In this opening talk I will address some issues that exemplify the theoretical progress that has been made and is to be expected in the field of meson-nucleon physics. My emphasis will be on performing precision calculations to test aspects of QCD, including also electroweak probes. In addition, I discuss the problems and opportunities related to the strange quark sector.

The Governance of Cyberspace arose from a small conference focusing on the political and social implications of the Intemet (p. xii). Held at the University of Teesside, England, in April 1995, the conference's participants ranged from social scientists to science fiction writers (pp. ix-xii). The twelve contributors (thirteen, if we include the editor, Brian Loader, who wrote the introduction)...

Software process improvement (SPI) is challenging, particularly for small and medium sized enterprises. Most existing SPI frameworks are either too expensive to deploy, or do not take an organizations’ specific needs into consideration. There is a need for light weight SPI frameworks that enable practitioners to base improvement efforts on the issues that are the most critical for the specific ...

Supply chain management and closed-loop supply chain management (CLSCM) have developed into established concepts in recent years. The related material cycles and product returns form an important part of all related processes with high potential for reducing environmental burden. The paper proposes a framework for (environmentally triggered) closed-loop supply chain management, spanning three d...

Data structures are essential components of computer systems in general and Google in particular. We believe this area of research is in an auspicious position where practical and theoretical goals are well aligned, implying that deep algorithmic ideas can also have significant practical impact. We exemplify with a few examples from our past research, which address problems of universal value, ...

I summarise and attempt to clarify some concepts presented in and arising from Margaret Boden’s (1990) descriptive hierarchy of creativity, by formalising the ideas she proposes. I exemplify their use by broadly describing the development of art music from the 10th to the 20th century in these more formal terms. I suggest that Boden’s descriptive framework, once elaborated, is more powerful tha...

We present a scenario concerning the existence of a large class of reflectionless selfadjoint analytic difference operators. In order to exemplify this scenario, we summarize our results on reflectionless self-adjoint difference operators of relativistic CalogeroMoser type.

When interpreting takes place in a videoconference setting, the intrinsic technological challenges and the very remoteness of the interpreters’ location compound the complexity of the task. Existing research on remote interpreting and the problems it entails focusses on remote conference interpreting, in which the interpreters are physically separated from the conference site while the primary ...

A good deal of painstaking empirical research is detailed in the literature on language acquisition in the first year of life. The majority of it, for obvious reasons, focuses on the infant's perceptual abilities rather than on production, and reveals what is perhaps an initially surprising sophistication in a young child's expertise at discerning contrasts in the acoustic signal which coincide...