Time series data show that nations do not get happier over time as they get richer. In contrast, happiness is positively correlated with individual income within a given country at any point in time; the rich generally report greater happiness than the poor. This, the so-called Easterlin paradox, named after the doyen of happiness studies, Richard Easterlin, is also discussed at length in the h...

Abstraction is often described as the key to effective software design, and declarative approaches to software design are often promoted as the most clear and succinct. Unfortunately, language and systems designers often get caught up in the their own little worlds, inventing abstractions and declarative techniques that are justified based on intrinsic values known only to language and systems ...

form for representation of both material and information processing. lhditional modelling languages from the information systems field are inappropriate for capturing realworld dynamics because they put more emphasis on the modelling of static aspects than dynamic aspects, or because they are usually limited to modelling information processing, not the processing of material. This paper addreaa...

Scalable handling of real arithmetic is a crucial part of the verification of hybrid systems, mathematical algorithms, and mixed analog/digital circuits. Despite substantial advances in verification technology, complexity issues with classical decision procedures are still a major obstacle for formal verification of real-world applications, e.g., in automotive and avionic industries. To identif...

One of the most important problems on the semantic web area is the one of trust. The growing exchange of semantic web data raises the need of policies that allow filtering out untrustworthy information. It is necessary, however, to model adequately the concept of trustworthiness, otherwise one may end up with operational trust measures that lack a clear meaning. It is also important to have a p...

Over the last decade, the tremendous increase in computational power of graphics hardware, in conjunction with equally improved rendering algorithms, have led to the situation today where real-time visual realism is computationally attainable on almost any PC, if only the digital models to be rendered were sufficiently detailed and realistic. With rapidly advancing rendering capabilities, the m...