We propose a new R-tree structure that outperforms all the older ones. The heart of the idea is to facilitate the deferred splitting approach in R-trees. This is done by proposing an ordering on the R-tree nodes. This ordering has to be 'good', in the sense that it should group 'similar' data rectangles together, to minimize the area and perimeter of the resulting minimum bounding rectangles (M...

Value functions can speed the learning of a solution to Markov Decision Problems by providing a prediction of reinforcement against which received reinforcement is compared. Once the learned values relatively reect the optimal ordering of actions, further learning is not necessary. In fact, further learning can lead to the disruption of the optimal policy if the value function is implemented wi...

globalization effects on social security systems and on social expenditures in different countries will be analyzed in this chapter. our consentration is yet on anglo-saxon countries . but it is assumed that many offer countries are under the same pressure of globalization on their social security expenses as the anglo-saxon countries . this will be examined later in another chapter. in previou...

Unfortunately, informal payments for health care are responsible for a considerable share of patients' out-of-pocket payments in Iran (1, 2). Almost all health care users and providers are familiar with such payments with the name of “under the table payments” in Iran (3). About half of Iranian health care seekers have faced with such payments at least one time during a year (2). Although the i...

One of the most important policies adopted in inventory control is the (R,S) policy (also known as the “replenishment cycle” policy). Under the non-stationary demand assumption the (R,S) policy takes the form (Rn,Sn) where Rn denotes the length of the n th replenishment cycle, and Sn the corresponding order-up-to-level. Such a policy provides an effective means of damping planning instability a...

Detailed analyses have been carried out on the molecular dynamics simulations on the short-range ordering of the quenched states below melting temperature for a system of nearly spherical rigid dimer molecules under constant high pressure. We present evidence of preserving local ordering that prevents the system from having long-range translational ordering. The effect provides the cause for th...

The generalization of mathematical morphology to multivariate vector spaces is addressed in this paper. The proposed approach is fully unsupervised and consists in learning a complete lattice from an image as a nonlinear bijective mapping, interpreted in the form of a learned rank transformation together with an ordering of vectors. This unsupervised ordering of vectors relies on three steps: d...