Background: Arthritis is very common but is not well understood. Actually, “arthritis” is not a single disease; it is an informal way of referring to joint pain or joint disease. There are more than 100 different types of arthritis and related conditions. People of all ages, sexes and races can and do have arthritis, and it is the leading cause of disability in America. More than 50 million adults and 300,000 children have some type of arthritis. It is most common (...) among women and occurs more frequently as people get older. Common arthritis joint symptoms include swelling, pain, stiffness and decreased range of motion. Symptoms may come and go. They can be mild, moderate or severe. They may stay about the same for years, but may progress or get worse over time. Severe arthritis can result in chronic pain, inability to do daily activities and make it difficult to walk or climb stairs. Arthritis can cause permanent joint changes. These changes may be visible, such as knobby finger joints, but often the damage can only be seen on X-ray. Some types of arthritis also affect the heart, eyes, lungs, kidneys and skin as well as the joints. Objectives: The main goal of this expert system is to get the appropriate diagnosis of disease and the correct treatment and give the appropriate method of treatment through several tips that concern the disease and how to treat it and we will see it through the application on the expert system. Methods: in this paper the design of the proposed Expert System which was produced to help Orthopedist in diagnosing Arthritis disease through its symptoms such as: pain on pressure in a joint , Inflammation indicated by joint swelling, Stiffness especially in the morning , Loss of flexibility of joint, Limited, joint movement, Deformity of the joints , Weight loss and fatigue , Non-specific fever and Crepitus. The proposed expert system presents an overview about Arthritis disease is given, the cause of diseases is outlined and the treatment of disease whenever possible is given out. SL5 Object Expert System language was used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. Results: The proposed Arthritis disease diagnosis expert system was evaluated by Orthopedics students and they were satisfied with its performance. Conclusions: The Proposed expert system is very useful for Orthopedist, patients with arthritis and newly graduated Orthopedics students. (shrink)

Diabetes is a major public health issue that affects the nations of our time to a large extent and is described as a non-communicable epidemic. Diabetes mellitus is a common disease where there is too much sugar (glucose) floating around in your blood. This occurs because either the pancreas can’t produce enough insulin or the cells in body have become resistant to insulin. The concentration in this paper is on diagnosis diabetes by designing a proposed expert system. The main goal (...) of this expert system is to get the appropriate diagnosing of the illness, dealing with it quickly, and tips for permanent treatment whenever possible is given out. SL5 object expert system language was used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. (shrink)

There is an increase in the use of in-door wireless networking solutions via Wi-Fi and this increase infiltrated and utilized Wi-Fi enable devices, as well as smart mobiles, games consoles, security systems, tablet PCs and smart TVs. Thus the demand on Wi-Fi connections increased rapidly. Rule Based System is an essential method in helping using the human expertise in many challenging fields. In this paper, a Rule Based System was designed and developed for diagnosing the wireless connection problems and attain (...) a precise decision about the cause of the problem. SL5 Object expert system language was used in developing the rule based system. An Evaluation of the rule based system was carried out to test its accuracy and the results were promising. (shrink)

Background: Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act. Fortunately, it is also treatable. Depression causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed. It can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems and can decrease a person’s ability to function at work and at home. Depression affects an estimated one in 15 adults (6.7%) in any given (...) year. And one in six people (16.6%) will experience depression at some time in their life. Depression can strike at any time, but on average, first appears during the late teens to mid-20s. Women are more likely than men to experience depression. Some studies show that one-third of women will experience a major depressive episode in their lifetime. Objectives: The main goal of this expert system is to get the appropriate diagnosis of disease and the correct treatment and give the appropriate method of treatment through several tips that concern the disease and how to treat it and we will see it through the application on the expert system. Methods: in this paper the design of the proposed Expert System which was produced to help Psychologist in diagnosing depression disease through its symptoms such as: a loss of energy, a change in appetite, sleeping more or less, anxiety, reduced concentration, indecisiveness, restlessness, feelings of worthlessness, guilt or hopelessness and thoughts of self-harm or suicide. The proposed expert system presents an overview about depression disease is given, the cause of diseases is outlined and the treatment of disease whenever possible is given out. SL5 Object Expert System language was used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. Results: The proposed depression disease diagnosis expert system was evaluated by psychologist students and they were satisfied with its performance. Conclusions: The Proposed expert system is very useful for psychologist, patients with depression and newly graduated psychologist. (shrink)

