Construction costs of 55 municipal wastewater treatment plants in Israel (secondary, advanced secondary, and advanced treatment) were analysed in order to derive cost functions expressing the effects of design flow and treatment level on construction costs. Three equations were derived (statistically significant, p<0.01), one for each treatment level. These indicate that economy of scale may be...

The role of science in policy making, specifically in the management of complex sociotechnical systems, has been increasing in the past three decades. Particularly in the case of permit processes requiring environmental impact assessment for new projects, such as those covered under the 1969 National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), science has been the main criteria for sound decision maki...

despite the fact that under paragraph (a) of the article 55 of fourth development plan and the article 21 of fifth development plan of the constitution, the government is required to establish a skill training policy-making institution, efforts has so far been fruitless and the problems due to lack of such national institution still remain to be seen. this paper aims to study the current condit...

Despite several calls to support evidence-informed policy-making, variations in uptake of evidence into policy persist. This editorial brings together and builds on previous Knowledge Translation (KT) frameworks and theories to present a simple, yet, holistic approach for promoting evidence-informed policies. The proposed conceptual framework is characterized by its impact-oriented approach and...

A distributed approach to Reinforcement Learning (RL) in multi-link robot control tasks is presented. One of the main drawbacks of classical RL is the combinatorial explosion when multiple states variables and multiple actuators are needed to optimally control a complex agent in a dynamical environment. In this paper we present an approach to avoid this drawback based on a distributed RL archit...