BACKGROUND The methodology of medical ethics during the last few decades has shifted from a predominant use of normative-philosophical analyses to an increasing involvement of empirical methods. The articles which have been published in the course of this so-called 'empirical turn' can be divided into conceptual accounts of empirical-normative collaboration and studies which use socio-empirical...

Our objective in this paper is to examine measures used in survey-based research in operations management. Specifically, we examine measures commonly used to assess operations strategy and advanced manufacturing technology in survey-based research. Examining two measures provides the ability to examine problems common to many of the measures used in operations management research. In addition, ...

evaporation, as a major component of the hydrologic cycle, plays a key role in water resources development and management in arid and semi-arid climatic regions. although there are empirical formulas available, their performances are not all satisfactory due to the complicated nature of the evaporation process and the data availability. this paper explores evaporation estimation methods based o...

hysteresis has been widely recognized in the soil water relationship. in this paper, a detailed review of hysteresis was performed in relation to its models. so far, different models have been suggested to describe hysteresis in the water retention curve (wrc) that could be categorized into two main groups: conceptual and empirical models. the models in the first group are based on the domain t...

Elicitation is the study of statistics or properties which are computable via empirical risk minimization.While several recent papers have approached the general question of which properties are elicitable, wesuggest that this is the wrong question—all properties are elicitable by first eliciting the entire distributionor data set, and thus the important question is how elicitable. ...

The lifetime of the b Pu(v51) state in N2 has been determined experimentally using a laser-based pump–probe scheme and an exceptionally long lifetime of 2.61 ns was found. Semiempirical close-coupling calculations of the radiative lifetime, which include Rydberg–valence interactions in the singlet manifold, are consistent with this large value, giving a value of 3.61 ns and suggesting a prediss...

We describe our entry in the EMNLP 2014 code-switching shared task. Our system is based on a sequential classifier, trained on the shared training set using various characterand word-level features, some calculated using a large monolingual corpora. We participated in the Twitter-genre Spanish-English track, obtaining an accuracy of 0.868 when measured on the tweet level and 0.858 on the word l...

The representer theorem assures that kernel methods retain optimality under penalized empirical risk minimization. While a sufficient condition on the form of the regularizer guaranteeing the representer theorem has been known since the initial development of kernel methods, necessary conditions have only been investigated recently. In this paper we completely characterize the necessary and suf...

We examine the NFA minimization problem in terms of atomic NFA’s, that is, NFA’s in which the right language of every state is a union of atoms, where the atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and uncomplemented left quotients of the language. We characterize all reduced atomic NFA’s of a given language, that is, those NFA’s that have no equivalent states. Usin...

Algorithmic mechanism design considers distributed settings where the participants, termed agents, cannot be assumed to follow the protocol but rather their own interests. The protocol can be regarded as an algorithm augmented with a suitable payment rule and the desired condition is termed truthfulness, meaning that it is never convenient for an agent to report false information. Motivated by ...