Clock-driven FORTRAN task scheduling in a multiprogramming environment

The existing ISA-standard FORTRAN task-scheduling calls require careful programming to provide timing accuracy even in a single-user system, and do not explicitly provide a mechanism for resolving task conflicts in a multiprogramming system. A simple assignment of priorities to tasks can guarantee timing accuracy to one task, but the risks generating maximum, unnecessary interference with other tasks. An alternative to such a standard priority scheme, not known to be available on common commercial systems, guarantees timing for one task while minimizing interference among tasks.     

Pattern identification of pure tones and frequency glides by untrained listeners

Six subjects identified the order of four-event sequences. Contiguous pure tones (713, 1,031, 1,209, and 1,514 Hz in permuted orders) were presented by earphones at 40 dB SL, with individual events Itones) from 20, to 40, 60, and 300 msec in duration. Again, silent intervals of 20 or 60 msec were inserted among tones of 20 or 40 msec duration. Finally, the pure tones of 713 and 1,209 Hz were combined, in any four-event sequence, with two glissandi chosen from 466 to 714 Hz, from 714 to 1,208 Hz, and their mirror reversals. The temporal and frequency continuity both of tonal and of glissando-plus-tonal sequences affected the identification of sequential order. Degraded performance in the glissando-plus-tonal condition was attributed partially to a subjective experience of pitch blurring. The inclusion of silent intervals in the sequences of the shorter pure-tone durations improved identification performance to that of contiguous sequences of equal overall duration, i.e., adding silent processing time was as efficacious as increasing by the same amount the duration of the individual frequency event.     

Gender Differences in Anti-Gay Prejudice: Evidence for Stability and Change

Sex Roles - In recent years, there has been remarkable change in societal acceptance of lesbians and gay men. This meta-analysis explored whether this positive shift has reduced the gender...     

A Theoretical Framework for Analysing the Notion of Relative Importance of Criteria

Multiple-criteria decision aid almost always requires the use of weights, importance coefficients or even a hierarchy of criteria, veto thresholds, etc. These are importance parameters that are used to differentiate the role devoted to each criterion in the construction of comprehensive preferences. Many researchers have studied the problem of how to assign values to such parameters, but few of them have tried to analyse in detail what underlies the notion of importance of criteria and to give a clear formal definition of it. In this paper our purpose is to define a theoretical framework so as to analyse the notion of the importance of criteria under very general conditions. Within this framework it clearly appears that the importance of criteria is taken into account in very different ways in various aggregation procedures. This framework also allows us to shed new light on fundamental questions such as: Under what conditions is it possible to state that one criterion is more important than another? Are importance parameters of the various aggregation procedures dependent on or independent of the encoding of criteria? What are the links between the two concepts of the importance of criteria and the compensatoriness of preferences? This theoretical framework seems to us sufficiently general to ground further research in order to define theoretically valid elicitation methods for importance parameters.