorial complexities prevalent in many biological systems, including signalling pathways. But Kappa provides little structure for organising rules, and large models can therefore be hard to read and maintain. This paper introduces a high-level, modular extension of Kappa called LBS-κ. We demonstrate the constructs of the language through examples and three case studies: a chemotaxis switch ring, a MAPK cascade, and an insulin signalling pathway. We then provide a formal definition of LBS-κ through an abstract syntax and a translation to plain Kappa. The translation is implemented in a compiler tool which is available as a web application. We finally demonstrate how to increase the expressivity of LBS-κ through embedded scripts in a general-purpose programming language, a technique which we view as generally applicable to other domain specific languages.

  4. Concurrence of rule- and similarity-based mechanisms in artificial grammar learning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Opitz, Bertram; Hofmann, Juliane

    2015-03-01

    A current theoretical debate regards whether rule-based or similarity-based learning prevails during artificial grammar learning (AGL). Although the majority of findings are consistent with a similarity-based account of AGL it has been argued that these results were obtained only after limited exposure to study exemplars, and performance on subsequent grammaticality judgment tests has often been barely above chance level. In three experiments the conditions were investigated under which rule- and similarity-based learning could be applied. Participants were exposed to exemplars of an artificial grammar under different (implicit and explicit) learning instructions. The analysis of receiver operating characteristics (ROC) during a final grammaticality judgment test revealed that explicit but not implicit learning led to rule knowledge. It also demonstrated that this knowledge base is built up gradually while similarity knowledge governed the initial state of learning. Together these results indicate that rule- and similarity-based mechanisms concur during AGL. Moreover, it could be speculated that two different rule processes might operate in parallel; bottom-up learning via gradual rule extraction and top-down learning via rule testing. Crucially, the latter is facilitated by performance feedback that encourages explicit hypothesis testing. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  5. [Materials for construction sector].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Macchia, C

    2012-01-01

    The construction sector is characterized by high complexity due to several factors. There are a lot of processes within the building sites and they need the use of different materials with the help of appropriate technologies. Traditional materials have evolved and diversified, meanwhile new products and materials appeared and still appear, offering services which meet user needs, but that often involve risks to the health of workers. Research in the field of materials, promoted and carried out at various levels, has led to interesting results, encoded in the form of rules and laws.

  6. Supply Chain Management In Construction Revealed

    OpenAIRE

    Dr. Ghaith Al-Werikat

    2017-01-01

    The construction supply chain plays a major role in the construction market competition. Construction supply chain management assists enterprises by helping to improve competitiveness increase profits and have more control over the different factors and variables within the project. This paper discusses the construction supply chain characteristics challenges and problems supply chains encounter and the benefits of an integrated supply chain in the construction sector.

  7. Constructing a Geology Ontology Using a Relational Database

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hou, W.; Yang, L.; Yin, S.; Ye, J.; Clarke, K.

    2013-12-01

    In geology community, the creation of a common geology ontology has become a useful means to solve problems of data integration, knowledge transformation and the interoperation of multi-source, heterogeneous and multiple scale geological data. Currently, human-computer interaction methods and relational database-based methods are the primary ontology construction methods. Some human-computer interaction methods such as the Geo-rule based method, the ontology life cycle method and the module design method have been proposed for applied geological ontologies. Essentially, the relational database-based method is a reverse engineering of abstracted semantic information from an existing database. The key is to construct rules for the transformation of database entities into the ontology. Relative to the human-computer interaction method, relational database-based methods can use existing resources and the stated semantic relationships among geological entities. However, two problems challenge the development and application. One is the transformation of multiple inheritances and nested relationships and their representation in an ontology. The other is that most of these methods do not measure the semantic retention of the transformation process. In this study, we focused on constructing a rule set to convert the semantics in a geological database into a geological ontology. According to the relational schema of a geological database, a conversion approach is presented to convert a geological spatial database to an OWL-based geological ontology, which is based on identifying semantics such as entities, relationships, inheritance relationships, nested relationships and cluster relationships. The semantic integrity of the transformation was verified using an inverse mapping process. In a geological ontology, an inheritance and union operations between superclass and subclass were used to present the nested relationship in a geochronology and the multiple inheritances

  8. Heuristic simulation of nuclear systems on a supercomputer using the HAL-1987 general-purpose production-rule analysis system

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Ragheb, M.; Gvillo, D.; Makowitz, H.

    1987-01-01

    HAL-1987 is a general-purpose tool for the construction of production-rule analysis systems. It uses the rule-based paradigm from the part of artificial intelligence concerned with knowledge engineering. It uses backward-chaining and forward-chaining in an antecedent-consequent logic, and is programmed in Portable Standard Lisp (PSL). The inference engine is flexible and accommodates general additions and modifications to the knowledge base. The system is used in coupled symbolic-procedural programming adaptive methodologies for stochastic simulations. In Monte Carlo simulations of particle transport, the system considers the pre-processing of the input data to the simulation and adaptively controls the variance reduction process as the simulation progresses. This is accomplished through the use of a knowledge base of rules which encompass the user's expertise in the variance reduction process. It is also applied to the construction of model-based systems for monitoring, fault-diagnosis and crisis-alert in engineering devices, particularly in the field of nuclear reactor safety analysis

  9. COLLABORATIVE NETWORK SECURITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM BASED ON ASSOCIATION MINING RULE

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Nisha Mariam Varughese

    2014-07-01

    Full Text Available Security is one of the major challenges in open network. There are so many types of attacks which follow fixed patterns or frequently change their patterns. It is difficult to find the malicious attack which does not have any fixed patterns. The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS attacks like Botnets are used to slow down the system performance. To address such problems Collaborative Network Security Management System (CNSMS is proposed along with the association mining rule. CNSMS system is consists of collaborative Unified Threat Management (UTM, cloud based security centre and traffic prober. The traffic prober captures the internet traffic and given to the collaborative UTM. Traffic is analysed by the Collaborative UTM, to determine whether it contains any malicious attack or not. If any security event occurs, it will reports to the cloud based security centre. The security centre generates security rules based on association mining rule and distributes to the network. The cloud based security centre is used to store the huge amount of tragic, their logs and the security rule generated. The feedback is evaluated and the invalid rules are eliminated to improve the system efficiency.

  10. Hadronic processes with large transfer momenta and quark counting rules in multiparticle dual amplitude

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Akkelin, S.V.; Kobylinskij, N.A.; Martynov, E.S.

    1989-01-01

    A dual N-particle amplitude satisfying the quark counting rules for the processes with large transfer momenta is constructed. The multiparticle channels are shown to give an essential contribution to the amplitude decreasing power in a hard kinematic limit. 19 refs.; 9 figs

  11. Evaluating chiral symmetry restoration through the use of sum rules

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Rapp Ralf

    2012-11-01

    Full Text Available We pursue the idea of assessing chiral restoration via in-medium modifications of hadronic spectral functions of chiral partners. The usefulness of sum rules in this endeavor is illustrated, focusing on the vector/axial-vector channel. We first present an update on obtaining quantitative results for pertinent vacuum spectral functions. These serve as a basis upon which the in-medium spectral functions can be constructed. A novel feature of our analysis of the vacuum spectral functions is the need to include excited resonances, dictated by satisfying the Weinberg-type sum rules. This includes excited states in both the vector and axial-vector channels.We also analyze the QCD sum rule for the finite temperature vector spectral function, based on a ρ spectral function tested in dilepton data which develops a shoulder at low energies.We find that the ρ′ peak flattens off which may be a sign of chiral restoration, though a study of the finite temperature axial-vector spectral function remains to be carried out.

  12. Proof of Kochen–Specker Theorem: Conversion of Product Rule to Sum Rule

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Toh, S.P.; Zainuddin, Hishamuddin

    2009-01-01

    Valuation functions of observables in quantum mechanics are often expected to obey two constraints called the sum rule and product rule. However, the Kochen–Specker (KS) theorem shows that for a Hilbert space of quantum mechanics of dimension d ≤ 3, these constraints contradict individually with the assumption of value definiteness. The two rules are not irrelated and Peres [Found. Phys. 26 (1996) 807] has conceived a method of converting the product rule into a sum rule for the case of two qubits. Here we apply this method to a proof provided by Mermin based on the product rule for a three-qubit system involving nine operators. We provide the conversion of this proof to one based on sum rule involving ten operators. (general)

  13. Supply Chain Management In Construction Revealed

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Dr. Ghaith Al-Werikat

    2017-03-01

    Full Text Available The construction supply chain plays a major role in the construction market competition. Construction supply chain management assists enterprises by helping to improve competitiveness increase profits and have more control over the different factors and variables within the project. This paper discusses the construction supply chain characteristics challenges and problems supply chains encounter and the benefits of an integrated supply chain in the construction sector.

  14. Object-oriented spatial-temporal association rules mining on ocean remote sensing imagery

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Xue, C J; Dong, Q; Ma, W X

    2014-01-01

    Using the long term marine remote sensing imagery, we develop an object-oriented spatial-temporal association rules mining framework to explore the association rules mining among marine environmental elements. Within the framework, two key issues are addressed. They are how to effectively deal with the related lattices and how to reduce the related dimensions? To deal with the first key issues, this paper develops an object-oriented method for abstracting marine sensitive objects from raster pixels and for representing them with a quadruple. To deal with the second key issues, by embedding the mutual information theory, we construct the direct association pattern tree to reduce the related elements at the first step, and then the Apriori algorithm is used to discover the spatio-temporal associated rules. Finally, Pacific Ocean is taken as a research area and multi- marine remote sensing imagery in recent three decades is used as a case study. The results show that the object-oriented spatio-temporal association rules mining can acquire the associated relationships not only among marine environmental elements in same region, also among the different regions. In addition, the information from association rules mining is much more expressive and informative in space and time than traditional spatio-temporal analysis

  15. Dynamic Construction Scheme for Virtualization Security Service in Software-Defined Networks.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lin, Zhaowen; Tao, Dan; Wang, Zhenji

    2017-04-21

    For a Software Defined Network (SDN), security is an important factor affecting its large-scale deployment. The existing security solutions for SDN mainly focus on the controller itself, which has to handle all the security protection tasks by using the programmability of the network. This will undoubtedly involve a heavy burden for the controller. More devastatingly, once the controller itself is attacked, the entire network will be paralyzed. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a novel security protection architecture for SDN. We design a security service orchestration center in the control plane of SDN, and this center physically decouples from the SDN controller and constructs SDN security services. We adopt virtualization technology to construct a security meta-function library, and propose a dynamic security service composition construction algorithm based on web service composition technology. The rule-combining method is used to combine security meta-functions to construct security services which meet the requirements of users. Moreover, the RETE algorithm is introduced to improve the efficiency of the rule-combining method. We evaluate our solutions in a realistic scenario based on OpenStack. Substantial experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our solutions that contribute to achieve the effective security protection with a small burden of the SDN controller.

  16. The Rare Traces of Constructional Procedures in `Practical Geometries´

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Høyrup, Jens

    2009-01-01

    measurements. As a rule it is not interested in geometrical construction, nor in the making of measurements - the fields, broadly speaking, of master builders/architects and surveyors. The paper discusses two cases - one fairly well-established, another more conjectural - where none the less "scribal...

  17. A brief review of the construction aggregates market

    Science.gov (United States)

    Willett, Jason Christopher

    2012-01-01

    The U.S. Geological Survey defines the construction aggregates industry as those companies that mine and process crushed stone and/or construction sand and gravel. Aggregates have been used from the earliest times of our civilization for a variety of purposes - construction being the major use. As construction aggregates, crushed stone and construction sand and gravel are the basic raw materials used to build the foundation for modern society. The widespread use of construction aggregates is the result of their general availability throughout the country and around the world along with their relatively low cost. Although construction aggregates have a low unit value, their widespread use makes them major contributors to, and indicators of, the economic well-being of the nation.

  18. Using Rule-Based Computer Programming to Unify Communication Rules Research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sanford, David L.; Roach, J. W.

    This paper proposes the use of a rule-based computer programming language as a standard for the expression of rules, arguing that the adoption of a standard would enable researchers to communicate about rules in a consistent and significant way. Focusing on the formal equivalence of artificial intelligence (AI) programming to different types of…

  19. Fossils, molecules, divergence times, and the origin of lissamphibians.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Marjanović, David; Laurin, Michel

    2007-06-01

    A review of the paleontological literature shows that the early dates of appearance of Lissamphibia recently inferred from molecular data do not favor an origin of extant amphibians from temnospondyls, contrary to recent claims. A supertree is assembled using new Mesquite modules that allow extinct taxa to be incorporated into a time-calibrated phylogeny with a user-defined geological time scale. The supertree incorporates 223 extinct species of lissamphibians and has a highly significant stratigraphic fit. Some divergences can even be dated with sufficient precision to serve as calibration points in molecular divergence date analyses. Fourteen combinations of minimal branch length settings and 10 random resolutions for each polytomy give much more recent minimal origination times of lissamphibian taxa than recent studies based on a phylogenetic analyses of molecular sequences. Attempts to replicate recent molecular date estimates show that these estimates depend strongly on the choice of calibration points, on the dating method, and on the chosen model of evolution; for instance, the estimate for the date of the origin of Lissamphibia can lie between 351 and 266 Mya. This range of values is generally compatible with our time-calibrated supertree and indicates that there is no unbridgeable gap between dates obtained using the fossil record and those using molecular evidence, contrary to previous suggestions.

  20. Advanced construction methods in ACR

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Elgohary, M.; Choy, E.; Yu, S.K.W.

    2002-01-01

    The ACR - Advanced CANDU Reactor, developed by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), is designed with constructability considerations as a major requirement during all project phases from the concept design stage to the detail design stage. This necessitated a much more comprehensive approach in including constructability considerations in the design to ensure that the construction duration is met. For the ACR-700, a project schedule of 48 months has been developed for the nth replicated unit with a 36 month construction period duration from First Concrete to Fuel Load. An overall construction strategy that builds on the success of the construction methods that are proven in the construction of the Qinshan CANDU 6 project has been developed for the ACR. The overall construction strategy comprises the 'Open Top' construction technique using a Very Heavy Lift crane, parallel construction activities, with extensive modularization and prefabrication. In addition, significant applications of up to date construction technology will be implemented, e.g. large volume concrete pours, prefabricated rebar, use of climbing forms, composite structures, prefabricated permanent formwork, automatic welding, and utilization of the latest electronic technology tools such as 3D CADDs modelling yields a very high quality, clash free product to allow construction to be completed 'right the first time' and eliminates rework. Integration of 3D CADDs models and scheduling tools such as Primavera has allowed development of actual construction sequences and an iterative approach to schedule verification and improvement. Modularization and prefabrication are major features of the ACR design in order to achieve the project schedule. For the reactor building approximately 80% of the volume will be installed as modules or prefabricated assembles. This ensures critical path activities are achieved. This paper examines the advanced construction methods implemented in the design in order to

  1. Distinguishing the Noise and image structures for detecting the correction term and filtering the noise by using fuzzy rules

    OpenAIRE

    Sridevi.Ravada,; Vani prasanna.Kanakala,; Ramya.Koilada

    2011-01-01

    A fuzzy filter is constructed from a set of fuzzy IF-THEN rules, these fuzzy rules come either from human experts or by matching input-output pairs .in this paper we propose a new fuzzy filter for the noise reduction of images corrupted with additive noise. here in this approach ,initially fuzzy derivatives for all eight directions that is N,E,W,S, NE,NW,SE,SW are calculated using “fuzzy IF-THEN rules “ and membership functions . Further the fuzzy derivative values obtained are used in the fu...

  2. New Jersey proposes rule reducing NOx emissions

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Anon.

    1993-01-01

    The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and Energy has proposed a rule requiring utility and industrial sources to significantly reduce their emission levels of nitrogen oxide (NO x ). If approved, it will be the first major rule mandated by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 to affect New Jersey's stationary sources of these air pollutants - primarily electric generating utilities and other large fossil fuel burning facilities. The proposed rule requires all facilities with the potential to emit 25 tons or more of NO x each year to install reasonably available control technology by May 30, 1995. According to Richard Sinding, the environment and energy agency's assistant commissioner for policy and planning, the rule will likely require installation of low-NO x burners or other modifications to the combustion process. Sinding says the proposed rule will reduce the State's NO x emissions by approximately 30,000 tons a year, roughly 30 percent from current levels from these stationary sources. The pollution prevention measures are estimated to cost approximately $1,000 for each ton of NO x removed. The state energy agency estimates the average residential utility customer will see an increase in the monthly electric bill of about 50 cents. The agency said the proposed regulation includes provisions to make implementation more flexible and less costly for achieving the NO x reductions. It has approved the use of natural gas during the ozone season if low-NO x burners are not available. Additionally, emissions may be averaged from all units at the same utility or company location, effectively allowing a company to select the most cost-effective method of achieving the required emissions reductions

  3. Convention on nuclear safety. Rules of procedure and financial rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1998-01-01

    The document presents the Rules of Procedure and Financial Rules that apply mutatis mutandis to any meeting of the Contracting Parties to the Convention on Nuclear Safety (INFCIRC/449) convened in accordance with Chapter 3 of the Convention. It includes four parts: General provisions, Preparatory process for review meetings, Review meetings, and Amendment and interpretation of rules

  4. Delayed rule following.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schmitt, D R

    2001-01-01

    Although the elements of a fully stated rule (discriminative stimulus [S(D)], some behavior, and a consequence) can occur nearly contemporaneously with the statement of the rule, there is often a delay between the rule statement and the S(D). The effects of this delay on rule following have not been studied in behavior analysis, but they have been investigated in rule-like settings in the areas of prospective memory (remembering to do something in the future) and goal pursuit. Discriminative events for some behavior can be event based (a specific setting stimulus) or time based. The latter are more demanding with respect to intention following and show age-related deficits. Studies suggest that the specificity with which the components of a rule (termed intention) are stated has a substantial effect on intention following, with more detailed specifications increasing following. Reminders of an intention, too, are most effective when they refer specifically to both the behavior and its occasion. Covert review and written notes are two effective strategies for remembering everyday intentions, but people who use notes appear not to be able to switch quickly to covert review. By focusing on aspects of the setting and rule structure, research on prospective memory and goal pursuit expands the agenda for a more complete explanation of rule effects.

