Organisms must distribute sufficient energy among different and often competing physiological systems. This task can become challenging, however, as resources are often limiting, resulting in energetic trade-offs. For example, energetically based trade-offs between the reproductive and immune systems are common across taxa, yet the regulatory mechanisms underlying these trade-offs remain unclea...

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...

Qualitative probabilistic networks have been designed for probabilistic reasoning in a qualitative way. As a consequence of their coarse level of representation detail, qualitative probabilistic networks do not provide for resolving trade-offs and typically yield ambiguous results upon inference. We present an algorithm for computing more informative results for unresolved trade-offs. The algor...

The specific goal of the study is to look how tensions, competing values and trade-offs manifest in the management of nuclear power plants. Second goal is to inspect how existing frameworks, such as Competing Values Framework, can be used to model the tensions. Empirical data consists of thirty interviews that were conducted as part of a NKS study on safety culture in the Nordic nuclear branch....

We investigate the phenomenon of non-recursive trade-offs between descriptional systems in an abstract fashion. We aim at categorizing non-recursive trade-offs by bounds on their growth rate, and show how to deduce such bounds in general. We also identify criteria which, in the spirit of abstract language theory, allow us to deduce nonrecursive tradeoffs from effective closure properties of lan...

A broad variety of implementation considerations become important when implementing software for embedded signal processing applications. These include complex trade-offs such as those involving code size, data buffering requirements, performance, and power consumption. This presentation motivates the use of high-level, dataflow-based programming models for automated synthesis of DSP software; ...