Background: With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the levels of pollution grow significantly. This Technological development contributed to the worsening of shortness breath problems in great shape. especially in infants and children. There are many shortness breath diseases that infants and children face in their lives. Shortness of breath is one of a very serious symptom in children and infants and should never be ignored. Objectives: Along these lines, the main goal of this expert system is to help physician (...) in diagnosing and describe some common causes of shortness of breath in infants and children by diagnosing their cases through our expert system. Moreover, this system which we are presenting will give patient the appropriate diagnosis of disease and the treatment required. Methods: In this paper the strategy of the expert system for diagnosing a number of the existed shortness of breath in infants and children diseases such as (Asthma , Bronchiolitis, Viral Pneumonia, cough, Shortness of breath' dyspnea ', Epiglottitis, Croup, ABSCESS in the tonsil 'peritonsillar abscess', Bronchitis, Viral Bronchitis, Wheezing, sudden infant death syndrome 'SIDS' ) is introduced, an overview about the shortness of breath in children and infants diseases are delineated, the cause of diseases are sketched and the treatment of disease whenever conceivable is given . SL5 Object Expert System language was utilized for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. Results: The proposed shortness of breath in children and infants diseases diagnosis expert system was estimated by Medical students and they were satisfied with its result. Conclusions: The Proposed expert system is very useful for Respiratory physician, pediatrician, recently graduated physician, and for children's parents with shortness of breath problem. (shrink)

Today’s everyone normal life can include a normal rate of playing computer games or video games; but what about an excessive or compulsive use of video games that impact on our life? Our kids, who usually spend a lot of time in playing video games will likely have a trouble in paying attention to their school lessons. In this paper, we introduce an expert system to help users in getting the correct diagnosis of the health problem of video game addictions (...) that range from (Musculoskeletal issues, Vision problems and Obesity). Moreover, this expert system provides information about the problem and tell us how we can solve it. SL5 Object expert system language was used to design and implement the expert system. (shrink)

In this paper a Knowledge-Based System (KBS) for determining the appropriate students major according to his/her preferences for sophomore student enrolled in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology in Al-Azhar University of Gaza was developed and tested. A set of predefined criterions that is taken into consideration before a sophomore student can select a major is outlined. Such criterion as high school score, score of subject such as Math I, Math II, Electrical Circuit I, and Electronics I taken during (...) the student freshman year, number of credits passed, student cumulative grade point average of freshman year, among others, were then used as input data to KBS. KBS was designed and developed using Simpler Level Five (SL5) Object expert system language. KBS was tested on three generation of sophomore students from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology of the Al-Azhar University, Gaza. The results of the evaluation show that the KBS is able to correctly determine the appropriate students major without errors. (shrink)

Background: Dengue Disease is a mosquito-borne tropical disease caused by the dengue virus, symptoms typically begin three to fourteen days after infection. This may include a high fever, headache, vomiting, muscle and joint pains, and a characteristic skin rash. Dengue serology is applied in different settings, such as for surveillance, in health care facilities in endemic areas and in travel clinics in non-endemic areas. The applicability and quality of serological tests in dengue endemic regions has to be judged against a (...) background of potential cross reactivity with other flavi-viruses, difficulties in distinguishing primary from secondary infections and technological problems related to the fact that most dengue endemic regions are relatively poor of resources .Objectives: to help doctors and patients in diagnosing Dengue Disease and give them the information of how to prevent Dengue Disease and to be able to understand the signs and symptoms of Dengue Disease. Methods: We collected all relevant material for Dengue Disease. Then we designed and implemented a knowledge based system for diagnosing Dengue Disease using SL5 Object Language. Results: The knowledge based system was evaluated by a group of Patients and specialized doctors and they found it very friendly and easy to use. (shrink)