  5. Hamburg rules V Hague Visby rules an English perspective

    OpenAIRE

    Tozaj Dorian; Xhelilaj Ermal

    2010-01-01

    It has often been argued for the effect of defences provided to carriers under Art IV (2) of Hague Visby Rules to almost nullify the protection guaranteed to shippers in other provisions of this convention. Therefore an all embracing universal shipper friendly convention, merely the Hamburg Rules, need be incorporated in all countries in order to address this issue and fully satisfy the intentions of the parties for the establishment of international rules in international trade

  6. Sensory Intelligence for Extraction of an Abstract Auditory Rule: A Cross-Linguistic Study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guo, Xiao-Tao; Wang, Xiao-Dong; Liang, Xiu-Yuan; Wang, Ming; Chen, Lin

    2018-02-21

    In a complex linguistic environment, while speech sounds can greatly vary, some shared features are often invariant. These invariant features constitute so-called abstract auditory rules. Our previous study has shown that with auditory sensory intelligence, the human brain can automatically extract the abstract auditory rules in the speech sound stream, presumably serving as the neural basis for speech comprehension. However, whether the sensory intelligence for extraction of abstract auditory rules in speech is inherent or experience-dependent remains unclear. To address this issue, we constructed a complex speech sound stream using auditory materials in Mandarin Chinese, in which syllables had a flat lexical tone but differed in other acoustic features to form an abstract auditory rule. This rule was occasionally and randomly violated by the syllables with the rising, dipping or falling tone. We found that both Chinese and foreign speakers detected the violations of the abstract auditory rule in the speech sound stream at a pre-attentive stage, as revealed by the whole-head recordings of mismatch negativity (MMN) in a passive paradigm. However, MMNs peaked earlier in Chinese speakers than in foreign speakers. Furthermore, Chinese speakers showed different MMN peak latencies for the three deviant types, which paralleled recognition points. These findings indicate that the sensory intelligence for extraction of abstract auditory rules in speech sounds is innate but shaped by language experience. Copyright © 2018 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  7. Designing collective behavior in a termite-inspired robot construction team.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Werfel, Justin; Petersen, Kirstin; Nagpal, Radhika

    2014-02-14

    Complex systems are characterized by many independent components whose low-level actions produce collective high-level results. Predicting high-level results given low-level rules is a key open challenge; the inverse problem, finding low-level rules that give specific outcomes, is in general still less understood. We present a multi-agent construction system inspired by mound-building termites, solving such an inverse problem. A user specifies a desired structure, and the system automatically generates low-level rules for independent climbing robots that guarantee production of that structure. Robots use only local sensing and coordinate their activity via the shared environment. We demonstrate the approach via a physical realization with three autonomous climbing robots limited to onboard sensing. This work advances the aim of engineering complex systems that achieve specific human-designed goals.

  8. Compliance as process: Work safety in the Chinese construction industry

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Li, Na

    2016-01-01

    China is facing a key challenge of achieving compliance in many regulatory areas. Responding to such issue, this research reports on an exploratory empirical study of how the regulated construction businesses comply with work safety rules in China. Building on the existing literature, it develops a

  9. The construct validity of the Major Depression Inventory: A Rasch analysis of a self-rating scale in primary care.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nielsen, Marie Germund; Ørnbøl, Eva; Vestergaard, Mogens; Bech, Per; Christensen, Kaj Sparle

    2017-06-01

    We aimed to assess the measurement properties of the ten-item Major Depression Inventory when used on clinical suspicion in general practice by performing a Rasch analysis. General practitioners asked consecutive persons to respond to the web-based Major Depression Inventory on clinical suspicion of depression. We included 22 practices and 245 persons. Rasch analysis was performed using RUMM2030 software. The Rasch model fit suggests that all items contribute to a single underlying trait (defined as internal construct validity). Mokken analysis was used to test dimensionality and scalability. Our Rasch analysis showed misfit concerning the sleep and appetite items (items 9 and 10). The response categories were disordered for eight items. After modifying the original six-point to a four-point scoring system for all items, we achieved ordered response categories for all ten items. The person separation reliability was acceptable (0.82) for the initial model. Dimensionality testing did not support combining the ten items to create a total score. The scale appeared to be well targeted to this clinical sample. No significant differential item functioning was observed for gender, age, work status and education. The Rasch and Mokken analyses revealed two dimensions, but the Major Depression Inventory showed fit to one scale if items 9 and 10 were excluded. Our study indicated scalability problems in the current version of the Major Depression Inventory. The conducted analysis revealed better statistical fit when items 9 and 10 were excluded. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  10. Analysis, Simulation, and Verification of Knowledge-Based, Rule-Based, and Expert Systems

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hinchey, Mike; Rash, James; Erickson, John; Gracanin, Denis; Rouff, Chris

    2010-01-01

    Mathematically sound techniques are used to view a knowledge-based system (KBS) as a set of processes executing in parallel and being enabled in response to specific rules being fired. The set of processes can be manipulated, examined, analyzed, and used in a simulation. The tool that embodies this technology may warn developers of errors in their rules, but may also highlight rules (or sets of rules) in the system that are underspecified (or overspecified) and need to be corrected for the KBS to operate as intended. The rules embodied in a KBS specify the allowed situations, events, and/or results of the system they describe. In that sense, they provide a very abstract specification of a system. The system is implemented through the combination of the system specification together with an appropriate inference engine, independent of the algorithm used in that inference engine. Viewing the rule base as a major component of the specification, and choosing an appropriate specification notation to represent it, reveals how additional power can be derived from an approach to the knowledge-base system that involves analysis, simulation, and verification. This innovative approach requires no special knowledge of the rules, and allows a general approach where standardized analysis, verification, simulation, and model checking techniques can be applied to the KBS.

  11. Resolving task rule incongruence during task switching by competitor rule suppression.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Meiran, Nachshon; Hsieh, Shulan; Dimov, Eduard

    2010-07-01

    Task switching requires maintaining readiness to execute any task of a given set of tasks. However, when tasks switch, the readiness to execute the now-irrelevant task generates interference, as seen in the task rule incongruence effect. Overcoming such interference requires fine-tuned inhibition that impairs task readiness only minimally. In an experiment involving 2 object classification tasks and 2 location classification tasks, the authors show that irrelevant task rules that generate response conflicts are inhibited. This competitor rule suppression (CRS) is seen in response slowing in subsequent trials, when the competing rules become relevant. CRS is shown to operate on specific rules without affecting similar rules. CRS and backward inhibition, which is another inhibitory phenomenon, produced additive effects on reaction time, suggesting their mutual independence. Implications for current formal theories of task switching as well as for conflict monitoring theories are discussed. (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved

  12. ASPECTS OF MULTIMODAL TRANSPORT IN THE ROTTERDAM RULES

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Alina SULICU

    2012-11-01

    Full Text Available The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea (hereinafter – The Rotterdam Rules or Convention signed on 23 September 2009 is taking a novel approach to international trade. It might be the reason why it has not received positive acknowledgement from the signatories, law experts and other interested parties. However, one might wonder whether the trade itself stayed novel-free during the past several decades. It should not come as a surprise that it has not. Tackle-to tackle approach is no longer applicable to a majority of contracts concluded that provide for delivery to the consignee’s doorstep, as of 1970 container ships and container terminals dominate cargo handling in ports and onboard the ship, electronic communication and documentation is becoming a common feature in the current trade. Even if there are more developments to be named, the aforementioned three make the regime under the Hague ,Hague-Visby and Hamburg Rules appear outdated. So is the unfamiliar approach as envisioned by the Rotterdam Rules really such a big failure?

  13. Update on ASME rules for spent nuclear fuel and high level radioactive material and waste storage containments

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Ralph S. Hill III; Foster, G.M.

    2005-01-01

    In 2004, a new Code Case, N-717, of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (Code) was published. The Code Case provides rules for construction of containments used for storage of spent nuclear fuel and high level radioactive material and waste. The Code Case has been incorporated into Section III of the Code as Division 3, Subsection WC, Class SC Storage Containments, and will be published in the 2005 Addenda. This paper provides an informative background and insight for these rules to provide Owners, regulators, designers, and fabricators with a more comprehensive understanding of the technical basis for these rules. (authors)

  14. Cooperation in Construction:

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Vogelius, Peter; Storgaard, Kresten

    2016-01-01

    The study presents a building project executed by a major Danish construction company, where cooperation and its staging were essential for achieving high productivity and competitiveness. The form of this cooperation is the main theme for the article. The contractor actively changed the communic......The study presents a building project executed by a major Danish construction company, where cooperation and its staging were essential for achieving high productivity and competitiveness. The form of this cooperation is the main theme for the article. The contractor actively changed...... the companies in the case can be understood as possessing a social capital which is enforced and united by initiatives of the main contractor. The social capital was built up and maintained through the actual constitution of cooperation already in the initial phase of bidding before the building process....... The management logic of the main contractor is interpreted as based on a sociology-inspired understanding focusing on norms and social values rather than on contractual (law) and functional (engineering) logic, which had hitherto been prevalent in Danish construction management....

  15. Electronuclear sum rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Arenhoevel, H.; Drechsel, D.; Weber, H.J.

    1978-01-01

    Generalized sum rules are derived by integrating the electromagnetic structure functions along lines of constant ratio of momentum and energy transfer. For non-relativistic systems these sum rules are related to the conventional photonuclear sum rules by a scaling transformation. The generalized sum rules are connected with the absorptive part of the forward scattering amplitude of virtual photons. The analytic structure of the scattering amplitudes and the possible existence of dispersion relations have been investigated in schematic relativistic and non-relativistic models. While for the non-relativistic case analyticity does not hold, the relativistic scattering amplitude is analytical for time-like (but not for space-like) photons and relations similar to the Gell-Mann-Goldberger-Thirring sum rule exist. (Auth.)

  16. Construction Safety Forecast for ITER

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    cadwallader, lee charles

    2006-11-01

    The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project is poised to begin its construction activity. This paper gives an estimate of construction safety as if the experiment was being built in the United States. This estimate of construction injuries and potential fatalities serves as a useful forecast of what can be expected for construction of such a major facility in any country. These data should be considered by the ITER International Team as it plans for safety during the construction phase. Based on average U.S. construction rates, ITER may expect a lost workday case rate of < 4.0 and a fatality count of 0.5 to 0.9 persons per year.

  17. Voting paradoxes and group coherence the condorcet efficiency of voting rules

    CERN Document Server

    Gehrlein, William V

    2011-01-01

    This book argues that strange election outcomes should become less likely as voters' preferences become more mutually coherent. It also focuses on the Condorcet Criterion, which states that pairwise majority rule winner should be chosen as the election winner.

  18. Workshop presentation: research guidelines for Construction Management

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Marco Alvise Bragadin

    2013-10-01

    Full Text Available Nowadays the European economic system challenges the construction sector to take part to industrial recovery of western countries. In co-operation with the Construction Production research group of the Tampere University of of research about construction management tools and methods were detected. Research guidelines: 1 Construction management: tools and methods to manage construction projects 2 environmental impact of construction projects 3 construction management and safety 4 project procurement 5 construction management for major public works & complex projects

  19. Integrated risk management for improving internal traffic control, work-zone safety, and mobility during major construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-10-01

    Highway construction is among the most dangerous industries in the US. Internal traffic control design, along with how construction : equipment and vehicles interact with the traveling public, have a significant effect on how safe a highway construct...

  20. Quantum Computing in Decoherence-Free Subspace Constructed by Triangulation

    OpenAIRE

    Bi, Qiao; Guo, Liu; Ruda, H. E.

    2010-01-01

    A formalism for quantum computing in decoherence-free subspaces is presented. The constructed subspaces are partial triangulated to an index related to environment. The quantum states in the subspaces are just projected states which are ruled by a subdynamic kinetic equation. These projected states can be used to perform ideal quantum logical operations without decoherence.

  1. Choosing the rules: distinct and overlapping frontoparietal representations of task rules for perceptual decisions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Jiaxiang; Kriegeskorte, Nikolaus; Carlin, Johan D; Rowe, James B

    2013-07-17

    Behavior is governed by rules that associate stimuli with responses and outcomes. Human and monkey studies have shown that rule-specific information is widely represented in the frontoparietal cortex. However, it is not known how establishing a rule under different contexts affects its neural representation. Here, we use event-related functional MRI (fMRI) and multivoxel pattern classification methods to investigate the human brain's mechanisms of establishing and maintaining rules for multiple perceptual decision tasks. Rules were either chosen by participants or specifically instructed to them, and the fMRI activation patterns representing rule-specific information were compared between these contexts. We show that frontoparietal regions differ in the properties of their rule representations during active maintenance before execution. First, rule-specific information maintained in the dorsolateral and medial frontal cortex depends on the context in which it was established (chosen vs specified). Second, rule representations maintained in the ventrolateral frontal and parietal cortex are independent of the context in which they were established. Furthermore, we found that the rule-specific coding maintained in anticipation of stimuli may change with execution of the rule: representations in context-independent regions remain invariant from maintenance to execution stages, whereas rule representations in context-dependent regions do not generalize to execution stage. The identification of distinct frontoparietal systems with context-independent and context-dependent task rule representations, and the distinction between anticipatory and executive rule representations, provide new insights into the functional architecture of goal-directed behavior.

  2. Smooth criminal: convicted rule-breakers show reduced cognitive conflict during deliberate rule violations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jusyte, Aiste; Pfister, Roland; Mayer, Sarah V; Schwarz, Katharina A; Wirth, Robert; Kunde, Wilfried; Schönenberg, Michael

    2017-09-01

    Classic findings on conformity and obedience document a strong and automatic drive of human agents to follow any type of rule or social norm. At the same time, most individuals tend to violate rules on occasion, and such deliberate rule violations have recently been shown to yield cognitive conflict for the rule-breaker. These findings indicate persistent difficulty to suppress the rule representation, even though rule violations were studied in a controlled experimental setting with neither gains nor possible sanctions for violators. In the current study, we validate these findings by showing that convicted criminals, i.e., individuals with a history of habitual and severe forms of rule violations, can free themselves from such cognitive conflict in a similarly controlled laboratory task. These findings support an emerging view that aims at understanding rule violations from the perspective of the violating agent rather than from the perspective of outside observer.

  3. A majority in favour of the construction of further nuclear power stations

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Anon.

    1978-01-01

    The results of an opinion poll of 5000 German-speaking persons in Bern Canton, Switzerland are summarised and commented on. 54% of those questioned expressed approval of further nuclear power station construction in Switzerland. (F.Q.)

  4. Global Governance: A New Paradigm for the Rule of Law

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Winston P. Nagan

    2013-10-01

    Full Text Available This article seeks to appraise the Rule of Law in the context of international sovereignty and the growth of international non-governmental organizations. The article explores the meaning of the Rule of Law and suggests that it is better understood as a symbol representing the most basic values that underline our global constitutional system. When we relate the global Rule of Law to the values and the global constitutional framework, we recognize that the Rule of Law and the global constitution are better secured if their authority base can be strengthened. The obvious way this can be done is by strengthening the role of non-governmental organizations within the framework of global governance. If we see the Rule of Law as a defense and promotion of basic values, we may then pose the question about the Rule of Law as an agent of change in a novel developmental construct. Here the author notes that the dynamism of technological change will only increase in the future. But technological change will result in more use of technology and less employment. The question then is, should the benefits of technology not be shared with the workers as well? If that is true, one of the obvious benefits of technology in relation to labor is to reduce the number of hours or days that the worker has to work. Leisure time could result in an aggregate distribution of human happiness. It could evolve into an incentive to generate enhanced human co-creative activity. We could possibly even imagine a second renaissance in the impact of human imagination on society. A modern renaissance. In short, such a development could stimulate the evolution of a human rights based aesthetic.

  5. Execution of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1994 in the Construction Industry from Contractors’ Point of View

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Awang H.

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available Construction is one of the highest contributing industries to occupational accidents by sector in Malaysia. Statistics have been drawn from year to year that show an increasing number of cases of accidents by industry sector. While it is impossible to completely eliminate all accidents, with a proper and effective safety and health policy or rules set by top management, especially contractors, the rate of accidents on construction sites can be reduced. The main objective of this study is to analyse the degree of application of the Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994 (OSHA 1994 in the construction industry and to identify the contributing factors leading to a lack of execution of OSHA 1994 on construction sites with a primary focus on contractors’ point of view. Five on-going construction projects in Perak were selected as case studies and site inspections were conducted. The results showed that none of the contractors have fully implemented the rules and regulations provided by the government. Within this report, some recommendations are made towards enhancing the safety and health issues on construction sites.

  6. The Rules of the Game—The Rules of the Player

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Thorhauge, Anne Mette

    2013-01-01

    of the game manager in order to implement the rules and provide a world for the other players. In online role-playing games, a programmed system simulates the rule system as well as part of the game manager’s tasks, while the rest of the activity is up to the players to define. Some aspects may translate more......This article presents a critical view of the concept of rules in game studies on the basis of a case study of role-playing across media. Role-playing in its traditional form is a complex activity including a game system and a number of communicative conventions where one player takes the role...... or less unproblematically across media, others are transformed by the introduction of the programmed system. This reveals some important perspectives on the sort of rules that can be simulated in a programmed system and what this means to the concept of rules in game studies....

  7. Political Leadership in Issue Networks : How Mayors Rule Their World?

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Denters, Sebastianus A.H.; Steyvers, Kristof; Klok, Pieter-Jan; Cermak, Daniel; Heinelt, Hubert; Magnier, Annick; Cabria, Marcello; Reynaert, Herwig

    2018-01-01

    In his controversial book If Mayors Ruled the World, US political theorist Benjamin Barber argued that mayors can and do play a major role in solving today’s grand societal challenges in domains like social inclusion and poverty, climate change and sustainability and safety and public order. It is

  8. Quantum Computing in Decoherence-Free Subspace Constructed by Triangulation

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Qiao Bi

    2010-01-01

    Full Text Available A formalism for quantum computing in decoherence-free subspaces is presented. The constructed subspaces are partial triangulated to an index related to environment. The quantum states in the subspaces are just projected states which are ruled by a subdynamic kinetic equation. These projected states can be used to perform ideal quantum logical operations without decoherence.

