There is an increasing need for space missions to be able to collaboratively (and competitively) develop plans both within and across missions. In addition, interacting spacecraft that interleave onboard planning and execution must reach consensus on their commitments to each other prior to execution. In domains where missions have varying degrees of interaction and different constraints on com...

The running time for solving constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) and propositional satisfiability problems (SAT) using systematic backtracking search has been shown to exhibit great variability. Randomization and restarts is an effective technique for reducing such variability to achieve better expected performance. Several restart strategies have been proposed and studied in previous work a...

BACKGROUND Physician shortage is a global issue that concerns Brazil's authorities. The organizational structure and the environment of a medical institution can hide a low-quality life of a physician. This study examines the relationship between the hospital work environment and physicians' job satisfaction and motivation when working in a large public academic hospital. METHODS The study wa...

This paper reviews how usability has been defined in the context of the digital library, what methods have been applied and their applicability, and proposes an evaluation model and a suite of instruments for evaluating usability for academic digital libraries. The model examines effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, and learnability. It is found that there exists an interlocking relationshi...

A central challenge for higher education today is to understand the diversity and complexity of nontraditional students’ life experiences and how these factors influence their academic success. To better understand these issues, this study explored the role of demographic characteristics and employment variables in predicting the academic success of part-time students at four polytechnic instit...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the academic satisfaction and importance among traditional learning (TL) and problem based learning (PBL) medical students, and to further evaluate the areas of concern in the academic education from the student's point of view. METHODS A cross sectional study was conducted at the College of Medicine, King Saud University, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from May to June...

Retention of female faculty is an important issue for institutions of higher education aiming for excellence and diversity. However, an essential first step in understanding retention is to examine what contributes to career satisfaction for academic women. This study is based on data from a census survey of faculty conducted in 1996 at a Research I university located in the Midwest. Using Haga...

This study proposed a conceptual model to examine how customers’ perceptions of physical environment influence disconfirmation, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty for first-time and repeat customers in upscale restaurants. Using a structural equation modeling analysis, this study showed that facility aesthetics, lighting, layout, and social factors had significant effects on disconfirm...