Eric Shanteau, who was a member of US Olympic Swim team, heard the three of the most chilling words just one week before the US Olympic trials: “You have cancer.” Regardless of his misfortune, he decided to compete in the 2008 Summer Olympics, where he posted a personal best time in the 200 meter breaststroke. After returning to his hometown, he underwent surgery and has become a legendary canc...

We investigate an improvement to GSAT which associates a weight with each clause. GSAT moves to assignments maximizing the weight of satisfied clauses and this weight is incremented when GSAT moves to an assignment in which this clause is unsatisfied. We present results showing that this algorithm and its variants outperform one of the best known modifications of GSAT to date using two metrics:...

This article explores the language in the four plays of Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Footfalls. It considers the way in which Beckett uses language, especially through fragmentation utterances, repetitions, monologues, contradictions, and silence. It discusses the function of language in modern society, in the Theater of the Absurd, and in the plays. Parad...

In this paper, we report on experience building our geographic information system GODOT on top of an object-oriented database system. In particular, we describe our experiences and methodology in selecting such a system, some of the problems we encountered, and possible solutions. Speciically, after identifying a range of spatial predicates, we show that the intersection join is of crucial impo...