A comparative study compiled from a survey taken in Middleton, Rhode Island concerning educational experiences for preschool children in the home,

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Finding the right answer: an information retrieval approach supporting knowledge sharing

Knowledge Management can be defined as the effective strategies to get the right piece of knowledge to the right person in the right time. Having the main purpose of providing users with information items of their interest, recommender systems seem to be quite valuable for organizational knowledge management environments. Here we present KARe (Knowledgeable Agent for Recommendations), a multiagent recommender system that supports users sharing knowledge in a peer-to-peer environment. Central to this work is the assumption that social interaction is essential for the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. Supporting social interaction, KARe allows users to share knowledge through questions and answers. This paper describes KARe�s agent-oriented architecture and presents its recommendation algorithm

Aubry-Mather measures in the non convex setting

The adjoint method, introduced in [L. C. Evans, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal., 197 (2010), pp. 1053–1088] and [H. V. Tran, Calc. Var. Partial Differential Equations, 41 (2011), pp. 301–319], is used to construct analogues to the Aubry–Mather measures for nonconvex Hamiltonians. More precisely, a general construction of probability measures, which in the convex setting agree with Mather measures, is provided. These measures may fail to be invariant under the Hamiltonian flow and a dissipation arises, which is described by a positive semidefinite matrix of Borel measures. However, in the case of uniformly quasiconvex Hamiltonians the dissipation vanishes, and as a consequence the invariance is guaranteed. Copyright © 2011 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematic

Approaching the ground states of the random maximum two-satisfiability problem by a greedy single-spin flipping process

In this brief report we explore the energy landscapes of two spin glass models using a greedy single-spin flipping process, {\tt Gmax}. The ground-state energy density of the random maximum two-satisfiability problem is efficiently approached by {\tt Gmax}. The achieved energy density $e(t)$ decreases with the evolution time $t$ as $e(t)-e(\infty)=h (\log_{10} t)^{-z}$ with a small prefactor $h$ and a scaling coefficient $z > 1$, indicating an energy landscape with deep and rugged funnel-shape regions. For the $\pm J$ Viana-Bray spin glass model, however, the greedy single-spin dynamics quickly gets trapped to a local minimal region of the energy landscape.Comment: 5 pages with 4 figures included. Accepted for publication in Physical Review E as a brief repor

Complete Fusion Enhancement and Suppression of Weakly Bound Nuclei at Near Barrier Energies

We consider the influence of breakup channels on the complete fusion of weakly bound systems in terms of dynamic polarization potentials. It is argued that the enhancement of the cross section at sub-barrier energies may be consistent with recent experimental observations that nucleon transfer, often leading to breakup, is dominant compared to direct breakup. The main trends of the experimental complete fusion cross section for $^{6,7}$Li + $^{209}$Bi are analyzed in the framework of the DPP approach.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure