Maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services in a changing environment requires a temporal perspective that informs realistic restoration and management targets. Such targets need to be dynamic, adaptive, and responsive to changing boundary conditions. However, the application of long-term data from palaeoecology is often hindered as the management and policy implications are not made explic...

This paper reviews the changing status of goose populations in Scotland since the 1940s, and the changing policies and management activities employed over that time. The size of all goose populations has risen since the 1940s due to protection measures, changes in agriculture and levels of shooting, in the UK and elsewhere. The development of goose policies in response to public interest and pr...

Policies are a means to dynamically regulate the behavior of system components without changing code nor requiring the cooperation of the components being governed. By changing policies, a system can be continuously adjusted to accommodate variations in externally imposed constraints and environmental conditions. KAoS policy and domain services rely on an OWL ontology of the computational envir...

background national oral health policy was conscripted by the indian dental association (ida) in 1986 and was accepted as an integral part of national health policy (nhp) by the central council of health and family welfare in one of its conferences in the year 1995. objectives of this paper were to find out the efforts made or going on towards its execution, its current status and recent oral h...

Background The Institute of Medicine recommends changing organizational policy as a key element of evidence-based practice (EBP) implementation; however, policy change alone may be insufficient to change provider practice behavior [1,2]. Engaging key organizational stakeholders in the policy change process may foster buy-in, particularly if the policy is piloted and refined alongside the new pr...

Off-policy learning refers to the problem of learning the value function of a behaviour, or policy, while selecting actions with a different policy. Gradient-based off-policy learning algorithms, such as GTD (Sutton et al., 2009b) and TDC/GQ (Sutton et al., 2009a), converge when selecting actions with a fixed policy even when using function approximation and incremental updates. In control prob...

Financial support from ESRC grant No. L116251003, "Macromodelling and Policy Analysis in a Changing World" is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.

Contemporary pervasive computing environments demand mechanism for coherently addressing high-level user needs despite changing availability of resources. We propose the formalization of goals as the semantic basis for this mechanism, and sketch a system architecture that separates policy-rich goals-level planning code from a policy-neutral component assembly model.

Background: The development of policies for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption is highlighted as a priority in developing countries. This review study aimed to present the available policy options for increasing fruit and vegetable consumption in the populations. Methods: To collect relevant English publications, five electronic databases, including PubMed/Medline, Scopus, Embase, ProQu...

This paper presents a framework for specifying policies for the management of Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks. Although policy-based management has been the subject of intensifying research efforts, proposed solutions are often restricted to condition-action rules where conditions are matched against incoming traffic flows. This results in static policy configurations where manual i...