Chest pain is the pain felt in the chest by infants, children and adolescents. In most cases the pain is not associated with the heart. It is mainly recognized by the observance or report of pain by the infant, child or adolescent by reports of distress by parents or care givers. Chest pain is not unusual in children. Lots of children are seen in ambulatory clinics, emergency rooms and hospitals and cardiology clinics. Usually there is a benign cause for the (...) pain for utmost children. Certain patients have conditions that are serious and perhaps life-threatening. Chest pain in pediatric patients needs careful physical examination and a detailed history that would point to the possibility of a serious cause. Researches of pediatric chest pain are scarce. It has been difficult to create evidence-based guidelines for evaluation. In this paper we propose an expert system to help doctors and parents, and care giver in diagnosing chest pain in infants and children. This expert System is design and implemented in SL5 Object language. (shrink)

The modal object calculus is the system of logic which houses the (proper) axiomatic theory of abstract objects. The calculus has some rather interesting features in and of itself, independent of the proper theory. The most sophisticated, type-theoretic incarnation of the calculus can be used to analyze the intensional contexts of natural language and so constitutes an intensional logic. However, the simpler second-order version of the calculus couches a theory of fine-grained properties, relations and propositions and serves as a (...) framework for defining situations, possible worlds, stories, and fictional characters, among other things. In the present paper, we focus on the second-order calculus. The second-order modal object calculus is so-called to distinguish it from the second-order modal predicate calculus. Though the differences are slight, the extra expressive power of the object calculus significantly enhances its ability to resolve logical and philosophical concepts and problems. (shrink)

Evidence from functional neuroimaging of the human brain indicates that information about salient properties of an object¿such as what it looks like, how it moves, and how it is used¿is stored in sensory and motor systems active when that information was acquired. As a result, object concepts belonging to different categories like animals and tools are represented in partially distinct, sensory- and motor property-based neural networks. This suggests that object concepts are not explicitly represented, but rather emerge (...) from weighted activity within property-based brain regions. However, some property-based regions seem to show a categorical organization, thus providing evidence consistent with category-based, domain-specific formulations as well.Acronyms and DefinitionsBiological motion: motion of animate agents characterized by highly flexible, fully articulated motion vectors, in contrast to the rigid, unarticulated motion vectors associated with most tools.Category-specific disorder: a relatively greater impairment in retrieving information about members of one superordinate object category (e.g., animals) as compared with other categories following brain injury or diseaseIPS: intraparietal sulcusLO: lateral occipital cortexObject concept: memory representations of a class or category of objects. Necessary for numerous cognitive functions including identifying an object as a member of a specific category and drawing inferences about object propertiespMTG: posterior middle temporal gyruspSTS: posterior superior temporal sulcusRepetition suppression: decreased neural response associated with repeated presentation of an identical, or a semantically/conceptually related, stimulusSD: semantic dementiaSemantic memory: a large division of long-term memory containing knowledge about the world including facts, ideas, beliefs, and conceptsSemantic priming: a short-lasting facilitation in processing a stimulus due to the prior presentation of a semantically related stimulusTMS: transcranial magnetic stimulationVPMC: ventral premotor cortex. (shrink)

One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls? Offering an informative account of such a category is no easy task. For nothing would distinguish things that fall under it from those that don’t—there being, after all, none of the latter. It seems hard, then, to say much about any fully general category; and it would appear to do no carving or categorizing or dividing at all. Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including (...) thing, being, entity, item, existent, and—especially—object.[ It is not obvious that there is any fully general category (whether object or otherwise). Accordingly, not all accounts of object assign it to a fully general category, instead allowing that there are non-objects. On those views, object does indeed divide. Accounts of object, then, differ with respect to whether there are non-objects. And this is not the only fault line. Other dimensions of difference include what objects there are and what objects are. Accordingly, this entry will survey three broad questions about the category object: What, if any, is its contrast or complement? What is its extension? What is its nature? (shrink)

