Despite the recent advances in information and communication technology that have increased our ability to store and circulate information, the task of ensuring that the right sorts of information gets to the right sorts of people remains. We argue that the many efforts underway to develop efficient means for sharing information across healthcare systems and organizations would benefit from a careful analysis of human action in healthcare organizations. This in turn requires that the management of information and knowledge within healthcare (...) organizations be combined with models of resources and processes of patient care that are based on a general ontology of social interaction. The Health Level 7 (HL7) is one of several ANSI-accredited Standards Developing Organizations operating in the healthcare arena. HL7 has advanced a widely used messaging standard that enables healthcare applications to exchange clinical and administrative data in digital form. HL7 focuses on the interface requirements of the entire healthcare system and not exclusively on the requirements of one area of healthcare such as pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance transactions. This has inspired the development of a powerful abstract model of patient care called the Reference Information Model (RIM). The present paper begins with an overview of the core classes of the HL7 (Version 3) RIM and a brief discussion of its “actcentered” view of healthcare. Central to this account is what is called the life cycle of events. A clinical action may progress from defined, through planned and ordered, to executed. These modalities of an action are represented as the mood of the act. We then outline the basis of an ontology of organizations, starting from the theory of speech Acts, and apply this ontology to the HL7 RIM. Special attention is given to the sorts of preconditions that must be satisfied for the successful performance of a speech act and to the sorts of entities to which speech acts give rise (e.g. obligations, claims, commitments, etc.). Finally we draw conclusions for the efficient communication and management of medical information and knowledge within and between healthcare organizations, paying special attention to the role that medical documents play in such organizations. (shrink)

There are compelling medical, ethical, and legal arguments that support mandating use of a central institutional review board for the review of clinical trials performed at multiple institutional sites. Progress against serious diseases depends on this.

Semantic role is the actual role a participant plays in some real or imagined situation, apart from the linguistic encoding of those situations. Semantic roles, also known as thematic roles, are one of the oldest classes of constructs in linguistic theory. Semantic roles are used to indicate the role played by each entity in a sentence and are ranging from very specific to very general. Also, semantic roles are useful in natural language processing. They have proved attractive because they provide (...) a way of representing commonalities across different uses of the same predicate or across uses of distinct but semantically related predicates that may be obscured because arguments with certain semantic roles may have various syntactic realisations. Thus they provide a level of abstraction for the statement of generalisations concerning a variety of linguistic phenomena. In particular, argument realisation generalisations are often stated over a thematic hierarchy, a ranking of semantic roles. However, semantic roles have not lived up to their initial promise. It has proved impossible to find a small set of roles that can be applied across all verbs in a language, let alone across languages. Advances in Research on Semantic Roles provide more sustained discussion of the notion of semantic role. It often traces the development of the notion, as well as its place within current linguistic theory. In addition, it introduces several approaches to semantic role inventories, highlighting the similarities and differences among them, and discusses the limitations both of particular approaches and of semantic role approaches in general. Semantic roles continue to be useful in stating linguistic generalisations, and so descriptive, if not theoretical, uses of semantic role labels persist across subfields, including language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. (shrink)

To entertain an idea is to take it in, pay attention to it, give it breathing room, dwell with it for a time. The practice of entertaining ideas suggests rumination and meditation, inviting us to think of philosophy as a form of hospitality and a kind of mental theatre. In this collection, organized around key words shared by philosophy and performance, the editors suggest that Shakespeare's plays supply readers, listeners, viewers, and performers with equipment for living. In plays ranging from (...) A Midsummer Night's Dream to King Lear and The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare invites readers and audiences to be more responsive to the texture and meaning of daily encounters, whether in the intimacies of love, the demands of social and political life, or moments of ethical decision. Entertaining the Idea features established and emerging scholars, addressing key words such as role play, acknowledgment, judgment, and entertainment as well as curse and care. The volume also includes longer essays on Shakespeare, Kant, Husserl, and Hegel as well as an afterword by theatre critic Charles McNulty on the philosophy and performance history of King Lear. (shrink)

