During the final decades of the 20th Century, the countries in Southern Europe now belonging to the European Union (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece) have experienced dramatic changes in all the demographic variables. Until the seventies, their mortality had been clearly worse than the European average, while nowadays their inhabitants enjoy a life expectancy ranking among the world’s highest,...

The purpose of this article is to introduce a new scheme for robust multivariate ranking by making use of a not so familiar notion called monotonicity. Under this scheme, as in the case of classical outward ranking, we get an increasing sequence of regions diverging away from a central region (may be a single point) as nucleus. The nuclear region may be deened as the median region.

American black bears (Ursus americanus) are seasonally polyoestrous and exhibit delayed implantation, which may allow equal and independent fertility of recurrent oestruses of a mating season. We postulated that the luteal inactivity during delayed implantation allows bears to have sequential ovulation during a polyoestrous mating season such that each oestrus of a polyoestrous female will have...

In numerous primates living in mixed-sex groups, females display probabilistic cues of fertility to simultaneously concentrate paternity to dominant males while diluting it amongst others as a means to reduce the risk of infanticide and to increase male care for offspring. A few species, however, lack these cues and potentially conceal fertility from males; yet, to date, little is known about m...

One can use the Leiden Rankings for grouping research universities by considering universities which are not significantly different as a homogeneous set. Such groupings reduce the complexity of the rankings without losing information. We pursue this classification using both statistical significance and effect sizes of differences among 902 universities in 54 countries; we focus on the UK, Ger...

The exchangeability assumption as defined in this paper on ranking functions seems intuitively natural, and indeed, specific ranking functions previously proposed in the literature are all exchangeable. While pointwise ranking functions are vacuously exchangeable, we now discuss two specifically listwise ranking functions previously proposed by [22] and [26] in light of our representation theor...

This paper is a continuation of the study of surprise as a base for constructing qualitative calculi for representing and reasoning about uncertain knowledge. Here, we further elaborate on κ, a qualitative ranking function which we developed in (Ibrahim, Tawfik, and Ngom 2009b) and which constructs qualitative ranks for events by obtaining the order of magnitude abstraction of the degree of sur...

In this paper, we provide an overview of the NTCIR IMine task, which is a core task of NTCIR-11 and also a succeeding work of INTENT@NTCIR-9 and INTENT2@NTCIR-10 tasks. IMine is composed of a subtopic mining (SM) task, a document ranking (DR) task and a TaskMine (TM) pilot task. 21 groups from Canada, China, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Spain, UK and United States registered to the task, whic...