  9. Study of market model describing the contrary behaviors of informed and uninformed agents: Being minority and being majority

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Yu-Xia; Liao, Hao; Medo, Matus; Shang, Ming-Sheng; Yeung, Chi Ho

    2016-05-01

    In this paper we analyze the contrary behaviors of the informed investors and uniformed investors, and then construct a competition model with two groups of agents, namely agents who intend to stay in minority and those who intend to stay in majority. We find two kinds of competitions, inter- and intra-groups. The model shows periodic fluctuation feature. The average distribution of strategies illustrates a prominent central peak which is relevant to the peak-fat-tail character of price change distribution in stock markets. Furthermore, in the modified model the tolerance time parameter makes the agents diversified. Finally, we compare the strategies distribution with the price change distribution in real stock market, and we conclude that contrary behavior rules and tolerance time parameter are indeed valid in the description of market model.

  10. Comparing Phylogenetic Trees by Matching Nodes Using the Transfer Distance Between Partitions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bogdanowicz, Damian; Giaro, Krzysztof

    2017-05-01

    Ability to quantify dissimilarity of different phylogenetic trees describing the relationship between the same group of taxa is required in various types of phylogenetic studies. For example, such metrics are used to assess the quality of phylogeny construction methods, to define optimization criteria in supertree building algorithms, or to find horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events. Among the set of metrics described so far in the literature, the most commonly used seems to be the Robinson-Foulds distance. In this article, we define a new metric for rooted trees-the Matching Pair (MP) distance. The MP metric uses the concept of the minimum-weight perfect matching in a complete bipartite graph constructed from partitions of all pairs of leaves of the compared phylogenetic trees. We analyze the properties of the MP metric and present computational experiments showing its potential applicability in tasks related to finding the HGT events.

  11. Magnetic moment for the negative parity Λ→Σ0 transition in light cone QCD sum rules

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    T.M. Aliev

    2016-07-01

    Full Text Available The magnetic moment of the Λ→Σ0 transition between negative parity baryons is calculated in framework of the QCD sum rules approach by using the general form of the interpolating currents. The pollution arising from the positive-to-positive, and positive-to-negative parity baryons is eliminated by constructing the sum rules for different Lorentz structures. A comparison of our result with the predictions of the results of other approaches for the positive parity baryons is presented.

  12. 76 FR 27801 - Capital Requirements of Swap Dealers and Major Swap Participants

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-05-12

    ... swaps, debt or equity securities, foreign currency, physical commodities, and other derivatives. The..., 23, and 140 Capital Requirements of Swap Dealers and Major Swap Participants; Proposed Rule #0;#0...

  13. RuleMaDrone: A Web-Interface to Visualise Space Usage Rules for Drones

    OpenAIRE

    Trippaers, Aäron

    2015-01-01

    RuleMaDrone, an application developed within this thesis, is presented as a solution to communicate the rules and regulations to drone operators. To provide the solution a framework for drone safety was designed which consists of the rules and regulations, the drone properties and the environmental factors. RuleMaDrone is developed with this framework and thus will provide drone operators with an application which they can use to find a safe and legal fly zone. RuleMaDrone u...

  14. Using Augmented Reality to Plan Virtual Construction Worksite

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Xiangyu Wang

    2007-12-01

    Full Text Available Current construction worksite layout planning heavily relies on 2D paper media where the worksite planners sketch the future layout adjacent to their real environment. This traditional approach turns out to be ineffective and prone to error because only experienced and well-trained planners are able to generate the effective layout design with paper sketch. Augmented Reality (AR, as a new user interface technology, introduces a completely new perspective for construction worksite planning. This paper disucsses the related AR work and issues in construction and describes the concept and prototype of an AR-based construction planning tool, AR Planner with virtual elements sets and tangible interface. The focus of the paper is to identify and integrate worksite planning rules into the AR planner with the purpose of intelligently preventing potential planning errors and process inefficiency, thus maximizing the overall productivity. Future work includes refining and verifying AR Planner in realistic projects.

  15. Using Augmented Reality to Plan Virtual Construction Worksite

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Xiangyu Wang

    2008-11-01

    Full Text Available Current construction worksite layout planning heavily relies on 2D paper media where the worksite planners sketch the future layout adjacent to their real environment. This traditional approach turns out to be ineffective and prone to error because only experienced and well-trained planners are able to generate the effective layout design with paper sketch. Augmented Reality (AR, as a new user interface technology, introduces a completely new perspective for construction worksite planning. This paper disucsses the related AR work and issues in construction and describes the concept and prototype of an AR-based construction planning tool, AR Planner with virtual elements sets and tangible interface. The focus of the paper is to identify and integrate worksite planning rules into the AR planner with the purpose of intelligently preventing potential planning errors and process inefficiency, thus maximizing the overall productivity. Future work includes refining and verifying AR Planner in realistic projects.

  16. Strategy as simple rules.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Eisenhardt, K M; Sull, D N

    2001-01-01

    The success of Yahoo!, eBay, Enron, and other companies that have become adept at morphing to meet the demands of changing markets can't be explained using traditional thinking about competitive strategy. These companies have succeeded by pursuing constantly evolving strategies in market spaces that were considered unattractive according to traditional measures. In this article--the third in an HBR series by Kathleen Eisenhardt and Donald Sull on strategy in the new economy--the authors ask, what are the sources of competitive advantage in high-velocity markets? The secret, they say, is strategy as simple rules. The companies know that the greatest opportunities for competitive advantage lie in market confusion, but they recognize the need for a few crucial strategic processes and a few simple rules. In traditional strategy, advantage comes from exploiting resources or stable market positions. In strategy as simple rules, advantage comes from successfully seizing fleeting opportunities. Key strategic processes, such as product innovation, partnering, or spinout creation, place the company where the flow of opportunities is greatest. Simple rules then provide the guidelines within which managers can pursue such opportunities. Simple rules, which grow out of experience, fall into five broad categories: how- to rules, boundary conditions, priority rules, timing rules, and exit rules. Companies with simple-rules strategies must follow the rules religiously and avoid the temptation to change them too frequently. A consistent strategy helps managers sort through opportunities and gain short-term advantage by exploiting the attractive ones. In stable markets, managers rely on complicated strategies built on detailed predictions of the future. But when business is complicated, strategy should be simple.

  17. Construction safety program for the National Ignition Facility

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Cerruti, S.J.

    1997-01-01

    The Construction Safety Program (CSP) for NIF sets forth the responsibilities, guidelines, rules, policies and regulations for all workers involved in the construction, special equipment installation, acceptance testing, and initial activation and operation of NIF at LLNL during the construction period of NIF. During this period, all workers are required to implement measures to create a universal awareness which promotes safe practice at the work site, and which will achieve NIF's management objectives in preventing accidents and illnesses. Construction safety for NIF is predicated on everyone performing their jobs in a manner which prevents job-related disabling injuries and illnesses. The CSP outlines the minimum environment, safety, and health (ES ampersand H) standards, LLNL policies and the Construction Industry Institute (CII) Zero Injury Techniques requirements that all workers at the NIF construction site shall adhere to during the construction period of NIF. It identifies the safety requirements which the NIF organizational Elements, construction contractors and construction subcontractors must include in their safety plans for the construction period of NIF, and presents safety protocols and guidelines which workers shall follow to assure a safe and healthful work environment. The CSP also identifies the ES ampersand H responsibilities of LLNL employees, non-LLNL employees, construction contractors, construction subcontractors, and various levels of management within the NIF Program at LLNL. In addition, the CSP contains the responsibilities and functions of ES ampersand H support organizations and administrative groups, and describes their interactions with the NIF Program

  18. Construction safety program for the National Ignition Facility

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Cerruti, S.J.

    1997-01-01

    The Construction Safety Program (CSP) for NIF sets forth the responsibilities, guidelines, rules, policies and regulations for all workers involved in the construction, special equipment installation, acceptance testing, and initial activation and operation of NIF at LLNL during the construction period of NIF. During this period, all workers are required to implement measures to create a universal awareness which promotes safe practice at the work site, and which will achieve NIF`s management objectives in preventing accidents and illnesses. Construction safety for NIF is predicated on everyone performing their jobs in a manner which prevents job-related disabling injuries and illnesses. The CSP outlines the minimum environment, safety, and health (ES&H) standards, LLNL policies and the Construction Industry Institute (CII) Zero Injury Techniques requirements that all workers at the NIF construction site shall adhere to during the construction period of NIF. It identifies the safety requirements which the NIF organizational Elements, construction contractors and construction subcontractors must include in their safety plans for the construction period of NIF, and presents safety protocols and guidelines which workers shall follow to assure a safe and healthful work environment. The CSP also identifies the ES&H responsibilities of LLNL employees, non-LLNL employees, construction contractors, construction subcontractors, and various levels of management within the NIF Program at LLNL. In addition, the CSP contains the responsibilities and functions of ES&H support organizations and administrative groups, and describes their interactions with the NIF Program.

  19. Construction of hydroelectric project generation: Focuses of the option value

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Villegas P, Clara Ines

    2002-01-01

    Work present work aims at the development of an analysis, that using the option value approach allows finding the optimal moment (from the environmental point of view), for the construction of an electrical project generation in a zone with determined environmental characteristics. The construction of the project, constitutes an irreversible decision and with uncertainty associated. The evolution of the environmental damage of the zone can be attracting through the variable C of environmental damage. The analysis developed here allows the characterization of a rule (or a barrier of environmental damage called C, which determines when, is optimal to construct the generation project or to conserve the ecosystems of the zone of location. Over this barrier, the construction of the project becomes optimal and below her the conservation of the ecosystems of the zone is privileged

  20. Qinshan CANDU project open top construction method

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Petrunik, K.J.; Wittann, K.; Khan, A.; Ricciuti, R.; Ivanov, A.; Chen, S.

    2003-01-01

    The significant schedule reductions achieved on the Qinshan CANDU Project were due in large part to the incorporation of advanced construction technologies in project design and delivery. For the Qinshan Project, a number of key advantages were realized through the use of the 'Open Top' construction method. This paper discusses the Qinshan Phase III CANDU Project Open Top implementation method. The Open Top method allowed major equipment to be installed simply, via the use of a Very Heavy Lift (VHL) crane and permitted the use of large-scale modularization. The advantages of Open Top construction, such as simplified access, more flexible project scheduling, improved construction safety and quality, and reduced labours are presented. The large-scale modularization of the Reactor Building Dousing System and the Open Top installation method and advantages relative to traditional CANDU 6 construction practices are also presented. Finally, major improvements for future CANDU plant construction using the Open Top method are discussed. (author)

  1. 49 CFR 222.41 - How does this rule affect Pre-Rule Quiet Zones and Pre-Rule Partial Quiet Zones?

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-10-01

    ...-Rule Quiet Zone may be established by automatic approval and remain in effect, subject to § 222.51, if... Zone may be established by automatic approval and remain in effect, subject to § 222.51, if the Pre... 49 Transportation 4 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false How does this rule affect Pre-Rule Quiet Zones and...

  2. Constructing a Scientific Explanation—A Narrative Account

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yeo, Jennifer; Gilbert, John K.

    2014-07-01

    Studies analyzing explanations that have been constructed by science students have found that they were generally weak and lack necessary features. The goal of this study was to establish the competencies that one needs to construct a scientific explanation. Scientific explanations can be looked at in three ways, in terms of their function, form and level, as being essentially sign-making processes. Taking a case study approach and using Lemke's multimodal framework, we analyzed the scientific explanation of an electromagnetic induction phenomenon constructed by one high school student. We found that such a construction involves the complex coordination of different types of signs, not only to represent the entities in the phenomenon, but also to support thinking and reasoning about it at abstract levels. Scientific conventions and rules, and everyday material and social tools were found to be crucial in shifting from one level of abstraction to another. The findings highlight the importance of developing the skillful use of schemes of scientific representation by students and familiarizing them with commonly encountered contexts.

  3. Using the Chain Rule as the Key Link in Deriving the General Rules for Differentiation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sprows, David

    2011-01-01

    The standard approach to the general rules for differentiation is to first derive the power, product, and quotient rules and then derive the chain rule. In this short article we give an approach to these rules which uses the chain rule as the main tool in deriving the power, product, and quotient rules in a manner which is more student-friendly…

  4. Construction Improvement for the Korean Nuclear Program

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Yang, T. E.

    1992-01-01

    Construction of the nine Nuclear plants requires an enormous financial investment. The decision to build a nuclear unit is based on both economic and resource requirements. Korea has few natural resources to use for power generation so the use of diversified fuel sources is a part of the planning process. Nuclear has historically had economic advantages over the fossil fueled plant, however, this advantage has been reduced. This is mainly due to increasing decommissioning and waste disposal costs plus the financial outlays associated with gaining public acceptance of new nuclear units. One of the principal means to recover the economic advantage of a nuclear plant is to shorten the time needed for construction. Every extra day of construction costs large sums of money in interest and escalation expenses alone. The challenge is to shorten the construction period to the minimum feasible time and thereby reduce the financing costs. The methods that have to be employed to achieve this goal require the total commitment from the management of all entities involved in the program. Through the application of advanced management and construction techniques a new era in the construction of nuclear plants in Korea will occur. This will include changes to the methods used for managing, planning, licensing, designing and constructing the new plants. The ability to meet the aggressive plan for the construction of new nuclear power plants in Korea rests in the hands of the managers of all the parties involved. These men set all the rules by which the new plants will be constructed. It is their responsibility to tackle the current problems and develop the solutions to enable the plan to be realized. The changes suggested within this paper are major, but the potential benefits will allow the Korean Nuclear Industry to advance into the twenty first Century as a leader. The number of fully trained specialists needed to make this happen will not appear overnight. They will have to be

  5. Rules, culture, and fitness.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Baum, W M

    1995-01-01

    Behavior analysis risks intellectual isolation unless it integrates its explanations with evolutionary theory. Rule-governed behavior is an example of a topic that requires an evolutionary perspective for a full understanding. A rule may be defined as a verbal discriminative stimulus produced by the behavior of a speaker under the stimulus control of a long-term contingency between the behavior and fitness. As a discriminative stimulus, the rule strengthens listener behavior that is reinforced in the short run by socially mediated contingencies, but which also enters into the long-term contingency that enhances the listener's fitness. The long-term contingency constitutes the global context for the speaker's giving the rule. When a rule is said to be "internalized," the listener's behavior has switched from short- to long-term control. The fitness-enhancing consequences of long-term contingencies are health, resources, relationships, or reproduction. This view ties rules both to evolutionary theory and to culture. Stating a rule is a cultural practice. The practice strengthens, with short-term reinforcement, behavior that usually enhances fitness in the long run. The practice evolves because of its effect on fitness. The standard definition of a rule as a verbal statement that points to a contingency fails to distinguish between a rule and a bargain ("If you'll do X, then I'll do Y"), which signifies only a single short-term contingency that provides mutual reinforcement for speaker and listener. In contrast, the giving and following of a rule ("Dress warmly; it's cold outside") can be understood only by reference also to a contingency providing long-term enhancement of the listener's fitness or the fitness of the listener's genes. Such a perspective may change the way both behavior analysts and evolutionary biologists think about rule-governed behavior.

  6. Management of waste from packaging of construction materials in building construction works

    OpenAIRE

    González Pericot, Natalia; Río Merino, Mercedes del

    2011-01-01

    Every material arriving at the construction site comes protected in some type of packaging, fundamentally cardboard, plastic or wood, and presently the great majority of these packagings finish in a container mixed with the rest of waste of the construction work. The increasing tendency to use prefabricated materials increases the volume of packaging necessary in product transport; in addition, the traditional materials also arrive more protected with packaging. A specific management for ...

  7. Consistence of Network Filtering Rules

    Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

    SHE Kun; WU Yuancheng; HUANG Juncai; ZHOU Mingtian

    2004-01-01

    The inconsistence of firewall/VPN(Virtual Private Network) rule makes a huge maintainable cost.With development of Multinational Company,SOHO office,E-government the number of firewalls/VPN will increase rapidly.Rule table in stand-alone or network will be increased in geometric series accordingly.Checking the consistence of rule table manually is inadequate.A formal approach can define semantic consistence,make a theoretic foundation of intelligent management about rule tables.In this paper,a kind of formalization of host rules and network ones for auto rule-validation based on SET theory were proporsed and a rule validation scheme was defined.The analysis results show the superior performance of the methods and demonstrate its potential for the intelligent management based on rule tables.

  8. Technical specification for transferring tank construction data to the Oak Ridge Environmental Information System (OREIS)

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1996-06-01

    The primary goal of this technical specification is to meet the consolidated environmental data requirements defined by the Federal Facility Agreement (FFA) and the Tennessee Oversight Agreement as they pertain to tank construction data maintained in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, by the US Department of Energy's Maintenance and Operations contractor Lockheed Martin Energy Systems, Inc., and prime contractors to the Department of Energy. This technical specification describes the organizational responsibilities for loading tank construction data into OREIS, describes the logical and physical data transfer files, addresses business rules and submission rules, addresses configuration control of this technical specification, and addresses required changes to the current OREIS data base structure based on site requirements. This technical specification addresses the tank construction data maintained by the Y-12, K-25, and ORNL sites that will be sent to OREIS. The initial submission of data will include only inactive Environmental Restoration tanks as specified by the FFA

  9. Max-out-in pivot rule with Dantzig's safeguarding rule for the simplex method

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Tipawanna, Monsicha; Sinapiromsaran, Krung

    2014-01-01

    The simplex method is used to solve linear programming problem by improving the current basic feasible solution. It uses a pivot rule to guide the search in the feasible region. The pivot rule is used to select an entering index in simplex method. Nowadays, many pivot rule have been presented, but no pivot rule shows superior performance than other. Therefore, this is still an active research in linear programming. In this research, we present the max-out-in pivot rule with Dantzig's safeguarding for simplex method. This rule is based on maximum improvement of objective value of the current basic feasible point similar to the Dantzig's rule. We can illustrate by Klee and Minty problems that our rule outperforms that of Dantzig's rule by the number of iterations for solving linear programming problems

  10. Totally optimal decision rules

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha

    2017-11-22

    Optimality of decision rules (patterns) can be measured in many ways. One of these is referred to as length. Length signifies the number of terms in a decision rule and is optimally minimized. Another, coverage represents the width of a rule’s applicability and generality. As such, it is desirable to maximize coverage. A totally optimal decision rule is a decision rule that has the minimum possible length and the maximum possible coverage. This paper presents a method for determining the presence of totally optimal decision rules for “complete” decision tables (representations of total functions in which different variables can have domains of differing values). Depending on the cardinalities of the domains, we can either guarantee for each tuple of values of the function that totally optimal rules exist for each row of the table (as in the case of total Boolean functions where the cardinalities are equal to 2) or, for each row, we can find a tuple of values of the function for which totally optimal rules do not exist for this row.