We examine the influence of word choices on mathematical practice, i.e. in developing definitions, theorems, and proofs. As a case study, we consider Euclid’s and Euler’s word choices in their influential developments of geometry and, in particular, their use of the term ‘polyhedron’. Then, jumping to the twentieth century, we look at word choices surrounding the use of the term ‘polyhedron’ in the work of Coxeter and of Grünbaum. We also consider a recent and explicit conflict of approach between Grünbaum (...) and Shephard on the one hand and that of Hilton and Pedersen on the other, elucidating that the conflict was engendered by disagreement over the proper conceptualization, and so also the appropriate word choices, in the study of polyhedra. (shrink)

The claim that there are nonpurposive functional statements is critically examined by looking at nine translation schemata, several of which are drawn from recent literature. All but one or two fail, suggesting that all functional statements (a) are causal (and not about probabilities or necessary conditions), and (b) have implicit reference to goals. If so, then the possibility of nonpurposive functional statements rests squarely on the possibility of nonpurposive goals.

The Propertian speaker's private erotic gaze evolves into Foucault's "panoptic" gaze of state control, illustrating in the process the early and formative years of Augustan social ideology and its relation to urban renewal. Composed almost a decade before the passage of social legislation in 18 B.C.E. ( leges Iuliae ), Propertius 2.31—the ecphrasis of the temple to Apollo on the Palatine—and its companion piece 2.32 anticipate the radical redefinition of imperial power under Augustus, the encroachment of the state into the (...) private domains of family and sexuality, and the eventual use of such legislation as a "strategy of surveillance.". (shrink)

Suppose you are on a commercial airplane that is flying at 35,000 feet. Next to you sits a man who appears to be sleeping. In fact, this man has been drugged and put upon the plane without his knowledge or consent. He has never flown on a plane before and, indeed, has no idea what an airplane is. Suddenly the man awakes and looks around him. Terrified by the alien environment in which he finds himself, he searches for a door (...) or window from which to make an escape. As luck would have it, he is seated right next to a window exit and he begins to pull the handle that will open the window. You are aware that opening the window exit at this altitude will cause the cabin to quickly depressurize and that this man, you, and probably several other passengers will be sucked out the window to your deaths. You desperately want to stop him from opening the window. Now assume that for some reason it is impossible to prevent him physically from performing the deadly act. Your only option is to rationally persuade him to leave the window exit alone. You cry out to him and, with both hands on the handles, he turns to face you and waits to hear what you have to say. What sort of argument would you make? (shrink)

Severian of Gabala’s homilies and Pseudo-Theodoret’s Quaestiones et responsiones ad Orthodoxos exhibit some notable parallels. Such links show that a marginal current of the Antiochene school was still thriving by the end of the 5th century, i.e. the most probable date of QRO.

When individuals cannot make up their mind, they sometimes use a random decision-making aid such as a coin to make a decision. This aid may also elicit affective reactions: A person flipping a coin may (dis)like the outcome, and thus decide according to this feeling. We refer to this process as catalysing decisions and to the aid as catalyst. We investigate whether using a catalyst may not only elicit affect but also result in more affect-based decision making. We used different (...) online studies that examine affect-driven decisions by investigating scope insensitivity (indirect behavioural measure) and self-reported weight given to feelings versus reasons in hypothetical donation decisions. Study 1a showed that a catalyst (a lottery wheel) lead to more scope insensitive (i.e. affect-driven) donations. Study 1b included several changes and did not replicate these results. Study 2 (preregistered) examined scope insensitivity but did not replicate previous results; Study 3 (preregistered) looked at the weight given to feelings versus reason. Although catalyst (compared to control) participants descriptively reported relying more on feelings, this difference did not reach significance. In contrast to lay beliefs, results do not indicate support for the hypothesis that using a catalyst results in more affect-based hypothetical donation decisions. (shrink)

In this paper we present an axiomatic characterization for brutal contractions. Then we consider the particular case of the brutal contractions that are based on a bounded ensconcement and also the class of severe withdrawals which are based on bounded epistemic entrenchment relations that are defined by means of bounded ensconcements. We present axiomatic characterizations for each one of those classes of functions and investigate the interrelation among them.

