We study labor-tying in a competitive agricultural economy. The co-existence of seasonal fluctuations in income and imperfect credit markets suggests that tied contracts should dominate casual labor markets. However, empirical observation from India suggests that this is far from being the case, and indeed, that there is a declining trend in labor tying. We consider a model that permits deviati...

Dialog management can be seen as a solution to two specific problems: (1) providing a coherent overall structure to interaction that extends beyond the single turn, (2) correctly manage mixed-initiative interaction, allowing users to guide interaction as per their (not necessarily explicitly shared) goals while allowing the system to guide interaction towards successful completion. We propose a...

How can one justify the secession of a territory from a liberal-democratic state of the kind currently prevalent in North America and Western Europe? The question does not primarily concern a mutually agreed secession, such as that of Norway from the United Kingdoms of Norway and Sweden in 1905. If the government and legislature of the ‘parent state’ freely agree to a secession of a part of its...

With the proliferation of software systems and products in the healthcare environment, it is increasingly common for such software products to be constructed in a modular design. However, for modular software to be securely interoperable with other software products requires agreed consistent and accountable interfaces. This agreement may take the form of bilateral vendor to vendor arrangements...

There has been a long-standing debate about whether having accurate self-perceptions or holding positive illusions of self is more adaptive. This debate has recently expanded to consider the role of accuracy and bias of partner perceptions in romantic relationships. In the present study, we hypothesized that because accuracy, positivity bias, and similarity bias are likely to serve distinct fun...

Abstract Background Hospital and university service providers invest significant but separate resources into preparing registered nurses to work in the emergency department setting. This results duplication of both curricula resource investment health higher education sectors. paper describes an evidence-based co-designed study with clinical-academic stakeholders from hospital settings. Methods...

Recent contributions to discussions on paediatric cochlear implantation in Norway indicate two mutually exclusive doctrines prescribing the best course of post-operative support for a child with cochlear implants; bilingually with sign language and spoken language simultaneously or primarily monolingually with speech only. This conflict constitutes an ethical problem for parents responsible for...