1998 Miles Conrad Memorial Lecture NFAIS Annual Conference February 24, 1998 Philadelphia, PA Kent Smith, Deputy Director, National Library of Medicine © 1998 Kent Smith Good morning and thank you for the honor to present this lecture in the memory of Miles Conrad, first president of NFAIS and one of its original founders. The lecture series is a fitting memory to a man of vision, strength, dev...

K. Schulten Beckman Institute University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801, USA More than ten of the most prominent models for the structure and for the activity dependent formation of orientation and ocular dominance columns in the striate cort(>x have been evaluated. We implemented those models on parallel machines, we extensively explored parameter space, and we quantitatively compared model pred...

Elite Dominance and Under-Investment in Mass Education: Disparity in the Social Development of the Indian States, 1960-92 Interand intra-state disparities in levels of literacy rates in India are striking, especially for the marginalized groups of women and low caste population. The present paper offers an explanation of this disparate development in terms of elite dominance that discriminates ...

Recent research identifies stochastic dominance as critical for understanding the relationship between network structure and diffusion. This paper introduces the concept of stochastic dominance, explains the theory linking stochastic dominance and diffusion, and applies this theory to a number of diffusion studies in the literature. The paper illustrates how the theory connects observations fro...

This paper examines the partial orderings of discrete distributions derived from various poverty indices and sets of welfare functions. The poverty ordering with respect to some index P is the ordering obtained when P ranks consistently over a range of admissible poverty lines. The poverty orderings derived from the headcount ratio, the per-capita income gap and another "distribution-sensitive"...

In feminist studies, the figure of the mermaid has long been regarded as flawed, disabled and less-than-human. Her theoretical counterpart in that respect would be the cyborg, an image used to show that with the aid of robotics, humankind could be larger than life. What would happen if we could combine those two images and apply them to create “super love” more-than-human relationships? This ar...