  11. Totally optimal decision rules

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha M.; Moshkov, Mikhail

    2017-01-01

    Optimality of decision rules (patterns) can be measured in many ways. One of these is referred to as length. Length signifies the number of terms in a decision rule and is optimally minimized. Another, coverage represents the width of a rule’s applicability and generality. As such, it is desirable to maximize coverage. A totally optimal decision rule is a decision rule that has the minimum possible length and the maximum possible coverage. This paper presents a method for determining the presence of totally optimal decision rules for “complete” decision tables (representations of total functions in which different variables can have domains of differing values). Depending on the cardinalities of the domains, we can either guarantee for each tuple of values of the function that totally optimal rules exist for each row of the table (as in the case of total Boolean functions where the cardinalities are equal to 2) or, for each row, we can find a tuple of values of the function for which totally optimal rules do not exist for this row.

  12. Uses of dipole oscillator strength sum rules in second order perturbation theory

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Struensee, M.C.

    1984-01-01

    Certain moments of the dipole oscillator strength distribution of atoms and molecules can be calculated from theory (using sum rules) or deduced from experiment. The present work describes the use of these moments to construct effective distributions which lead to bounds and estimates of physical properties of interest. Asymptotic analysis is then used to obtain the high energy behavior of the oscillator strength density and a previously unknown sum rule for atoms and molecules. A new type of effective distribution, which incorporates the information concerning the asymptotic behavior and the new sum rule, is suggested. This new type of distribution is used to calculate the logarithmic mean excitation energies for the ground states of atomic hydrogen, atomic helium and the negative hydrogen ion. The calculations for atomic helium and the negative hydrogen ion require the evaluation of certain ground state expectation values. These have been calculated using high accuracy wavefunctions containing the nonconventional terms shown by Fock to be necessary for a correct analytic expansion when both electrons are near the nucleus

  13. The participative construction of the criminal decision in democratic states ruled by the law: the guaranty of participation of the parties, through confrontation, in the composition of a fair and legitimate decision

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Flávio da Silva Andrade

    2017-10-01

    Full Text Available This article concerns a topic that is not new, but it remains current:  the participatory construction of the criminal decision in a democratic State ruled by law. Starting from the concepts of Rule of Law, of Guarantism and of Democracy, it seeks to renew the importance of the equal and dialectical participation of the parties, through the adversarial system, for the composition of a fair and legitimate criminal judicial decision. It is argued, from this perspective, that the parties should take the role of protagonists in the procedural scenario, since the decision should be built in a participatory way, i.e., based on the arguments and evidence presented, thus reducing the gaps that favor judicial discretion and decisionism. It is proposed, therefore, that the solution to the concrete case (acceptance or dismissal of the information or indictment, grant or rejection of a criminal precautionary measure, conviction or acquittal should be elaborated with support on the contribution of the litigants, from the contrast of their arguments and of the evidence produced, in adversarial proceedings, in the regular course of the process.

  14. Do Group Decision Rules Affect Trust? A Laboratory Experiment on Group Decision Rules and Trust

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Nielsen, Julie Hassing

    2016-01-01

    Enhanced participation has been prescribed as the way forward for improving democratic decision making while generating positive attributes like trust. Yet we do not know the extent to which rules affect the outcome of decision making. This article investigates how different group decision rules......-hierarchical decision-making procedures enhance trust vis-à-vis other more hierarchical decision-making procedures....... affect group trust by testing three ideal types of decision rules (i.e., a Unilateral rule, a Representative rule and a 'Non-rule') in a laboratory experiment. The article shows significant differences between the three decision rules on trust after deliberation. Interestingly, however, it finds...

  15. Contractors’ Attitude towards Enhancing Safety Performance: Case Study on Construction Firms in Penang

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ulang N. Md

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available A qualitative study was conducted to investigate the contractors’ attitude towards enhancing the safety performance in construction site. Despite the fact that there are many safety initiatives established by the government, the rates of accidents are still in a critically high condition. Thus the purpose of this research is to study the contractors’ attitude towards enhancing the implementation of safety management system in construction site in order to increase the safety awareness of construction practitioners in construction site and improve the safety condition of construction sites. This study is conducted through oral interviews with the construction practitioners, and visual inspection of construction sites. The attitudes of contractors are evaluated from 3 aspects: Contractors’ efforts in implement and enforce the safety rules, Contractors efforts in overcoming the rate of accidents, and Reasons given by the contractors for not implement safety law.

  16. RIGHTS, RULES, AND DEMOCRACY

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Richard S. Kay, University of Connecticut-School of Law, Estados Unidos

    2012-11-01

    Full Text Available Abstract: Democracy require protection of certain fundamental rights, but can we expect courts to follow rules? There seems little escape from the proposition that substantive constitutional review by an unelected judiciary is a presumptive abridgement of democratic decision-making. Once we have accepted the proposition that there exist human rights that ought to be protected, this should hardly surprise us. No one thinks courts are perfect translators of the rules invoked before them on every occasion. But it is equally clear that rules sometimes do decide cases. In modern legal systems the relative roles of courts and legislators with respect to the rules of the system is a commonplace. Legislatures make rules. Courts apply them in particular disputes. When we are talking about human rights, however, that assumption must be clarified in at least one way. The defense of the practice of constitutional review in this article assumes courts can and do enforce rules. This article also makes clear what is the meaning of “following rules”. Preference for judicial over legislative interpretation of rights, therefore, seems to hang on the question of whether or not judges are capable of subordinating their own judgment to that incorporated in the rules by their makers. This article maintains that, in general, entrenched constitutional rules (and not just constitutional courts can and do constrain public conduct and protect human rights. The article concludes that the value judgments will depend on our estimate of the benefits we derive from the process of representative self-government. Against those benefits we will have to measure the importance we place on being able to live our lives with the security created by a regime of human rights protected by the rule of law. Keywords: Democracy. Human Rights. Rules. Judicial Review.

  17. Scope of Negotiability: Index of Recent Case Law and Administrative Rulings.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jones, Thomas Neil

    This listing presents court decisions and administrative rulings from the 1970s concerning the topics that are negotiable in bargaining between teachers, as public employees, and school boards, as public employers. The topics are grouped into 14 major areas: budget considerations; contracts; direct compensation; discipline; evaluation; hiring,…

  18. The method of using current regulations and standards in designing management and technologies of construction

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sinenko Sergey

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available Economic efficiency of using funds in construction of buildings and structures begins from an effective, proper design, which is based on modern, cutting-edge, advanced equipment, streamlined organization and process solutions of construction operations. In the light of this it is considered application of “Self-Organization and Technology of Building” multifunctional software package capable of solving various engineering tasks on designing management of construction operations in accordance with the applicable rules and regulations in view of using software for automatic generation of workflow. Implementing this software in the construction management processes may help to solve management tasks at the construction site.

  19. Convention on nuclear safety. Rules of procedure and financial rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1999-01-01

    The document is the first revision of the Rules of Procedures and Financial Rules that apply mutatis mutandis to any meetings of the Contracting Parties to the Convention on Nuclear Safety (INFCIRC/573), convened in accordance with the Chapter 3 of the Convention

  20. Convention on Nuclear Safety. Rules of procedure and financial rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    2002-01-01

    The document is the second revision of the Rules of Procedures and Financial Rules that apply mutatis mutandis to any meetings of the Contracting Parties to the Convention on Nuclear Safety (INFCIRC/573), convened in accordance with the Chapter 3 of the Convention

  1. Budget performance reporting and construction work packaging

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Strong, M.G.; Weyers, L.L.

    1976-01-01

    A changing financial, technological, and regulatory environment has increased the complexity, costliness, and risk involved in constructing new generating facilities. A primary challenge facing utility executives is to hold down costs on these construction projects. New construction management techniques are required to accomplish this. Commonwealth Edison has responded by implementing a new Budget Performance Reporting System and a Construction Work Packaging System. The new systems are being used successfully on four major construction projects with budgets totaling over $4 billion

  2. Planning linear construction projects: automated method for the generation of earthwork activities

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Askew, W.H.; Al-Jibouri, Saad H.S.; Mawdesley, M.J.; Patterson, D.E.

    2002-01-01

    Earthworks planning for road construction projects is a complex operation and the planning rules used are usually intuitive and not well defined. An approach to automate the earthworks planning process is described and the basic techniques that are used are outlined. A computer-based system has been

  3. A Method of Sample Models of Program Construction in Terms of Petri Nets

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    D. I. Kharitonov

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available In the article a method of automated construction of Petri nets simulating the behaviour of imperative programs is considered from the formal point of view. Petri net samples with certain characteristics are necessary in programming new algorithms for program analysis; in particular, they can be used for developing or optimizing algorithms of Petri nets compositions and decompositions, building the reachability tree, checking invariants and so on. The generation process consists of two stages. At the first stage, construction templates for a resulting net and parameters for construction are described. With the help of these parameters it is possible to regulate the final size and the absolute or relative amount of certain structures in the resulting net. At the second stage, iterative process of automated net construction is used for Petri net generation of any size, limited only by an available computer memory. In the first section of the article the minimum necessary definitions are given and a new version of Petri nets composition operation by places is introduced. Commutative and associative properties of introduced binary operation allow to synchronize any number of Petri nets in arbitrary order. Then construction template is defined as a marked Petri net with input and output interfaces and rules for templates composition using this interfaces. A number of construction templates can be united in a collection, for which the evolution rules are defined. The completeness property of a collection guarantees that the collection evolution results in a Petri net that simulates the imperative program behavior. The article provides a version of the construction templates complete collection and an example of Petri net simulating sequential imperative program construction.

  4. Operations management for construction

    CERN Document Server

    March, Chris

    2009-01-01

    Students studying construction management and related subjects need to have a broad understanding of the major aspects of controlling the building processes. Operations Management for Construction is one of three textbooks (Business Organisation, Operations Management and Finance Control) written to systematically cover the field. Focusing on construction sites and operations which are challenging to run, Chris March explores issues such as the setting up of the site, the deciding of the methodology of construction, and the sequence of work and resourcing. As changing and increasing regulations affect the way sites are managed, he also considers the issues and methods of successful administering, safety, quality and environment. Finally, the contractor's responsibility to the environment, including relationships with third parties, selection of materials, waste management and sustainability is discussed. Chris March has a wealth of practical experience in the construction industry, as well as considerable exp...

  5. Construction of a high beta plasma source

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Naraghi, M.; Torabi-Fard, A.

    1976-02-01

    A high beta plasma source has been designed and constructed. This source will serve as a means of developing and exercising different diagnostic techniques as required for ALVAND I, linear theta pinch experiment. Also, it will serve to acquaint the technicians with some of the techniques and safety rules of high voltage and capacitor discharge experiments. The operating parameters of the theta pinch and Z-pinch preionization is presented and the program of diagnostic measurements on the high beta plasma source is discussed

  6. WellnessRules: A Web 3.0 Case Study in RuleML-Based Prolog-N3 Profile Interoperation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Boley, Harold; Osmun, Taylor Michael; Craig, Benjamin Larry

    An interoperation study, WellnessRules, is described, where rules about wellness opportunities are created by participants in rule languages such as Prolog and N3, and translated within a wellness community using RuleML/XML. The wellness rules are centered around participants, as profiles, encoding knowledge about their activities conditional on the season, the time-of-day, the weather, etc. This distributed knowledge base extends FOAF profiles with a vocabulary and rules about wellness group networking. The communication between participants is organized through Rule Responder, permitting wellness-profile translation and distributed querying across engines. WellnessRules interoperates between rules and queries in the relational (Datalog) paradigm of the pure-Prolog subset of POSL and in the frame (F-logic) paradigm of N3. An evaluation of Rule Responder instantiated for WellnessRules revealed acceptable Web response times.

  7. A novel abutment construction technique for rapid bridge construction : controlled low strength Materials (CLSM) with full-height concrete panels.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-01-01

    One of the major obstacles facing rapid bridge construction for typical span type bridges is the time required to construct bridge abutments and foundations. This can be remedied by using the controlled low strength materials (CLSM) bridge abutment. ...

  8. Students’ Learning Obstacles and Alternative Solution in Counting Rules Learning Levels Senior High School

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    M A Jatmiko

    2017-12-01

    Full Text Available The counting rules is a topic in mathematics senior high school. In the learning process, teachers often find students who have difficulties in learning this topic. Knowing the characteristics of students' learning difficulties and analyzing the causes is important for the teacher, as an effort in trying to reflect the learning process and as a reference in constructing alternative learning solutions which appropriate to anticipate students’ learning obstacles. This study uses qualitative methods and involves 70 students of class XII as research subjects. The data collection techniques used in this study is diagnostic test instrument about learning difficulties in counting rules, observation, and interview. The data used to know the learning difficulties experienced by students, the causes of learning difficulties, and to develop alternative learning solutions. From the results of data analysis, the results of diagnostic tests researcher found some obstacles faced by students, such as students get confused in describing the definition, students difficulties in understanding the procedure of solving multiplication rules. Based on those problems, researcher analyzed the causes of these difficulties and make hypothetical learning trajectory as an alternative solution in counting rules learning.

  9. The role of traffic rules.

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Noordzij, P.C.

    1988-01-01

    Experienced road users seem to have their own set of traffic rules (including rules about when to violate the official rules). The number of violations is enormous, causing great concern for the authorities. The situation could be improved by separating a set of rules with the aim of deterring road

  10. Dynamic association rules for gene expression data analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Shu-Chuan; Tsai, Tsung-Hsien; Chung, Cheng-Han; Li, Wen-Hsiung

    2015-10-14

    The purpose of gene expression analysis is to look for the association between regulation of gene expression levels and phenotypic variations. This association based on gene expression profile has been used to determine whether the induction/repression of genes correspond to phenotypic variations including cell regulations, clinical diagnoses and drug development. Statistical analyses on microarray data have been developed to resolve gene selection issue. However, these methods do not inform us of causality between genes and phenotypes. In this paper, we propose the dynamic association rule algorithm (DAR algorithm) which helps ones to efficiently select a subset of significant genes for subsequent analysis. The DAR algorithm is based on association rules from market basket analysis in marketing. We first propose a statistical way, based on constructing a one-sided confidence interval and hypothesis testing, to determine if an association rule is meaningful. Based on the proposed statistical method, we then developed the DAR algorithm for gene expression data analysis. The method was applied to analyze four microarray datasets and one Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) dataset: the Mice Apo A1 dataset, the whole genome expression dataset of mouse embryonic stem cells, expression profiling of the bone marrow of Leukemia patients, Microarray Quality Control (MAQC) data set and the RNA-seq dataset of a mouse genomic imprinting study. A comparison of the proposed method with the t-test on the expression profiling of the bone marrow of Leukemia patients was conducted. We developed a statistical way, based on the concept of confidence interval, to determine the minimum support and minimum confidence for mining association relationships among items. With the minimum support and minimum confidence, one can find significant rules in one single step. The DAR algorithm was then developed for gene expression data analysis. Four gene expression datasets showed that the proposed

  11. The fusion rules for the Temperley–Lieb algebra and its dilute generalization

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Belletête, Jonathan

    2015-01-01

    The Temperley–Lieb (TL) family of algebras is well known for its role in building integrable lattice models. Even though a proof is still missing, it is agreed that these models should go to conformal field theories in the thermodynamic limit and that the limiting vector space should carry a representation of the Virasoro algebra. The fusion rules are a notable feature of the Virasoro algebra. One would hope that there is an analogous construction for the TL family. Such a construction was proposed by Read and Saleur (2007 Nucl. Phys. B 777 316) and partially computed by Gainutdinov and Vasseur (2013 Nucl. Phys. B 868 223–70) using the bimodule structure over the TL algebras and the quantum group Uq (sl2).We use their definition for the dilute Temperley–Lieb (dTL) family, a generalization of the original TL family. We develop a new way of computing fusion by using induction and show its power by obtaining fusion rules for both dTL and TL. We recover those computed by Gainutdivov and Vasseur and new ones that were beyond their scope. In particular, we identify a set of irreducible TL- or dTL-representations whose behavior under fusion is that of some irreducibles of the minimal models of conformal field theory. (paper)

  12. Life fraction rules

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Maile, K.

    1989-01-01

    Evaluations for lifetime estimation of high temperature loaded HTR-components under creep fatigue load had been performed. The evaluations were carried out on the basis of experimental data of strain controlled fatigue tests with respectively without hold times performed on material NiCr 22 Co 12 Mo (Inconel 617). Life prediction was made by means of the linear damage accumulation rule. Due to the high temperatures no realistic estimates of creep damage can be obtained with this rule. Therefore the rule was modified. The modifications consist in a different analysis of the relaxation curve including different calculation of the creep damage estimate resp. in an extended rule, taking into consideration the interaction between creep and fatigue. In order to reach a better result transparency and to reduce data set dependent result scattering a round robin with a given data set was carried out. The round robin yielded that for a given test temperature of T = 950deg C realistic estimate of damage can be obtained with each modification. Furthermore a reduction of resulting scatterbands in the interaction diagram can be observed, i.e. the practicability of the rule has been increased. (orig.)

  13. Identifying Causes of Construction Waste – Case of Central Region of Peninsula Malaysia

    OpenAIRE

    Sasitharan Nagapan; Ismail Abdul Rahman; Ade Asmi; Aftab Hameed Memon; Rosli Mohammad Zin

    2012-01-01

    Construction waste becomes a global issue facing by practitioners and researchers around the world. Waste can affects success of construction project significantly. More specifically, it has major impact on construction cost, construction time, productivity and sustainability aspects. This paper aims to identify various factors causing construction waste in Malaysia. Study was carried out through structured questionnaire focusing three major parties (i.e. clients, consultants and contractors)...

  14. BIM-BASED SCHEDULING OF CONSTRUCTION

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Andersson, Niclas; Büchmann-Slorup, Rolf

    2010-01-01

    The potential of BIM is generally recognized in the construction industry, but the practical application of BIM for management purposes is, however, still limited among contractors. The objective of this study is to review the current scheduling process of construction in light of BIM...... and communicate. Scheduling on the detailed level, on the other hand, follows a stipulated approach to scheduling, i.e. the Last Planner System (LPS), which is characterized by involvement of all actors in the construction phase. Thus, the major challenge when implementing BIM-based scheduling is to improve...

