In the last decade, various approximation approaches, such as dispatching rules, shifting bottleneck heuristic and local search methods, are proposed for the job shop scheduling problem. As one of the local search methods, taboo search provides a promising alternative for the job shop scheduling problem; however, it has to be tailored each time with respect to parameters for every instance in o...

hat could be better than dying in the place you spent your life work-ing…? " Jack Shadbolt's wife Doris mused, as she and friends moved his bed into the studio during the final days of his life. " When I can't paint, I don't want to live, " he had said (1). Around the bed was Blue Breaking, a triptych he had painted, filled with shadowy forms, " like butterflies' footprints. " A few days later,...

Many people insist that their commitments to certain values (e.g. love, honor, justice) are absolute and inviolable - in effect, sacred. They treat the mere thought of trading off sacred values against secular ones (such as money) as transparently outrageous - in effect, taboo. Economists insist, however, that in a world of scarce resources, taboo trade-offs are unavoidable. Research shows that...

Academic studies on the impact of taboo words on cognition, memory, perception, etc. support the intuitive position that taboo words are at least in part used because they are an effective tool in making meaning understood. What hasn’t been done, to the best of our knowledge, is to look at the effect of taboo words on speech recognition. To this end we have collected data comparing the impact o...