This thesis is an examination of the relevance of the philosophy of science to science policy, focused around an analysis of philosopher Philip Kitcher’s 2001 Science, Truth and Democracy. I consider and draw upon Kitcher’s work from a variety of perspectives. Initially, I use Kitcher’s work to argue for a more democratic approach to nanotechnology policy. The thesis then examines the philosoph...

On 30 August 1998, the Mail on Sunday, under the headline "TB refugee 'must be held in hospital"', described the case of a Somalian man who had been "ordered by a court to remain in hospital for six months to prevent him spreading a highly infectious deadly disease". That disease was tuberculosis and a court order had been issued "after the man had twice staggered into Northwick Park Hospital i...

This paper investigates the impact of the Bolsa Família Program on the immunization of children from 0 to 6 years of age in Brazil and its regions. The Bolsa Família program is a conditional cash transfer program. One of its conditionalities is the compliance of children with the immunization schedule ordered by the Ministry of Health. The evaluation was performed using the Propensity Score Mat...

This paper deals with the problem of determining the optimal retailer’s replenishment decisions for deteriorating items under two levels of trade credit policy within the economic order quantity (EOQ) framework to reflect the supply chain management situation. We investigate the retailer's inventory system as a cost minimization problem to determine the retailer's optimal inventory policy under...

this article strive to examine and explaine national sources of the foreign policy of the islamic republic of iran. cultural, historical, geographic, ideological, social, and economic variables, as societal sources, will lead to the continuation of some behaviours in iran’s foreign policy. the author argues that to better understand iran’s foreign policy, one must pay attention to the above var...

We present an approach to monitoring system policies. As a specification language, we use an expressive fragment of a temporal logic, which can be effectively monitored. We report on case studies in security and compliance monitoring and use these to show the adequacy of our specification language for naturally expressing complex, realistic policies and the practical feasibility of monitoring t...

We select policies for large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with compact first-order representations. We find policies that generalize well as the number of objects in the domain grows, potentially without bound. Existing dynamic-programming approaches based on flat, propositional, or first-order representations either are impractical here or do not naturally scale as the number of objects gr...