The formal theory of equality of opportunity emerged as a response – a friendly amendment – to Ronald Dworkin's (1981) characterization of resource egalitarianism, as defined by the allocation that would emerge from insurance contracts arrived at behind a thin veil of ignorance. This article compares several of the prominent versions of this response, put forth in the period 1993–2008. I argue that a generalization of Roemer's (1998) proposal is the most satisfactory approach. Inherent in that generalization is an indeterminism, (...) which reflects a philosophical problem: that we do not know what comprise the ethically correct rewards to effort. The indeterminism should be resolved, I propose, by an ancillary theory which limits the degree of inequality which is acceptable. (shrink)

Arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA) is one of the recently proposed population-based metaheuristic algorithms. The algorithmic design concept of the AOA is based on the distributive behavior of arithmetic operators, namely, multiplication (M), division (D), subtraction (S), and addition (A). Being a new metaheuristic algorithm, the need for a performance evaluation of AOA is significant to the global optimization research community and specifically to nature-inspired metaheuristic enthusiasts. This article aims to evaluate the influence of the algorithm control parameters, namely, population size (...) and the number of iterations, on the performance of the newly proposed AOA. In addition, we also investigated and validated the influence of different initialization schemes available in the literature on the performance of the AOA. Experiments were conducted using different initialization scenarios and the first is where the population size is large and the number of iterations is low. The second scenario is when the number of iterations is high, and the population size is small. Finally, when the population size and the number of iterations are similar. The numerical results from the conducted experiments showed that AOA is sensitive to the population size and requires a large population size for optimal performance. Afterward, we initialized AOA with six initialization schemes, and their performances were tested on the classical functions and the functions defined in the CEC 2020 suite. The results were presented, and their implications were discussed. Our results showed that the performance of AOA could be influenced when the solution is initialized with schemes other than default random numbers. The Beta distribution outperformed the random number distribution in all cases for both the classical and CEC 2020 functions. The performance of uniform distribution, Rayleigh distribution, Latin hypercube sampling, and Sobol low discrepancy sequence are relatively competitive with the Random number. On the basis of our experiments’ results, we recommend that a solution size of 6,000, the number of iterations of 100, and initializing the solutions with Beta distribution will lead to AOA performing optimally for scenarios considered in our experiments. (shrink)

The pioneering work of Edwin T. Jaynes in the field of statistical physics, quantum optics, and probability theory has had a significant and lasting effect on the study of many physical problems, ranging from fundamental theoretical questions through to practical applications such as optical image restoration. Physics and Probability is a collection of papers in these areas by some of his many colleagues and former students, based largely on lectures given at a symposium celebrating Jaynes' contributions, on the occasion of (...) his seventieth birthday and retirement as Wayman Crow Professor of Physics at Washington University. The collection contains several authoritative overviews of current research on maximum entropy and quantum optics, where Jaynes' work has been particularly influential, as well as reports on a number of related topics. In the concluding paper, Jaynes looks back over his career, and gives encouragement and sound advice to young scientists. All those engaged in research on any of the topics discussed in these papers will find this a useful and fascinating collection, and a fitting tribute to an outstanding and innovative scientist. (shrink)

In addition to the technical writers on music, a number of ancient authors, notably Plutarch and Athenaeus, have recorded several musical terms, either by way of illustrative material—Plutarch is particularly given to musical similes and metaphors—or in the course of anecdotes about music and musicians. As musical terminology in different ages contains words or phrases not only of general acceptance and familiarity, but other more ephemeral expressions which belong to the jargon of a narrower circle of executants and critics, it (...) is possible that the musical significance of such words, when used in an apparently non-musical context, has escaped notice. (shrink)

