Our infrastructure touches the day-to-day life of each of our fellow citizens, and its capabilities, integrity and sustainability are crucial to the overall competitiveness and prosperity of our country. Unfortunately, the current state of U.S. infrastructure is not good: the American Society of Civil Engineers’ latest report on America’s infrastructure ranked it at a D+ — in need of $3.9 trill...

The effect of different kinds of weight normalization on the outcome of a simple competitive learning rule is analysed. It is shown that there are important differences in the representation formed depending on whether the constraint is enforced by dividing each weight by the same amount (“divisive enforcement”), or subtracting a fixed amount from each weight (“subtractive enforcement”). For th...

This paper studies the following online replacement problem. There is a real function f(t), called the ow rate, deened over a nite time horizon 0; T]. It is known that m f(t) M for some reals 0 m < M. At time 0 an online player starts to pay money at the rate f(0). At each time 0 < t T the player may changeover and continue paying money at the rate f(t). The complication is that each such chang...

We describe a multi-network, or modular, connectionist architecture that captures that fact that many tasks have structure at a level of granularity intermediate to that assumed by local and global function approximation schemes. The main innovation of the architecture is that it combines associative and competitive learning in order to learn task decompositions. A task decomposition is discove...

introduction: the current literature supports the inclusion of inter-professional education in healthcare education. changes in the structure and nature of the integrated medical education and healthcare system provide some opportunities for interprofessional education among various professions. this study is an attempt to determine the perceptions of students and faculty members about interpro...

Niche construction means that all organisms modify their environments, also known as ecosystem engineering. Organism– environmental relations induced by niche construction profoundly influence the dynamics, competition, and diversity of metapopulations. Single-species model shows a positive feedback between metapopulation and environmental resources, which leads to threshold phenomena in dynami...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the factor structure, validity, and reliability of the bodybuilding dependence scale and to investigate differences in bodybuilding dependence between men and women and competitive and non-competitive bodybuilders. METHODS Seventy two male competitive bodybuilders, 63 female competitive bodybuilders, 87 male non-competitive bodybuilders, and 63 non-competitive female...