  15. Analysis of Rules for Islamic Inheritance Law in Indonesia Using Hybrid Rule Based Learning

    Science.gov (United States)

    Khosyi'ah, S.; Irfan, M.; Maylawati, D. S.; Mukhlas, O. S.

    2018-01-01

    Along with the development of human civilization in Indonesia, the changes and reform of Islamic inheritance law so as to conform to the conditions and culture cannot be denied. The distribution of inheritance in Indonesia can be done automatically by storing the rule of Islamic inheritance law in the expert system. In this study, we analyze the knowledge of experts in Islamic inheritance in Indonesia and represent it in the form of rules using rule-based Forward Chaining (FC) and Davis-Putman-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) algorithms. By hybridizing FC and DPLL algorithms, the rules of Islamic inheritance law in Indonesia are clearly defined and measured. The rules were conceptually validated by some experts in Islamic laws and informatics. The results revealed that generally all rules were ready for use in an expert system.

  16. A Better Budget Rule

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dothan, Michael; Thompson, Fred

    2009-01-01

    Debt limits, interest coverage ratios, one-off balanced budget requirements, pay-as-you-go rules, and tax and expenditure limits are among the most important fiscal rules for constraining intertemporal transfers. There is considerable evidence that the least costly and most effective of such rules are those that focus directly on the rate of…

  17. Challenges for Rule Systems on the Web

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hu, Yuh-Jong; Yeh, Ching-Long; Laun, Wolfgang

    The RuleML Challenge started in 2007 with the objective of inspiring the issues of implementation for management, integration, interoperation and interchange of rules in an open distributed environment, such as the Web. Rules are usually classified as three types: deductive rules, normative rules, and reactive rules. The reactive rules are further classified as ECA rules and production rules. The study of combination rule and ontology is traced back to an earlier active rule system for relational and object-oriented (OO) databases. Recently, this issue has become one of the most important research problems in the Semantic Web. Once we consider a computer executable policy as a declarative set of rules and ontologies that guides the behavior of entities within a system, we have a flexible way to implement real world policies without rewriting the computer code, as we did before. Fortunately, we have de facto rule markup languages, such as RuleML or RIF to achieve the portability and interchange of rules for different rule systems. Otherwise, executing real-life rule-based applications on the Web is almost impossible. Several commercial or open source rule engines are available for the rule-based applications. However, we still need a standard rule language and benchmark for not only to compare the rule systems but also to measure the progress in the field. Finally, a number of real-life rule-based use cases will be investigated to demonstrate the applicability of current rule systems on the Web.

  18. Communicating rules in recreation areas

    Science.gov (United States)

    Terence L. Ross; George H. Moeller

    1974-01-01

    Five hundred fifty-eight campers were surveyed on the Allegheny National Forest to determine their knowledge of rules governing recreation behavior. Most of them were uninformed about the rules. Results of the study suggest that previous camping experience, age, camping style, and residence significantly affect knowledge of rules. Campers who received rule brochures or...

  19. Methodological approaches based on business rules

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Anca Ioana ANDREESCU

    2008-01-01

    Full Text Available Business rules and business processes are essential artifacts in defining the requirements of a software system. Business processes capture business behavior, while rules connect processes and thus control processes and business behavior. Traditionally, rules are scattered inside application code. This approach makes it very difficult to change rules and shorten the life cycle of the software system. Because rules change more quickly than the application itself, it is desirable to externalize the rules and move them outside the application. This paper analyzes and evaluates three well-known business rules approaches. It also outlines some critical factors that have to be taken into account in the decision to introduce business rules facilities in a software system. Based on the concept of explicit manipulation of business rules in a software system, the need for a general approach based on business rules is discussed.

  20. Parental rules and communication: their association with adolescent smoking.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harakeh, Zeena; Scholte, Ron H J; de Vries, Hein; Engels, Rutger C M E

    2005-06-01

    To examine the association between parental rules and communication (also referred to as antismoking socialization) and adolescents' smoking. A cross-sectional study including 428 Dutch two-parent families with at least two adolescent children (aged 13-17 years). Parents' and adolescents' reports on an agreement regarding smoking by adolescents, smoking house rules, parental confidence in preventing their child from smoking, frequency and quality of communication about smoking, and parent's reactions to smoking experimentation. Compared with fathers and adolescents, mothers reported being more involved in antismoking socialization. There were robust differences in antismoking socialization efforts between smoking and non-smoking parents. Perceived parental influence and frequency and quality of communication about smoking were associated with adolescents' smoking. The association between antismoking socialization practices and adolescents' smoking was not moderated by birth order, parents' smoking or gender of the adolescent. Encouraging parents, whether or not they themselves smoke, to discuss smoking-related issues with their children in a constructive and respectful manner is worth exploring as an intervention strategy to prevent young people taking up smoking.

  1. [The reciprocity rule in the construction of relationships as the key in relational processes].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fenelli, Antonio; Volpi, Cecilia; Guarracino, Emanuele; Galli, Virginia; Esposito, Massimo

    2011-01-01

    Reciprocity as an expression of the therapist-patient relationship is pointed-out by Mario Reda who refers to Comparetti's studies on the mother-foetus reciprocity, mediated by the so-called "jumps". Reciprocal behaviours are clearly observable during bird and other animal courtship behaviour, whereas in the Sapiens sapiens species, we may observe the establishing of a very complex reciprocity system, which starts with gestures and bodily attitudes, subsequently activating sensory-motor emotional schemata and internal working models, thus enabling the construction of personal meanings. A relationship may result from an encounter provided that "compatible" meanings are constructed in the context of "possible reciprocity" of significant systems. The observation of reciprocity provides a concrete possibility to reduce the risk of absolute subjectivity related to the I or the you, superceding it through the us.

  2. WTO accepts rules limiting medicine exports to poor countries.

    Science.gov (United States)

    James, John S

    2003-09-12

    In a controversial decision on August 30, 2003, the World Trade Organization agreed to complex rules limiting the export of medications to developing countries. Reaction to the decision so far has shown a complete disconnect between trade delegates and the WTO, both of which praise the new rules as a humanitarian advance, and those working in treatment access in poor countries, who believe that they will effectively block treatment from reaching many who need it. We have prepared a background paper that analyzes this decision and its implications and offers the opinions of key figures on both sides of the debate. It is clear that the rules were largely written for and probably by the proprietary pharmaceutical industry, and imposed on the countries in the WTO mainly by the United States. The basic conflict is that this industry does not want the development of international trade in low-cost generic copies of its patented medicines--not even for poor countries, where little or no market exists. Yet millions of people die each year without medication for treatable conditions such as AIDS, and drug pricing remains one of several major obstacles to controlling global epidemics.

  3. Logarithmic corrections in a quantization rule. The polaron spectrum

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Karasev, M.V.; Pereskokov, A.V.

    1994-01-01

    A nonlinear integrodifferential equation that arises in polaron theory is considered. The integral nonlinearity is given by a convolution with the Coulomb potential. Radially symmetric solutions are sought. In the semiclassical limit, an equation for the self-consistent potential is found and studied. The potential has a logarithmic singularity at the origin, and also a turning point at 1. The phase shifts at these points are determined. The quantization rule that takes into account the logarithmic corrections gives a simple asymptotic formula for the polaron spectrum. Global semiclassical solutions of the original nonlinear equation are constructed. 18 refs., 1 tab

  4. Spatio-Temporal Rule Mining

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Gidofalvi, Gyozo; Pedersen, Torben Bach

    2005-01-01

    Recent advances in communication and information technology, such as the increasing accuracy of GPS technology and the miniaturization of wireless communication devices pave the road for Location-Based Services (LBS). To achieve high quality for such services, spatio-temporal data mining techniques...... are needed. In this paper, we describe experiences with spatio-temporal rule mining in a Danish data mining company. First, a number of real world spatio-temporal data sets are described, leading to a taxonomy of spatio-temporal data. Second, the paper describes a general methodology that transforms...... the spatio-temporal rule mining task to the traditional market basket analysis task and applies it to the described data sets, enabling traditional association rule mining methods to discover spatio-temporal rules for LBS. Finally, unique issues in spatio-temporal rule mining are identified and discussed....

  5. Constructing Agent Model for Virtual Training Systems

    Science.gov (United States)

    Murakami, Yohei; Sugimoto, Yuki; Ishida, Toru

    Constructing highly realistic agents is essential if agents are to be employed in virtual training systems. In training for collaboration based on face-to-face interaction, the generation of emotional expressions is one key. In training for guidance based on one-to-many interaction such as direction giving for evacuations, emotional expressions must be supplemented by diverse agent behaviors to make the training realistic. To reproduce diverse behavior, we characterize agents by using a various combinations of operation rules instantiated by the user operating the agent. To accomplish this goal, we introduce a user modeling method based on participatory simulations. These simulations enable us to acquire information observed by each user in the simulation and the operating history. Using these data and the domain knowledge including known operation rules, we can generate an explanation for each behavior. Moreover, the application of hypothetical reasoning, which offers consistent selection of hypotheses, to the generation of explanations allows us to use otherwise incompatible operation rules as domain knowledge. In order to validate the proposed modeling method, we apply it to the acquisition of an evacuee's model in a fire-drill experiment. We successfully acquire a subject's model corresponding to the results of an interview with the subject.

  6. Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Educational Facilities and the EPA Greenhouse Gas Reporting Rule: Actions You Need to Take Now

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wurmbrand, Mitchell M.; Klotz, Thomas C.

    2010-01-01

    On September 22, 2009, The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued its final rule on greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reporting. The informational literature that EPA has published to support the rule clearly states that EPA believes the vast majority of smaller GHG-emitting facilities, such as educational facilities, will not be…

  7. Organisational Rules in Schools: Teachers' Opinions about Functions of Rules, Rule-Following and Breaking Behaviours in Relation to Their Locus of Control

    Science.gov (United States)

    Demirkasimoglu, Nihan; Aydin, Inayet; Erdogan, Cetin; Akin, Ugur

    2012-01-01

    The main aim of this research is to examine teachers' opinions about functions of school rules, reasons for rule-breaking and results of rule-breaking in relation to their locus of control, gender, age, seniority and branch. 350 public elementary school teachers in Ankara are included in the correlational survey model study. According to the…

  8. Nuclear Power Plant Construction Contracts: A Review of the Major Problems

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Crawford, B.B.

    1977-01-01

    This paper analyses the problems raised by nuclear power plant construction contracts. To the extent these contracts can be defined as devices for allocating responsibilities and risks between the Contracting Parties, the author notes that the 'responsibilities' aspect presents no problem peculiar to the nuclear sector and that difficulties mainly stem from co-ordination of work. On the other hand, the list of problems linked to 'nuclear contract risks' is long: uncertainties in the licensing procedure and export licenses, changes in pricing due to inflation, imprevision and force majeure theories, protection of proprietary information, operator's civil liability for nuclear incidents. (NEA) [fr

  9. Report No. 3 -- Background of the factors of safety used in Divisions 1 of Sections III and XI of the ASME rules for nuclear vessels

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Cooper, W.E.

    1993-01-01

    This paper was prepared in 1984 as a quick background summary of the factors of safety used in the various Code rules as they apply to Class 1 reactor pressure vessels (RPVs). This document should be interpreted as the individual viewpoint of the author on the matters under discussion. The general approach followed is to cite basic reference documents, to lead the reader to the more important aspects which are pertinent to the subject material, and to provide a viewpoint on additional rules which might be either needed or desirable. After a discussion of the differences between Sections 3 and 11 in categorizing the loadings to be considered, the sequence of consideration is as follows: (1) The rules of the code that control initial construction, Section 3, Division (Construction = materials + design + examination + testing + inspection + certification). (2) The rules of Section 3 that specifically affect operation, Appendix G, which forms the basis of the pressure-temperature limits of the Technical Specifications. (3) The rules of Section 11 as they affect ''Acceptance by Examination'' and ''Acceptance by Evaluation''. (4) The special considerations of: (a) Limits for Emergency and Faulted Conditions (b) Elastic-Plastic Fracture Mechanics (c) Low Upper-Shelf Energy (USE) Materials (d) Pressure Thermal Shock (PTS)

  10. Dynamic, Dogmatic, & Divergent: How United States Marine Corps Officers Learn the Innovative Art of Constructive Rule-Breaking

    Science.gov (United States)

    2014-07-16

    organizations nurture innovative creativity and integrity of purpose when rules governing consequential decision-making remain somewhat “ elastic .”24...competencies demanded by the Warfighting doctrine. The two key components of this training & education reset involved expanding professional military...at the bridge and is preparing a textbook defense, she makes the divergent decision to disobey her order to secure the bridge, and instead locates a

  11. Optimization of approximate decision rules relative to number of misclassifications: Comparison of greedy and dynamic programming approaches

    KAUST Repository

    Amin, Talha

    2013-01-01

    In the paper, we present a comparison of dynamic programming and greedy approaches for construction and optimization of approximate decision rules relative to the number of misclassifications. We use an uncertainty measure that is a difference between the number of rows in a decision table T and the number of rows with the most common decision for T. For a nonnegative real number γ, we consider γ-decision rules that localize rows in subtables of T with uncertainty at most γ. Experimental results with decision tables from the UCI Machine Learning Repository are also presented. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

  12. Structural evaluation method for class 1 vessels by using elastic-plastic finite element analysis in code case of JSME rules on design and construction

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Asada, Seiji; Hirano, Takashi; Nagata, Tetsuya; Kasahara, Naoto

    2008-01-01

    A structural evaluation method by using elastic-plastic finite element analysis has been developed and published as a code case of Rules on Design and Construction for Nuclear Power Plants (The First Part: Light Water Reactor Structural Design Standard) in the JSME Codes for Nuclear Power Generation Facilities. Its title is 'Alternative Structural Evaluation Criteria for Class 1 Vessels Based on Elastic-Plastic Finite Element Analysis' (NC-CC-005). This code case applies elastic-plastic analysis to evaluation of such failure modes as plastic collapse, thermal ratchet, fatigue and so on. Advantage of this evaluation method is free from stress classification, consistently use of Mises stress and applicability to complex 3-dimensional structures which are hard to be treated by the conventional stress classification method. The evaluation method for plastic collapse has such variation as the Lower Bound Approach Method, Twice-Elastic-Slope Method and Elastic Compensation Method. Cyclic Yield Area (CYA) based on elastic analysis is applied to screening evaluation of thermal ratchet instead of secondary stress evaluation, and elastic-plastic analysis is performed when the CYA screening criteria is not satisfied. Strain concentration factors can be directly calculated based on elastic-plastic analysis. (author)

  13. Binary effectivity rules

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Keiding, Hans; Peleg, Bezalel

    2006-01-01

    is binary if it is rationalized by an acyclic binary relation. The foregoing result motivates our definition of a binary effectivity rule as the effectivity rule of some binary SCR. A binary SCR is regular if it satisfies unanimity, monotonicity, and independence of infeasible alternatives. A binary...

  14. Technical rules in law

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Debelius, J

    1978-08-01

    An important source of knowledge for technical experts is the state of the art reflected by catalogues of technical rules. Technical rules may also achieve importance in law due to a legal transformation standard. Here, rigid and flexible reference are controversial with regard to their admissibility from the point of view of constitutional law. In case of a divergence from the generally accepted technical rules, it is assumed - refutably - that the necessary care had not been taken. Technical rules are one out of several sources of information; they have no normative effect. This may result in a duty of anyone applying them to review the state of technology himself.

  15. Technical rules in law

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Debelius, J.

    1978-01-01

    An important source of knowledge for technical experts is the state of the art reflected by catalogues of technical rules. Technical rules may also achieve importance in law due to a legal transformation standard. Here, rigid and flexible reference are controversial with regard to their admissibility from the point of view of constitutional law. In case of a divergence from the generally accepted technical rules, it is assumed - refutably - that the necessary care had not been taken. Technical rules are one out of several sources of information; they have no normative effect. This may result in a duty of anyone applying them to review the state of technology himself. (orig.) [de

  16. To improve the teaching of construction of written texts and regulations from all curriculum areas

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ana María Abello Cruz

    2013-09-01

    Full Text Available In th is article it is offered theoretical references for the construction of texts written according to the rules and suggestions for the daily performance in the universities of pedagogical sciences, since all curricular areas.

  17. Decision problems in management of construction projects

    Science.gov (United States)

    Szafranko, E.

    2017-10-01

    In a construction business, one must oftentimes make decisions during all stages of a building process, from planning a new construction project through its execution to the stage of using a ready structure. As a rule, the decision making process is made more complicated due to certain conditions specific for civil engineering. With such diverse decision situations, it is recommended to apply various decision making support methods. Both, literature and hands-on experience suggest several methods based on analytical and computational procedures, some less and some more complex. This article presents the methods which can be helpful in supporting decision making processes in the management of civil engineering projects. These are multi-criteria methods, such as MCE, AHP or indicator methods. Because the methods have different advantages and disadvantages, whereas decision situations have their own specific nature, a brief summary of the methods alongside some recommendations regarding their practical applications has been given at the end of the paper. The main aim of this article is to review the methods of decision support and their analysis for possible use in the construction industry.

  18. Protection of third parties. The protection of third parties affected by building or plant construction permits under the public construction law, the emission control law, or the atomic energy law

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Koenig, S.