We examine three critical aspects of Popper’s formulation of the ‘ Logic of Scientific Discovery ’—evidence, content and degree of corroboration—and place these concepts in the context of the Tree of Life (ToL) problem with particular reference to molecular systematics. Content, in the sense discussed by Popper, refers to the breadth and scope of existence that a hypothesis purports to explain. Content, in conjunction with the amount of available and relevant evidence, determines the testability, or potential degree of corroboration, of (...) a statement; content distinguishes scientific hypotheses from metaphysical assertions. Degree of corroboration refers to the relative and tentative confidence assigned to one hypothesis over another, based upon the performance of each under critical tests. Here we suggest that systematists attempt to maximize content and evidence to increase the potential degree of corroboration in all phylogenetic endeavors. Discussion of this “total evidence” approach leads to several interesting conclusions about generating ToL hypotheses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Encounters with Ovid: Gavin Douglas’s The Palis of Honoure and Derek Walcott’s “The Hotel Normandie Pool” CAROLE E. NEWLANDS In sixteenth-century Rome, humanist scholars of ancient material and religious culture were exploring the ruins and inscriptions of ancient Rome with a copy of Ovid’s Fasti in hand.1 In London at the same time, Shakespeare was entertaining audiences and inspiring other poets with plots and characters drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. (...) Reception studies of Ovid often focus on these great metropolitan centers. In this article, however, I will explore transformative encounters with Ovid by two poets living on the geographical margins: Gavin Douglas, the Scottish poet whose major work, the Eneados, completed in 1513, was the first translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in the British Isles, and Derek Walcott, the Caribbean Nobel-prize winning poet best known for his epic poem Omeros, published in 1990. As a poet of a small northern country that had fraught political and cultural relations with its much more populous neighbor, England, Douglas can be considered to some extent, like Walcott, within a postcolonial critical paradigm. For despite their stark differences in geographical locale and in period of time, these poets have significant commonalties. Both men were natives of places geographically distant from the major metropolitan center of London. Both were also classically learned poets. They thus shared anxieties relating to their temporal distance from Graeco-Roman culture as well as to their physical distance from the powerful English-language literary center of their day. And significantly, both Douglas and Walcott present transformative visions of Ovid in indiarion 26.3 winter 2019 vidual, early poems, The Palis of Honoure and “The Hotel Normandie Pool” respectively. These imagined but direct encounters with the Roman poet occur in poems before Douglas and Walcott composed the works for which they are chiefly known, in Douglas’s case the translation of the Aeneid, and in Walcott’s Omeros. Ovid appears in both the Palis of Honoure and “The Hotel Normandie Pool” initially, at least, as an outsider, a poet of exile, but not, however, as a self-pitying poet in decline or, as recent scholarship would have it, as a skilled manipulator of the tropes of poetic decline.2 Rather, in Douglas’s and Walcott’s poems Ovid is a figure who authorizes marginality as a vital source of poetic re-creation. As both insider and outsider Ovid can offer positive redirection to these authors whether within or beyond their geographical boundaries. Through their visions of Ovid, both Douglas and Walcott are offered the possibility of personal change and generic innovation. For each poet the encounter with Ovid is a form of poetic initiation that leads him to his more ambitious work in the heroic genre. gavin douglas’s THE PALIS OF HONOURE i will start with Gavin Douglas (c. 1474–1522). Douglas is generally classed as one of the “Makars,” a term used to refer to a cluster of brilliant, experimental Scottish poets of the late 15th and early 16th century. Among these were Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas, three poets who thrived under the rule of King James IV of Scotland, an active patron of the arts who sought to make his court a center of cultural excellence that would rival the English court.3 Douglas’s Palis of Honoure is a youthful, ambitious poem, composed in 1502, twelve years before his major achievement, his translation of the Aeneid.4 Dedicated to King James, The Palis comprises 2169 decasyllabic lines with several demanding rhyme schemes.5 It is written in a manner that combines the “aureate” style, that is elegant and Latinate, with down-to-earth Scottish vernacular 74 encounters with ovid diction and forms of expression, and it is also suffused with Ovidian myth and concepts.6 Its format derives from the medieval dream vision, a form employed notably, for instance, by Douglas’s famous English predecessor Chaucer.7 Scholars tend to find The Palis of Honoure less polished than Douglas’s mature work, the Eneados. Conor Leahy, however, describes the youthful poem as bold and dynamic: “In the hundred years following the death of Chaucer, no other dream vision... (shrink)