    1993-01-01

    Building construction permits just like plant construction permits under the Federal Emission Control Act or the Atomic Energy Act are typical cases representing the administrative order with a dual effect, or an effect on third parties: decisions supporting the interests of the project owner always affect third parties. Third party protection therefore is a major topic of public construction law or the environmental protection law to be applied to industrial installations. Although actions brought by third parties have become something ordinary for the administrative courts, substantive third party protection continues to pose specific problems. The book in hand develops and explains a way out of the dilemma created by third party protection. The solutions presented are founded on a sound dogmatic basis and take into account the Federal Constitutional Court's rulings in matters of civil rights. The starting point adopted by the authors is the third party rights warranting protection, with the objective protection provided for by the law in general gaining effect as subjective rights as far as the protection is based on the civil rights of the constitution. The scope of protection affordable depends on the individual case and the reconciliation of terests of all parties concerned. The problem solutions set forth very extensively rely on the jurisdiction in matters of third party protection and on approaches published in the relevant literature, so that the book also may serve as a guide to current practice and a helpful source of reference for readers looking for information about the issue of third party protection. (orig./HP) [de

  19. Constructal vascularized structures

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cetkin, Erdal

    2015-06-01

    Smart features such as self-healing and selfcooling require bathing the entire volume with a coolant or/and healing agent. Bathing the entire volume is an example of point to area (or volume) flows. Point to area flows cover all the distributing and collecting kinds of flows, i.e. inhaling and exhaling, mining, river deltas, energy distribution, distribution of products on the landscape and so on. The flow resistances of a point to area flow can be decreased by changing the design with the guidance of the constructal law, which is the law of the design evolution in time. In this paper, how the flow resistances (heat, fluid and stress) can be decreased by using the constructal law is shown with examples. First, the validity of two assumptions is surveyed: using temperature independent Hess-Murray rule and using constant diameter ducts where the duct discharges fluid along its edge. Then, point to area types of flows are explained by illustrating the results of two examples: fluid networks and heating an area. Last, how the structures should be vascularized for cooling and mechanical strength is documented. This paper shows that flow resistances can be decreased by morphing the shape freely without any restrictions or generic algorithms.

  20. Report on FY15 alloy 617 code rules development

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Sham, Sam [Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); Jetter, Robert I [Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); Hollinger, Greg [Becht Engineering Co., Inc., Liberty Corner, NJ (United States); Pease, Derrick [Becht Engineering Co., Inc., Liberty Corner, NJ (United States); Carter, Peter [Stress Engineering Services, Inc., Houston, TX (United States); Pu, Chao [Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States); Wang, Yanli [Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

    2015-09-01

    Due to its strength at very high temperatures, up to 950°C (1742°F), Alloy 617 is the reference construction material for structural components that operate at or near the outlet temperature of the very high temperature gas-cooled reactors. However, the current rules in the ASME Section III, Division 5 Subsection HB, Subpart B for the evaluation of strain limits and creep-fatigue damage using simplified methods based on elastic analysis have been deemed inappropriate for Alloy 617 at temperatures above 650°C (1200°F) (Corum and Brass, Proceedings of ASME 1991 Pressure Vessels and Piping Conference, PVP-Vol. 215, p.147, ASME, NY, 1991). The rationale for this exclusion is that at higher temperatures it is not feasible to decouple plasticity and creep, which is the basis for the current simplified rules. This temperature, 650°C (1200°F), is well below the temperature range of interest for this material for the high temperature gas-cooled reactors and the very high temperature gas-cooled reactors. The only current alternative is, thus, a full inelastic analysis requiring sophisticated material models that have not yet been formulated and verified. To address these issues, proposed code rules have been developed which are based on the use of elastic-perfectly plastic (EPP) analysis methods applicable to very high temperatures. The proposed rules for strain limits and creep-fatigue evaluation were initially documented in the technical literature (Carter, Jetter and Sham, Proceedings of ASME 2012 Pressure Vessels and Piping Conference, papers PVP 2012 28082 and PVP 2012 28083, ASME, NY, 2012), and have been recently revised to incorporate comments and simplify their application. Background documents have been developed for these two code cases to support the ASME Code committee approval process. These background documents for the EPP strain limits and creep-fatigue code cases are documented in this report.

  1. Conceptualisation of rights and meta-rule of law for the web of data

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Pompeu Casanovas

    2015-09-01

    Full Text Available This article deals with some regulatory and legal problems of the Web of Data. Data and metadata are defined. Digital Rights Management (DRM and Rights Expression Languages (REL are introduced. Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL, Licensed Linked Data Resources (LLDR and Creative Commons Licenses are referred. The development of REL by means of Ontology Design Patterns such as LLDR, or Open Licenses sustained by Policy Models such as ODRL, situates the discussion on metadata at the regulatory level. With the development of the Web of Data the Rule of Law needs to evolve to a Meta-Rule of Law, incorporating tools to regulate and monitor the semantic layer of the Web. This means reflecting on the construction of a new public dimension space for the exercise of rights.

  2. Relaxed Observance of Traditional Marriage Rules Allows Social Connectivity without Loss of Genetic Diversity.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guillot, Elsa G; Hazelton, Martin L; Karafet, Tatiana M; Lansing, J Stephen; Sudoyo, Herawati; Cox, Murray P

    2015-09-01

    Marriage rules, the community prescriptions that dictate who an individual can or cannot marry, are extremely diverse and universally present in traditional societies. A major focus of research in the early decades of modern anthropology, marriage rules impose social and economic forces that help structure societies and forge connections between them. However, in those early anthropological studies, the biological benefits or disadvantages of marriage rules could not be determined. We revisit this question by applying a novel simulation framework and genome-wide data to explore the effects of Asymmetric Prescriptive Alliance, an elaborate set of marriage rules that has been a focus of research for many anthropologists. Simulations show that strict adherence to these marriage rules reduces genetic diversity on the autosomes, X chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, but relaxed compliance produces genetic diversity similar to random mating. Genome-wide data from the Indonesian community of Rindi, one of the early study populations for Asymmetric Prescriptive Alliance, are more consistent with relaxed compliance than strict adherence. We therefore suggest that, in practice, marriage rules are treated with sufficient flexibility to allow social connectivity without significant degradation of biological diversity. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.

  3. Giant panda BAC library construction and assembly of a 650-kb contig spanning major histocompatibility complex class II region

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Pan Hui-Juan

    2007-09-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Giant panda is rare and endangered species endemic to China. The low rates of reproductive success and infectious disease resistance have severely hampered the development of captive and wild populations of the giant panda. The major histocompatibility complex (MHC plays important roles in immune response and reproductive system such as mate choice and mother-fetus bio-compatibility. It is thus essential to understand genetic details of the giant panda MHC. Construction of a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC library will provide a new tool for panda genome physical mapping and thus facilitate understanding of panda MHC genes. Results A giant panda BAC library consisting of 205,800 clones has been constructed. The average insert size was calculated to be 97 kb based on the examination of 174 randomly selected clones, indicating that the giant panda library contained 6.8-fold genome equivalents. Screening of the library with 16 giant panda PCR primer pairs revealed 6.4 positive clones per locus, in good agreement with an expected 6.8-fold genomic coverage of the library. Based on this BAC library, we constructed a contig map of the giant panda MHC class II region from BTNL2 to DAXX spanning about 650 kb by a three-step method: (1 PCR-based screening of the BAC library with primers from homologous MHC class II gene loci, end sequences and BAC clone shotgun sequences, (2 DNA sequencing validation of positive clones, and (3 restriction digest fingerprinting verification of inter-clone overlapping. Conclusion The identifications of genes and genomic regions of interest are greatly favored by the availability of this giant panda BAC library. The giant panda BAC library thus provides a useful platform for physical mapping, genome sequencing or complex analysis of targeted genomic regions. The 650 kb sequence-ready BAC contig map of the giant panda MHC class II region from BTNL2 to DAXX, verified by the three-step method, offers a

  4. Measuring the construct of executive control in schizophrenia: defining and validating translational animal paradigms for discovery research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gilmour, Gary; Arguello, Alexander; Bari, Andrea; Brown, Verity J; Carter, Cameron; Floresco, Stan B; Jentsch, David J; Tait, David S; Young, Jared W; Robbins, Trevor W

    2013-11-01

    Executive control is an aspect of cognitive function known to be impaired in schizophrenia. Previous meetings of the Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) group have more precisely defined executive control in terms of two constructs: "rule generation and selection", and "dynamic adjustments of control". Next, human cognitive tasks that may effectively measure performance with regard to these constructs were identified to be developed into practical and reliable measures for use in treatment development. The aim of this round of CNTRICS meetings was to define animal paradigms that have sufficient promise to warrant further investigation for their utility in measuring these constructs. Accordingly, "reversal learning" and the "attentional set-shifting task" were nominated to assess the construct of rule generation and selection, and the "stop signal task" for the construct of dynamic adjustments of control. These tasks are described in more detail here, with a particular focus on their utility for drug discovery efforts. Presently, each assay has strengths and weaknesses with regard to this point and increased emphasis on improving practical aspects of testing, understanding predictive validity, and defining biomarkers of performance represent important objectives in attaining confidence in translational validity here. Crown Copyright © 2012. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  5. 4D Applications of GIS in Construction Management

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    A. Chaitanya Kumar

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available Construction industries broadly involve different set of construction activities which are to be executed as per schedule and the major software used for scheduling is PRIMAVERA and Microsoft Project (MSP. But the software still lacks a feature of providing spatial aspects of information in construction schedule. Recently, advanced technology like 4D GIS plays a major role in overcoming the limitation of the software. 4D GIS technology includes integration of 2D drawings from AutoCAD and schedules prepared in PRIMAVERA software. In the present study, a multistair residential building has been selected. ARCMAP 10.2 is used for interlinking of schedules as well as drawings and ARCSCENE has been used for developing 4D view. This linkage between scheduled activities and respective drawings in GIS helps in identifying construction sequences and also in detecting logical errors that occur in project schedules. The developed 4D view provides better visualization of construction progress of a project.

  6. The South African constitutional Court and the Rule of Law: The ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The rule of law as a foundational constitutional value constrains the exercise of public power but the precise limits of the constraints it sets are not well defined. In Masethla v President of the Republic of South Africa,1 the majority of the Constitutional Court opted for an interpretation of this value that frees the President from ...

  7. Following the Rules.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Katz, Anne

    2016-05-01

    I am getting better at following the rules as I grow older, although I still bristle at many of them. I was a typical rebellious teenager; no one understood me, David Bowie was my idol, and, one day, my generation was going to change the world. Now I really want people to understand me: David Bowie remains one of my favorite singers and, yes, my generation has changed the world, and not necessarily for the better. Growing up means that you have to make the rules, not just follow those set by others, and, at times, having rules makes a lot of sense.
.

  8. Construction Tender Subcontract Selection using Case-based Reasoning

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Due Luu

    2012-11-01

    Full Text Available Obtaining competitive quotations from suitably qualified subcontractors at tender tim n significantly increase the chance of w1nmng a construction project. Amidst an increasingly growing trend to subcontracting in Australia, selecting appropriate subcontractors for a construction project can be a daunting task requiring the analysis of complex and dynamic criteria such as past performance, suitable experience, track record of competitive pricing, financial stability and so on. Subcontractor selection is plagued with uncertainty and vagueness and these conditions are difficul_t o represent in generalised sets of rules. DeciSIOns pertaining to the selection of subcontr:act?s tender time are usually based on the mtu1t1onand past experience of construction estimators. Case-based reasoning (CBR may be an appropriate method of addressing the chal_lenges of selecting subcontractors because CBR 1s able to harness the experiential knowledge of practitioners. This paper reviews the practicality and suitability of a CBR approach for subcontractor tender selection through the development of a prototype CBR procurement advisory system. In this system, subcontractor selection cases are represented by a set of attributes elicited from experienced construction estimators. The results indicate that CBR can enhance the appropriateness of the selection of subcontractors for construction projects.

  9. CRITICAL EVENTS IN CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Jørgensen, Kirsten; Rasmussen, Grane Mikael Gregaard

    2009-01-01

    cause-effects of failures and defects in the construction industry by using an analytical approach (The bowtie model) which is developed in the accident research. Using this model clarifies the relationships within the chain of failures that causes critical events with undesirable consequences......Function failures, defects and poor communication are major problems in the construction industry. These failures and defects are caused by a row of critical events in the construction process. The purpose of this paper is to define “critical events” in the construction process and to investigate....... In this way the causes of failures and the relationships between various failures are rendered visible. A large construction site was observed from start to finish as the empirical element in the research. The research focuses on all kinds of critical events identified throughout every phase during...

  10. Firm heterogeneity, Rules of Origin and Rules of Cumulation

    OpenAIRE

    Bombarda , Pamela; Gamberoni , Elisa

    2013-01-01

    We analyse the impact of relaxing rules of origin (ROOs) in a simple setting with heterogeneous firms that buy intermediate inputs from domestic and foreign sources. In particular, we consider the impact of switching from bilateral to diagonal cumulation when using preferences (instead of paying the MFN tariff) involving the respect of rules of origin. We find that relaxing the restrictiveness of the ROOs leads the least productive exporters to stop exporting. The empirical part confirms thes...

  11. The Product and Quotient Rules Revisited

    Science.gov (United States)

    Eggleton, Roger; Kustov, Vladimir

    2011-01-01

    Mathematical elegance is illustrated by strikingly parallel versions of the product and quotient rules of basic calculus, with some applications. Corresponding rules for second derivatives are given: the product rule is familiar, but the quotient rule is less so.

  12. Designing adaptive operating rules for a large multi-purpose reservoir

    Science.gov (United States)

    Geressu, Robel; Rougé, Charles; Harou, Julien

    2017-04-01

    Reservoirs whose live storage capacity is large compared with annual inflow have "memory", i.e., their storage levels contain information about past inflows and reservoir operations. Such "long-memory" reservoirs can be found in basins in dry regions such as the Nile River Basin in Africa, the Colorado River Basin in the US, or river basins in Western and Central Asia. There the effects of a dry year have the potential to impact reservoir levels and downstream releases for several subsequent years, prompting tensions in transboundary basins. Yet, current reservoir operation rules in those reservoirs do not reflect this by integrating past climate history and release decisions among the factors that influence operating decisions. This work proposes and demonstrates an adaptive reservoir operating rule that explicitly accounts for the recent history of release decisions, and not only current storage level and near-term inflow forecasts. This implies adding long-term (e.g., multiyear) objectives to the existing short-term (e.g., annual) ones. We apply these operating rules to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a large reservoir under construction on the Blue Nile River. Energy generation has to be balanced with the imperative of releasing enough water in low flow years (e.g., the minimum 1, 2 or 3 year cumulative flow) to avoid tensions with downstream countries, Sudan and Egypt. Maximizing the minimum multi-year releases could be of interest for the Nile problem to minimize the impact on performance of the large High Aswan Dam in Egypt. Objectives include maximizing the average and minimum annual energy generation and maximizing the minimum annual, two year and three year cumulative releases. The system model is tested using 30 stochastically generated streamflow series. One can then derive adaptive release rules depending on the value of one- and two-year total releases with respect to thresholds. Then, there are 3 sets of release rules for the reservoir depending

  13. DeepDive: Declarative Knowledge Base Construction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    De Sa, Christopher; Ratner, Alex; Ré, Christopher; Shin, Jaeho; Wang, Feiran; Wu, Sen; Zhang, Ce

    2016-03-01

    The dark data extraction or knowledge base construction (KBC) problem is to populate a SQL database with information from unstructured data sources including emails, webpages, and pdf reports. KBC is a long-standing problem in industry and research that encompasses problems of data extraction, cleaning, and integration. We describe DeepDive, a system that combines database and machine learning ideas to help develop KBC systems. The key idea in DeepDive is that statistical inference and machine learning are key tools to attack classical data problems in extraction, cleaning, and integration in a unified and more effective manner. DeepDive programs are declarative in that one cannot write probabilistic inference algorithms; instead, one interacts by defining features or rules about the domain. A key reason for this design choice is to enable domain experts to build their own KBC systems. We present the applications, abstractions, and techniques of DeepDive employed to accelerate construction of KBC systems.

  14. 75 FR 51934 - Telemarketing Sales Rule

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-08-24

    ... FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION 16 CFR Part 310 Telemarketing Sales Rule AGENCY: Federal Trade Commission. ACTION: Final rule; correction. SUMMARY: The Federal Trade Commission (``Commission'') published a final rule on August 10, 2010, adopting amendments to the Telemarketing Sales Rule that address the...

  15. Jahn-Teller effect versus Hund's rule coupling in C60N-

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wehrli, S.; Sigrist, M.

    2007-09-01

    We propose variational states for the ground state and the low-energy collective rotator excitations in negatively charged C60N- ions (N=1,…,5) . The approach includes the linear electron-phonon coupling and the Coulomb interaction on the same level. The electron-phonon coupling is treated within the effective mode approximation which yields the linear t1u⊗Hg Jahn-Teller problem whereas the Coulomb interaction gives rise to Hund’s rule coupling for N=2,3,4 . The Hamiltonian has accidental SO(3) symmetry which allows an elegant formulation in terms of angular momenta. Trial states are constructed from coherent states and using projection operators onto angular momentum subspaces which results in good variational states for the complete parameter range. The evaluation of the corresponding energies is to a large extent analytical. We use the approach for a detailed analysis of the competition between Jahn-Teller effect and Hund’s rule coupling, which determines the spin state for N=2,3,4 . We calculate the low-spin-high-spin gap for N=2,3,4 as a function of the Hund’s rule coupling constant J . We find that the experimentally measured gaps suggest a coupling constant in the range J=60-80meV . Using a finite value for J , we recalculate the ground state energies of the C60N- ions and find that the Jahn-Teller energy gain is partly counterbalanced by the Hund’s rule coupling. In particular, the ground state energies for N=2,3,4 are almost equal.

  16. Autonomous Rule Creation for Intrusion Detection

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Todd Vollmer; Jim Alves-Foss; Milos Manic

    2011-04-01

    Many computational intelligence techniques for anomaly based network intrusion detection can be found in literature. Translating a newly discovered intrusion recognition criteria into a distributable rule can be a human intensive effort. This paper explores a multi-modal genetic algorithm solution for autonomous rule creation. This algorithm focuses on the process of creating rules once an intrusion has been identified, rather than the evolution of rules to provide a solution for intrusion detection. The algorithm was demonstrated on anomalous ICMP network packets (input) and Snort rules (output of the algorithm). Output rules were sorted according to a fitness value and any duplicates were removed. The experimental results on ten test cases demonstrated a 100 percent rule alert rate. Out of 33,804 test packets 3 produced false positives. Each test case produced a minimum of three rule variations that could be used as candidates for a production system.

  17. Impact of modules on the ACR construction schedule

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Choy, Ed; Elgohary, Medhat; Fairclough, Neville; Yu, Stephen; Murayama, Kouichi; Miura, Jun; Kawahata, Junichi

    2003-01-01

    The ACR (Advanced CANDU Reactor), developed by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL), is designed with constructability considerations as a major requirement during all project phases from the concept design stage to the detail design stage. For ACR-700, a project schedule of 48 months has been developed for the nth replicated unit with a 36 month construction period duration from First Concrete to Fuel Load. AECL, recognizing the immense benefit of collective experience, is partnering with Hitachi Ltd in the development of the ACR power plant design. AECL has gained valuable experience in implementing new construction methods at the Qinshan (Phase III) twin unit CANDU 6 plant in China, and Hitachi likewise has enjoyed success in modular construction of ABWRs in Japan. Utilizing these experiences, AECL is developing the ACR nuclear steam plant (NSP) and Hitachi is developing the Turbine Building. An overall construction strategy, which builds on the success of these construction methods from the nuclear power plant developments in China and Japan, has been developed for the ACR. The overall construction strategy comprises the 'Open Top' construction technique using a Very Heavy Lift crane, parallel construction activities, with extensive modularization and prefabrication. Modules and prefabrications are major features of the ACR design, resulting in an excess of 80% of Reactor Building internal work being completed as modules or as very streamlined traditional construction. This paper reviews the ACR construction strategy and provides examples of modules and how they impact on the ACR construction schedule. In conclusion, the ACR-700 is designed using the latest, proven construction methods to achieve a 36 month construction period for the nth replicated unit. (author)

  18. Methodological approaches based on business rules

    OpenAIRE

    Anca Ioana ANDREESCU; Adina UTA

    2008-01-01

    Business rules and business processes are essential artifacts in defining the requirements of a software system. Business processes capture business behavior, while rules connect processes and thus control processes and business behavior. Traditionally, rules are scattered inside application code. This approach makes it very difficult to change rules and shorten the life cycle of the software system. Because rules change more quickly than the application itself, it is desirable to externalize...

  19. Endogeneously arising network allocation rules

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Slikker, M.

    2006-01-01

    In this paper we study endogenously arising network allocation rules. We focus on three allocation rules: the Myerson value, the position value and the component-wise egalitarian solution. For any of these three rules we provide a characterization based on component efficiency and some balanced

  20. Performance based regulation - The maintenance rule

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Correia, Richard P. [NRR/DOTS/TQMP, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, M/S OWFN 10A19, Washington, D.C. 20555 (United States)

    1997-07-01

    The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has begun a transition from 'process-oriented' to 'results-oriented' regulations. The maintenance rule is a results-oriented rule that mandates consideration of risk and plant performance. The Maintenance Rule allows licensees to devise the most effective and efficient means of achieving the results described in the rule including the use of Probabilistic Risk (or Safety) Assessments. The NRC staff conducted a series of site visits to evaluate implementation of the Rule. Conclusions from the site visits indicated that the results-oriented Maintenance Rule can be successfully implemented and enforced. (author)

  1. Performance based regulation - The maintenance rule

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Correia, Richard P.

    1997-01-01

    The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has begun a transition from 'process-oriented' to 'results-oriented' regulations. The maintenance rule is a results-oriented rule that mandates consideration of risk and plant performance. The Maintenance Rule allows licensees to devise the most effective and efficient means of achieving the results described in the rule including the use of Probabilistic Risk (or Safety) Assessments. The NRC staff conducted a series of site visits to evaluate implementation of the Rule. Conclusions from the site visits indicated that the results-oriented Maintenance Rule can be successfully implemented and enforced. (author)

  2. Patterns of Knowledge Construction

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chang, Bo

    2018-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to identify knowledge construction patterns in a local learning community. Observation, documents, and semistructured interviews were employed to collect data. Twenty learners were interviewed. Data were analyzed inductively using the constant comparative method. Five major patterns--radiation, circulation,…

  3. Persistent Rule-Following in the Face of Reversed Reinforcement Contingencies: The Differential Impact of Direct Versus Derived Rules.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harte, Colin; Barnes-Holmes, Yvonne; Barnes-Holmes, Dermot; McEnteggart, Ciara

    2017-11-01

    Rule-governed behavior and its role in generating insensitivity to direct contingencies of reinforcement have been implicated in human psychological suffering. In addition, the human capacity to engage in derived relational responding has also been used to explain specific human maladaptive behaviors, such as irrational fears. To date, however, very little research has attempted to integrate research on contingency insensitivity and derived relations. The current work sought to fill this gap. Across two experiments, participants received either a direct rule (Direct Rule Condition) or a rule that involved a novel derived relational response (Derived Rule Condition). Provision of a direct rule resulted in more persistent rule-following in the face of competing contingencies, but only when the opportunity to follow the reinforced rule beforehand was relatively protracted. Furthermore, only in the Direct Rule Condition were there significant correlations between rule-compliance and stress. A post hoc interpretation of the findings is provided.

  4. Constructed wetlands for pollution control: processes, performance, design and operation

    National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

    2000-01-01

    .... Types of constructed wetland, major design parameters, role of vegetation, hydraulic patterns, loadings, treatment efficiency, construction, operation and maintenance costs are discussed in depth...

  5. "Chaos Rules" Revisited

    Science.gov (United States)

    Murphy, David

    2011-01-01

    About 20 years ago, while lost in the midst of his PhD research, the author mused over proposed titles for his thesis. He was pretty pleased with himself when he came up with "Chaos Rules" (the implied double meaning was deliberate), or more completely, "Chaos Rules: An Exploration of the Work of Instructional Designers in Distance Education." He…

  6. Idioms-based Business Rule Extraction

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    R Smit (Rob)

    2011-01-01

    htmlabstractThis thesis studies the extraction of embedded business rules, using the idioms of the used framework to identify them. Embedded business rules exist as source code in the software system and knowledge about them may get lost. Extraction of those business rules could make them accessible

  7. 18 CFR 39.10 - Changes to an Electric Reliability Organization Rule or Regional Entity Rule.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... RULES CONCERNING CERTIFICATION OF THE ELECTRIC RELIABILITY ORGANIZATION; AND PROCEDURES FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT, APPROVAL, AND ENFORCEMENT OF ELECTRIC RELIABILITY STANDARDS § 39.10 Changes to an Electric... Reliability Organization Rule or Regional Entity Rule. 39.10 Section 39.10 Conservation of Power and Water...

  8. Incremental Learning of Context Free Grammars by Parsing-Based Rule Generation and Rule Set Search

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nakamura, Katsuhiko; Hoshina, Akemi

    This paper discusses recent improvements and extensions in Synapse system for inductive inference of context free grammars (CFGs) from sample strings. Synapse uses incremental learning, rule generation based on bottom-up parsing, and the search for rule sets. The form of production rules in the previous system is extended from Revised Chomsky Normal Form A→βγ to Extended Chomsky Normal Form, which also includes A→B, where each of β and γ is either a terminal or nonterminal symbol. From the result of bottom-up parsing, a rule generation mechanism synthesizes minimum production rules required for parsing positive samples. Instead of inductive CYK algorithm in the previous version of Synapse, the improved version uses a novel rule generation method, called ``bridging,'' which bridges the lacked part of the derivation tree for the positive string. The improved version also employs a novel search strategy, called serial search in addition to minimum rule set search. The synthesis of grammars by the serial search is faster than the minimum set search in most cases. On the other hand, the size of the generated CFGs is generally larger than that by the minimum set search, and the system can find no appropriate grammar for some CFL by the serial search. The paper shows experimental results of incremental learning of several fundamental CFGs and compares the methods of rule generation and search strategies.

  9. The knowledge of dietary rules among patients with diabetes

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Joanna Świrska

    2017-05-01

    Full Text Available Introduction: The incidence of diabetes increases in Poland and all over the world. Diet is an integral element of diabetes therapy. The knowledge of dietary rules and compliance with them facilitates body mass reduction and improves metabolic parameters of the body thus preventing diabetes’ complications development. Aim: The aim of the study was to evaluate the knowledge of dietary rules among diabetic patients. Material and methods: The study included 50 patients with recognized diabetes  who were hospitalized in SPSK-4 hospital in Lublin from January to May, 2016. In the study the diagnostic survey was applied. Results: The knowledge of basic dietary rules in diabetes among the majority of surveyed diabetic patients (64% was unsatisfactory. The most significant deficit included lack of acquaintance with glycemic index and carbohydrate exchanges thus making it impossible to make use of them in preparing everyday meals. The knowledge of the surveyed patients depended on their educational status, place of residence and age. Unsatisfactory knowledge was found among 82% of patients  with primary education vs. 40% with higher education, in 80% with countryside residence vs. 53% residing in town and in 80% of patients aged 31-40  and 41-55 years vs. 50% aged 18-30. Conclusion: Dietary education is a necessary element of diabetes therapy. Educating patients about diabetic diet should be repeated regularly as even patients with long-standing diabetes history have unsatisfactory knowledge about the dietary rules. Preferably, educating should be individual and adjusted to patient’s age and education.

  10. Rules Extraction with an Immune Algorithm

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Deqin Yan

    2007-12-01

    Full Text Available In this paper, a method of extracting rules with immune algorithms from information systems is proposed. Designing an immune algorithm is based on a sharing mechanism to extract rules. The principle of sharing and competing resources in the sharing mechanism is consistent with the relationship of sharing and rivalry among rules. In order to extract rules efficiently, a new concept of flexible confidence and rule measurement is introduced. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is effective.

  11. Impact of Construction Waste Disposal Charging Scheme on work practices at construction sites in Hong Kong.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yu, Ann T W; Poon, C S; Wong, Agnes; Yip, Robin; Jaillon, Lara

    2013-01-01

    Waste management in the building industry in Hong Kong has become an important environmental issue. Particularly, an increasing amount of construction and demolition (C&D) waste is being disposed at landfill sites. In order to reduce waste generation and encourage reuse and recycling, the Hong Kong Government has implemented the Construction Waste Disposal Charging Scheme (CWDCS) to levy charges on C&D waste disposal to landfills. In order to provide information on the changes in reducing waste generation practice among construction participants in various work trades, a study was conducted after 3 years of implementation of the CWDCS via a structured questionnaire survey in the building industry in Hong Kong. The study result has revealed changes with work flows of the major trades as well as differentiating the levels of waste reduced. Three building projects in the public and private sectors were selected as case studies to demonstrate the changes in work flows and the reduction of waste achieved. The research findings reveal that a significant reduction of construction waste was achieved at the first 3 years (2006-2008) of CWDCS implementation. However, the reduction cannot be sustained. The major trades have been influenced to a certain extent by the implementation of the CWDCS. Slight improvement in waste management practices was observed, but reduction of construction waste in the wet-finishing and dry-finishing trades has undergone little improvement. Implementation of the CWDCS has not yet motivated subcontractors to change their methods of construction so as to reduce C&D waste. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  12. Evaluation of IOTA Simple Ultrasound Rules to Distinguish Benign and Malignant Ovarian Tumours.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Garg, Sugandha; Kaur, Amarjit; Mohi, Jaswinder Kaur; Sibia, Preet Kanwal; Kaur, Navkiran

    2017-08-01

    IOTA stands for International Ovarian Tumour Analysis group. Ovarian cancer is one of the common cancers in women and is diagnosed at later stage in majority. The limiting factor for early diagnosis is lack of standardized terms and procedures in gynaecological sonography. Introduction of IOTA rules has provided some consistency in defining morphological features of ovarian masses through a standardized examination technique. To evaluate the efficacy of IOTA simple ultrasound rules in distinguishing benign and malignant ovarian tumours and establishing their use as a tool in early diagnosis of ovarian malignancy. A hospital based case control prospective study was conducted. Patients with suspected ovarian pathology were evaluated using IOTA ultrasound rules and designated as benign or malignant. Findings were correlated with histopathological findings. Collected data was statistically analysed using chi-square test and kappa statistical method. Out of initial 55 patients, 50 patients were included in the final analysis who underwent surgery. IOTA simple rules were applicable in 45 out of these 50 patients (90%). The sensitivity for the detection of malignancy in cases where IOTA simple rules were applicable was 91.66% and the specificity was 84.84%. Accuracy was 86.66%. Classifying inconclusive cases as malignant, the sensitivity and specificity was 93% and 80% respectively. High level of agreement was found between USG and histopathological diagnosis with Kappa value as 0.323. IOTA simple ultrasound rules were highly sensitive and specific in predicting ovarian malignancy preoperatively yet being reproducible, easy to train and use.

  13. Assumption and program of the earlier stage construction of L/ILW disposal site

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Li Xuequn; Chen Shi; Li Xinbang

    1993-01-01

    The authors analysed the production and treatment of low- and intermediate-level radwastes (L/ILW) in China. Some problems and situation in this field are introduced. Over the past ten years, preliminary efforts have been made by CNNC (China National Nuclear Corporation) in policy, law and rules, developing program, management system, siting, engineering techniques, and safety assessment for radwaste disposal. The investment of the earlier stage work of L/ILW disposal site construction is estimated, the program and assumption to disposal site construction of the L/ILW are reviewed

  14. Electrotechnical installations. Transformer stations. Construction; transformer rooms. Elektrotechnische Anlagen. Transformatorenstationen. Bauliche Ausfuehrung; Raeume fuer Transformatoren

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    1976-05-01

    The data sheet to standardize the construction of transformer rooms for stationary transformers and takes into account the replacement of transformers by units made by different manufacturers. It contains information about the position, dimensions, load assumptions, construction of ceilings, walls and floors, cable routes, electric installations for lighting and ventilation systems, windows and doors, venting, paint and surface protection coatings, arrangement and design of oil catch pans, and calculation of the venting cross sections. Pertinent VDE rules are listed.

  15. Proof Rules for Recursive Procedures

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Hesselink, Wim H.

    1993-01-01

    Four proof rules for recursive procedures in a Pascal-like language are presented. The main rule deals with total correctness and is based on results of Gries and Martin. The rule is easier to apply than Martin's. It is introduced as an extension of a specification format for Pascal-procedures, with

  16. "Smart inhibition": electrophysiological evidence for the suppression of conflict-generating task rules during task switching.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Meiran, Nachshon; Hsieh, Shulan; Chang, Chi-Chih

    2011-09-01

    A major challenge for task switching is maintaining a balance between high task readiness and effectively ignoring irrelevant task rules. This calls for finely tuned inhibition that targets only the source of interference without adversely influencing other task-related representations. The authors show that irrelevant task rules generating response conflict are inhibited, causing their inefficient execution on the next trial (indicating the presence of competitor rule suppression[CRS];Meiran, Hsieh, & Dimov, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 36, 992-1002, 2010). To determine whether CRS influences task rules, rather than target stimuli or responses, the authors focused on the processing of the task cue before the target stimulus was presented and before the response could be chosen. As was predicted, CRS was found in the event-related potentials in two time windows during task cue processing. It was also found in three time windows after target presentation. Source localization analyses suggest the involvement of the right dorsal prefrontal cortex in all five time windows.

  17. Implementing a Rule-Based Contract Compliance Checker

    Science.gov (United States)

    Strano, Massimo; Molina-Jimenez, Carlos; Shrivastava, Santosh

    The paper describes the design and implementation of an independent, third party contract monitoring service called Contract Compliance Checker (CCC). The CCC is provided with the specification of the contract in force, and is capable of observing and logging the relevant business-to-business (B2B) interaction events, in order to determine whether the actions of the business partners are consistent with the contract. A contract specification language called EROP (for Events, Rights, Obligations and Prohibitions) for the CCC has been developed based on business rules, that provides constructs to specify what rights, obligation and prohibitions become active and inactive after the occurrence of events related to the execution of business operations. The system has been designed to work with B2B industry standards such as ebXML and RosettaNet.

  18. The construction and use of a knowledge base in the real-time control of research reactor power

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Bernard, J.A.

    1986-01-01

    The construction of a knowledge base and its use in developing a rule-based methodology for the transient, closed-loop, digital control of the power on the 5 MWt MIT Research Reactor (MITR-II) is described. Material is first presented on the nature of the control task, the procedure used for knowledge acquisition, the contents of the knowledge base, the verification of the information contained therein, and the use of 'fuzzy' logic to represent that knowledge. The rationale, structure, and implementation of a possible set of conditional rules for the transient control of the MITR-II's power is then described together with the results of a successful experimental trial of this rule-based controller. The possible role of the rule-based approach in process control is discussed. The proposal is made that rule-based and analytic technologies should be merged in order to obtain a robust controller capable of displaying both the sequence and 'reasoning' of its automatic actions to human supervisory personnel

  19. Handbook of energy use for building construction

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Stein, R.G.; Stein, C.; Buckley, M.; Green, M.

    1980-03-01

    The construction industry accounts for over 11.14% of the total energy consumed in the US annually. This represents the equivalent energy value of 1 1/4 billion barrels of oil. Within the construction industry, new building construction accounts for 5.19% of national annual energy consumption. The remaining 5.95% is distributed among new nonbuilding construction (highways, ralroads, dams, bridges, etc.), building maintenance construction, and nonbuilding maintenance construction. The handbook focuses on new building construction; however, some information for the other parts of the construction industry is also included. The handbook provides building designers with information to determine the energy required for buildings construction and evaluates the energy required for alternative materials, assemblies, and methods. The handbook is also applicable to large-scale planning and policy determination in that it provides the means to estimate the energy required to carry out major building programs.

  20. Handbook of energy use for building construction

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stein, R. G.; Stein, C.; Buckley, M.; Green, M.

    1980-03-01

    The construction industry accounts for over 11.14% of the total energy consumed in the US annually. This represents the equivalent energy value of 1 1/4 billion barrels of oil. Within the construction industry, new building construction accounts for 5.19% of national annual energy consumption. The remaining 5.95% is distributed among new nonbuilding construction (highways, railroads, dams, bridges, etc.), building maintenance construction, and nonbuilding maintenance construction. Emphasis is given to new building construction; however, some information for the other parts of the construction industry is also included. Building designers are provided with information to determine the energy required for buildings construction and to evaluate the energy required for alternative materials, assemblies, and methods. It is also applicable to large-scale planning and policy determination in that it provides the means to estimate the energy required to carry out major building programs.

  1. Rules Versus Discretion in Monetary Policy

    OpenAIRE

    Stanley Fischer

    1988-01-01

    This paper examines the case for rules rather than discretion in the conduct of monetary policy, from both historical and analytic perspectives. The paper starts with the rules of the game under the gold standard. These rules were ill-defined and not adhered to; active discretionary policy was pursued to defend the gold standard -- but the gold standard came closer to a regime of rules than the current system. The arguments for rules in general developed by Milton Friedman are described mo ap...

  2. Rule Making and Rule Breaking: Game Development and the Governance of Emergent Behaviour

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jennifer R. Whitson

    2010-07-01

    Full Text Available Discussions of ‘control’ in games often center on players and their myriad attempts to push back upon the systems that seek to constrain them. The fact that players resist the constraints imposed upon them is not surprising, nor is it surprising that counterplay and control are such rich topics for game studies academics. In this article, I argue that players are invited by games to bend the rules. It is in the very nature of play to find the movement between the rules, and for many players the ‘fun’ in play is the inherent challenge of attempting to master, defeat, or remake games’ formal structures. These rationalities of play preclude blind obedience to the rules and have distinct implications for how games are governed. While there have been numerous studies of players who bend or break the rules (Consalvo, 2007; Foo and Koivisto, 2004; Dibbell, 1998; Kolko and Reid, 1998; Williams, 2006; Mnookin, 1997 and players who alter and re-make the rules in their role of co-producers (Sotamaa, 2009; Kücklich, 2005; Humphreys, 2005; Taylor, 2006b, there is little research on game development companies and their attempts to harness these rationalities of play and uphold the rules beyond the reflexive writings of game designers themselves (Curtis, 1992; Morningstar and Farmer, 1991; Koster, 2002.

  3. Gaming the system. Dodging the rules, ruling the dodgers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Morreim, E H

    1991-03-01

    Although traditional obligations of fidelity require physicians to deliver quality care to their patients, including to utilize costly technologies, physicians are steadily losing their accustomed control over the necessary resources. The "economic agents" who own the medical and monetary resources of care now impose a wide array of rules and restrictions in order to contain their costs of operation. However, physicians can still control resources indirectly through "gaming the system," employing tactics such as "fudging" that exploit resource rules' ambiguity and flexibility to bypass the rules while ostensibly honoring them. Physicians may be especially inclined to game the system where resource rules seriously underserve patients' needs, where economic agents seem to be "gaming the patient," with needless obstacles to care, or where others, such as hospitals or even physicians themselves, may be denied needed reimbursements. Though tempting, gaming is morally and medically hazardous. It can harm patients and society, offend honesty, and violate basic principles of contractual and distributive justice. It is also, in fact, usually unnecessary in securing needed resources for patients. More fundamentally, we must reconsider what physicians owe their patients. They owe what is theirs to give: their competence, care and loyalty. In light of medicine's changing economics, two new duties emerge: economic advising, whereby physicians explicitly discuss the economic as well as medical aspects of each treatment option; and economic advocacy, whereby physicians intercede actively on their patients' behalf with the economic agents who control the resources.

  4. Genomic taxonomy of vibrios

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Iida Tetsuya

    2009-10-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Vibrio taxonomy has been based on a polyphasic approach. In this study, we retrieve useful taxonomic information (i.e. data that can be used to distinguish different taxonomic levels, such as species and genera from 32 genome sequences of different vibrio species. We use a variety of tools to explore the taxonomic relationship between the sequenced genomes, including Multilocus Sequence Analysis (MLSA, supertrees, Average Amino Acid Identity (AAI, genomic signatures, and Genome BLAST atlases. Our aim is to analyse the usefulness of these tools for species identification in vibrios. Results We have generated four new genome sequences of three Vibrio species, i.e., V. alginolyticus 40B, V. harveyi-like 1DA3, and V. mimicus strains VM573 and VM603, and present a broad analyses of these genomes along with other sequenced Vibrio species. The genome atlas and pangenome plots provide a tantalizing image of the genomic differences that occur between closely related sister species, e.g. V. cholerae and V. mimicus. The vibrio pangenome contains around 26504 genes. The V. cholerae core genome and pangenome consist of 1520 and 6923 genes, respectively. Pangenomes might allow different strains of V. cholerae to occupy different niches. MLSA and supertree analyses resulted in a similar phylogenetic picture, with a clear distinction of four groups (Vibrio core group, V. cholerae-V. mimicus, Aliivibrio spp., and Photobacterium spp.. A Vibrio species is defined as a group of strains that share > 95% DNA identity in MLSA and supertree analysis, > 96% AAI, ≤ 10 genome signature dissimilarity, and > 61% proteome identity. Strains of the same species and species of the same genus will form monophyletic groups on the basis of MLSA and supertree. Conclusion The combination of different analytical and bioinformatics tools will enable the most accurate species identification through genomic computational analysis. This endeavour will culminate in

  5. BUDGET NORMALIZATION AND PRICING FEATURES IN CONSTRUCTION

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    M. I. Gadzhieva

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available It is proved that the pricing of the construction is different from the pricing system in the industry and other branches of economy, because it has different methodological and organizational approaches. It has been determined that the cost of construction is set on the stage of its design, in the process of concluding investment contracts (construction contracts, as well as directly during construction, major repairs of objects of capital construction, reconstruction and the implementation of certain types of construction and installation works. It has been found that the pricing mechanism in construction is based on the detailed legal and reference documents regulating material consumption rates and prices, taking into account sectoral, territorial and seasonal features of building production. It has been found that under inflation conditions the price index calculation of construction products for investment purposes is of great importance. Mandatory approval of all stakeholders of the construction production method for determining the price of the construction site is proposed.

  6. 77 FR 42988 - Updating OSHA Construction Standards Based on National Consensus Standards; Head Protection...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-07-23

    .... OSHA-2011-0184] RIN 1218-AC65 Updating OSHA Construction Standards Based on National Consensus... Administration (OSHA), Department of Labor. ACTION: Direct final rule; correction. SUMMARY: OSHA is correcting a... confusion resulting from a drafting error. OSHA published the DFR on June 22, 2012 (77 FR 37587). OSHA also...

  7. Changing from a Rules-based to a Principles-based Accounting Logic: A Review

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Marta Silva Guerreiro

    2014-06-01

    Full Text Available We explore influences on unlisted companies when Portugal moved from a code law, rules-based accounting system, to a principles-based accounting system of adapted International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS. Institutionalisation of the new principles-based system was generally facilitated by a socio-economic and political context that increasingly supported IFRS logic. This helped central actors gain political opportunity, mobilise important allies, and accommodate major protagonists. The preparedness of unlisted companies to adopt the new IFRS-based accounting system voluntarily was explained by their desire to maintain social legitimacy. However, it was affected negatively by the embeddedness of rule-based practices in the ‘old’ prevailing institutional logic.

  8. Methods of Information Subjects and Objects Interaction Rules Formalization in the Electronic Trading Platform System

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Emma Emanuilova Yandybaeva

    2015-03-01

    Full Text Available The methods of information subjects and objects interaction rules formalization in the electronic trading platform system has been developed. They are based on mathematical model of mandatory role-based access control. As a result of the work we have defined set of user roles and constructed roles hierarchy. For the roles hierarchy restrictions have been imposed to ensure the safety of the information system.

  9. Welding engineering manual for constructing engineers. Pt. 2

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Neumann, A.

    1986-01-01

    The manual is a real treasure trove of knowledge and experience for the statics expert, the constructing engineer, and the welding engineer, who have to do with design and dimensioning of welding engineering work for steel structures, bridges, boilers, vessels, and pipes. Many practical examples are given together with numerous data that provide helpful information for the task of technical and economic design and dimensioning. Determination of efficient and appropriate cross-sectional dimensions and materials is the main goal of the manual. Structural steel engineering and installations subject to monitoring and inspection such as boilers, pipings, pressure vessels, and nuclear installations are the subject fields dealt with in separate chapters. The dimensioning rules presented are based on the regulations and technical codes valid in the GDR and the FRG. The catalogue of technical rules of the FRG concerning structural steel engineering and installations as above are given in supplementary chapters. (orig./HP) [de

  10. 18 CFR 385.2201 - Rules governing off-the-record communications (Rule 2201).

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-04-01

    ... 603, a neutral (other than an arbitrator) under Rule 604 in an alternative dispute resolution... any person outside the Commission, any off-the-record communication. (c) Definitions. For purposes of... in which an intervenor disputes any material issue, any proceeding initiated pursuant to rule 206 by...

  11. Multifocus Image Fusion in Q-Shift DTCWT Domain Using Various Fusion Rules

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yingzhong Tian

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available Multifocus image fusion is a process that integrates partially focused image sequence into a fused image which is focused everywhere, with multiple methods proposed in the past decades. The Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform (DTCWT is one of the most precise ones eliminating two main defects caused by the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT. Q-shift DTCWT was proposed afterwards to simplify the construction of filters in DTCWT, producing better fusion effects. A different image fusion strategy based on Q-shift DTCWT is presented in this work. According to the strategy, firstly, each image is decomposed into low and high frequency coefficients, which are, respectively, fused by using different rules, and then various fusion rules are innovatively combined in Q-shift DTCWT, such as the Neighborhood Variant Maximum Selectivity (NVMS and the Sum Modified Laplacian (SML. Finally, the fused coefficients could be well extracted from the source images and reconstructed to produce one fully focused image. This strategy is verified visually and quantitatively with several existing fusion methods based on a plenty of experiments and yields good results both on standard images and on microscopic images. Hence, we can draw the conclusion that the rule of NVMS is better than others after Q-shift DTCWT.

  12. KEBERADAAN KONSEP RULE BY LAW (NEGARA BERDASARKAN HUKUM DIDALAM TEORI NEGARA HUKUM THE RULE OF LAW

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Made Hendra Wijaya

    2013-11-01

    Full Text Available This research titled, the existence of the concept of rule by law (state law within thestate theories of law the rule of law, which is where the first problem: How can theadvantages of Rule by Law in the theory of law Rule of Law?, How is the dis advantages of aconcept of Rule by law in the theory of law Rule of Law.This research method using the method of normative, legal research that examines thewritten laws of the various aspects, ie aspects of the theory, history, philosophy, comparative,structure and composition, scope, and content, consistent, overview, and chapter by chapter,formality, and the binding force of a law, and the legal language used, but did not examine orimlementasi applied aspects. By using this approach of Historical analysis and approach oflegal conceptual analysis.In this research have found that the advantages of the concept of Rule by Law lies in theproviding of certainty, can also be social control for the community, thus ensuring all citizensin good order at all reciprocal relationships within the community. And Disadvantages of theconcept of Rule by Law if the Law which legalized state action is not supported by democracyand human rights, and the principles of justice, there will be a denial of human rights,widespread poverty, and racial segregation, and if the law is only utilized out by theauthorities as a means to legalize all forms of actions that violate human can inflicttotalitarian nature of the ruling

  13. Statics of historic masonry constructions

    CERN Document Server

    Como, Mario

    2016-01-01

    This successful book, which is now appearing in its second edition, presents a comprehensive new Statics of Masonry Constructions. Masonry constructions are the great majority of the buildings in Europe’s historic centres and the most important monuments in its architectural heritage. Given the age of these constructions, the demand for safety assessments and restoration projects is pressing and constant. The book you hold in hands contributes to fill this demand. The second edition integrates the original text of the first edition with new developments, widening and revisions, due to recent research studies achievements. The result is a book that gives a complete picture of the behaviour of the Masonry Constructions. First of all, it gives the fundamentals of its Statics, based on the no-tension assumption, and then it develops the Limit Analysis for the Masonry Constructions. In this framework, through an interdisciplinary approach combining Engineering and Architecture, the book also investigates the sta...

  14. Impact of Construction Waste Disposal Charging Scheme on work practices at construction sites in Hong Kong

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Yu, Ann T.W.; Poon, C.S.; Wong, Agnes; Yip, Robin; Jaillon, Lara

    2013-01-01

    Highlights: ► A significant reduction of construction waste was achieved at the first 3 years of CWDCS implementation. ► However, the reduction cannot be sustained. ► Implementation of the CWDCS has generated positive effects in waste reduction by all main trades. - Abstract: Waste management in the building industry in Hong Kong has become an important environmental issue. Particularly, an increasing amount of construction and demolition (C and D) waste is being disposed at landfill sites. In order to reduce waste generation and encourage reuse and recycling, the Hong Kong Government has implemented the Construction Waste Disposal Charging Scheme (CWDCS) to levy charges on C and D waste disposal to landfills. In order to provide information on the changes in reducing waste generation practice among construction participants in various work trades, a study was conducted after 3 years of implementation of the CWDCS via a structured questionnaire survey in the building industry in Hong Kong. The study result has revealed changes with work flows of the major trades as well as differentiating the levels of waste reduced. Three building projects in the public and private sectors were selected as case studies to demonstrate the changes in work flows and the reduction of waste achieved. The research findings reveal that a significant reduction of construction waste was achieved at the first 3 years (2006–2008) of CWDCS implementation. However, the reduction cannot be sustained. The major trades have been influenced to a certain extent by the implementation of the CWDCS. Slight improvement in waste management practices was observed, but reduction of construction waste in the wet-finishing and dry-finishing trades has undergone little improvement. Implementation of the CWDCS has not yet motivated subcontractors to change their methods of construction so as to reduce C and D waste.

  15. Impact of Construction Waste Disposal Charging Scheme on work practices at construction sites in Hong Kong

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Yu, Ann T.W., E-mail: bsannyu@polyu.edu.hk [Department of Building and Real Estate, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon (Hong Kong); Poon, C.S.; Wong, Agnes; Yip, Robin; Jaillon, Lara [Department of Civil and Structural Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon (Hong Kong)

    2013-01-15

    Highlights: Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer A significant reduction of construction waste was achieved at the first 3 years of CWDCS implementation. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer However, the reduction cannot be sustained. Black-Right-Pointing-Pointer Implementation of the CWDCS has generated positive effects in waste reduction by all main trades. - Abstract: Waste management in the building industry in Hong Kong has become an important environmental issue. Particularly, an increasing amount of construction and demolition (C and D) waste is being disposed at landfill sites. In order to reduce waste generation and encourage reuse and recycling, the Hong Kong Government has implemented the Construction Waste Disposal Charging Scheme (CWDCS) to levy charges on C and D waste disposal to landfills. In order to provide information on the changes in reducing waste generation practice among construction participants in various work trades, a study was conducted after 3 years of implementation of the CWDCS via a structured questionnaire survey in the building industry in Hong Kong. The study result has revealed changes with work flows of the major trades as well as differentiating the levels of waste reduced. Three building projects in the public and private sectors were selected as case studies to demonstrate the changes in work flows and the reduction of waste achieved. The research findings reveal that a significant reduction of construction waste was achieved at the first 3 years (2006-2008) of CWDCS implementation. However, the reduction cannot be sustained. The major trades have been influenced to a certain extent by the implementation of the CWDCS. Slight improvement in waste management practices was observed, but reduction of construction waste in the wet-finishing and dry-finishing trades has undergone little improvement. Implementation of the CWDCS has not yet motivated subcontractors to change their methods of construction so as to reduce C and D waste.

  16. Safety rule of the KTA. Alarm system, staff locator systems, and internal and external communication lines of nuclear power plants. Pt. 1

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1977-01-01

    This rule aims at stipulating the requirements on type and extent of communication means for personnel within the nuclear power plant, and from the nuclear power plant to the outside. Requirements on design, construction, operating equipment, and alarm and locator system tests for nuclear power plants are defined. The rule applies to stationary nuclear power plants with one power station unit, but not to facilities of process control, radiation protection control, fire protection control, environmental control, and plant security. (orig./HP) [de

  17. Do Fiscal Rules Matter?

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Grembi, Veronica; Nannicini, Tommaso; Troiano, Ugo

    2016-01-01

    , the central government imposed fiscal rules on municipal governments, and in 2001 relaxed them below 5,000 inhabitants. We exploit the before/after and discontinuous policy variation, and show that relaxing fiscal rules increases deficits and lowers taxes. The effect is larger if the mayor can be reelected......Fiscal rules are laws aimed at reducing the incentive to accumulate debt, and many countries adopt them to discipline local governments. Yet, their effectiveness is disputed because of commitment and enforcement problems. We study their impact applying a quasi-experimental design in Italy. In 1999...

  18. System diagnostic builder: a rule-generation tool for expert systems that do intelligent data evaluation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nieten, Joseph L.; Burke, Roger

    1993-03-01

    The system diagnostic builder (SDB) is an automated knowledge acquisition tool using state- of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. The SDB uses an inductive machine learning technique to generate rules from data sets that are classified by a subject matter expert (SME). Thus, data is captured from the subject system, classified by an expert, and used to drive the rule generation process. These rule-bases are used to represent the observable behavior of the subject system, and to represent knowledge about this system. The rule-bases can be used in any knowledge based system which monitors or controls a physical system or simulation. The SDB has demonstrated the utility of using inductive machine learning technology to generate reliable knowledge bases. In fact, we have discovered that the knowledge captured by the SDB can be used in any number of applications. For example, the knowledge bases captured from the SMS can be used as black box simulations by intelligent computer aided training devices. We can also use the SDB to construct knowledge bases for the process control industry, such as chemical production, or oil and gas production. These knowledge bases can be used in automated advisory systems to ensure safety, productivity, and consistency.

  19. Probabilistic Rule Generator: A new methodology of variable-valued logic synthesis

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Lee, W.D.; Ray, S.R.

    1986-01-01

    A new methodology to synthesize variable-valued logic formulas from training data events is presented. Probablistic Rule Generator (PRG) employs not only information-theoretic entropy as a heuristic to capture a path expression but also multiple-valued logic to expand a captured complex. PRG is efficient for capturing major clusters in the event space, and is more general than previous methodologies in providing probabilistic features

  20. Sustainable development and construction industry in Malaysia

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Suliman L. Kh. M.

    2009-12-01

    Full Text Available Sustainable construction is a way for the building and infrastructure industry to move towards achieving sustainable development, taking into account environmental, socioeconomic and cultural issues. Differing approaches and differing economic markets lead to different priorities. This paper presents the construction scenario of Malaysia and the developments in sustainable construction taking place in this country. Barriers to the implementation of sustainable construction are discussed. A list of recommendation was proposed to drive sustainable construction in this country. In conclusion, the status of sustainable construction in Malaysia is still in its infancy. The lack of awareness, training and education, ineffective procurement systems, existing public policies and regulatory frameworks are among the major barriers for sustainable construction in Malaysia. Besides the needs for capacities, technologies and tools, total and ardent commitment by all players in the construction sectors including the governments and the public atlarge are required in order to achieve sustainable construction in Malaysia.