A new method was devised to test object permanence in young infants. Fivemonth-old infants were habituated to a screen that moved back and forth through a 180-degree arc, in the manner of a drawbridge. After infants reached habituation, a box was centered behind the screen. Infants were shown two test events: a possible event and an impossible event. In the possible event, the screen stopped when it reached the occluded box; in the impossible event, the screen moved through the (...) space occupied by the box. The results indicated that infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event. This hnding suggested that infants (1) understood that the box continued to exist, in its same location, after it was occluded by the screen, and (2) expected the screen to stop against the occluded box and were surprised, or puzzled, when it failed to do so. A control experiment in which the box was placed next to the screen provided support for this interpretation of the results. Together, the results of these experiments indicate that, contrary to Piaget’s (1954) claims, infants as young as 5 months of age understand that objects continue to exist when occluded. The results, also indicate that 5-month-old infants realize that solid objects do not move through the space occupied by other solid objects. (shrink)

Object files are mental representations that enable perceptual systems to keep track of objects as numerically the same. How is their reference fixed? A prominent approach, championed by Zenon Pylyshyn and John Campbell, makes room for a non-satisfactional use of properties to fix reference. This maneuver has enabled them to reconcile a singularist view of reference with the intuition that properties must play a role in reference fixing. This paper examines Campbell’s influential defense of this strategy. After criticizing it, (...) a new approach is sketched. The alternative view introduces representational contents to explain perceptual individuation. After arguing that those contents are not satisfactional, it is concluded that there is room for a third view of reference fixing that does not fit into the singularist/descriptivist dichotomy. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: The following comments are from a psychologist, involved in the study of complex human information processing such as problem-solving, in which overt behaviour cannot be isolated from the subject's representation, since it is the prototype of goal-directed activity. In that respect perception, i.e. interpretation of the situation, is intrinsically linked to action, i.e. to changing the situation so as to complete the goal. In that field representation cannot be assimilated to consciousness, and it is very important, in my (...) opinion, to understand what makes a representation become conscious and what is changed in behaviour when an implicit representation becomes explicit and reportable; and to develop a precise methodology for obtaining and analysing verbal reports, which are in those situations the only ways of access to the subjective experience of other people. (shrink)

What is a thing? What is an object? Tristan Garcia decisively overturns 100 years of Heideggerian orthodoxy about the supposedly derivative nature of objects to put forward a new theory of ontology that gives us deep insights into the world and our place in it."e.

Four-month-old infants were allowed to manipulate, without vision, two rings attached to a bar that permitted each ring to undergo rotary motion against a fixed surface. In different conditions, the relative motions of the rings were rigid, independent, or opposite, and they circled either the same fixed point outside the zone of manipulation or spatially separated points. Infants’ perception of the ring assemblies were affected by the nature of the rotary motion in two ways. First, infants perceived a unitary (...) class='Hi'>object when the felt ends of the object underwent a common, rigid rotary motion; perception of object unity was stronger in this condition than when the ends underwent either independent or opposite rotary motions. Second, infants perceived two distinct objects when the felt ends of the objects underwent independent rotary motions that centred on distinct fixed points. Perception of the distinctness of the objects was less clear when the ends underwent opposite or independent rotary motions that centred on a common fixed point. These findings provide the first evidence that infants are sensitive to rotary motion patterns and can extrapolate a global pattern of rigid motion from the distinct, local velocities that they produce and experience at their two hands. (shrink)

In this short review I address certain issues and predictions that arise from the position papers by Erteschik- Shir, and by Fox and Pesetsky. The two proposed analyses are radically different, so I have made no attempt to relate them in terms of their properties. In section 1 I discuss some underlying issues in the architecture of grammar assumed by Erteschik-Shir, and in section 2 I evaluate some of the predictions generated by Fox and Pesetsky’s approach. In section 3 I (...) draw some more general conclusions about what consequences Object Shift shows us concerning the organization of grammar, and the nature of grammatical principles. While my remarks mainly address problems or drawbacks that I see with the proposals in the two position papers, they both offer a stimulating account of OS and explore the wider implications of the natures of their enterprises, and deserve fuller consideration beyond the present venue, consideration that they will surely receive. (shrink)

What makes an object the same persisting individual over time? Philosophers and psychologists have both grappled with this question, but from different perspectives—philosophers conceptually analyzing the criteria for object persistence, and psychologists exploring the mental mechanisms that lead us to experience the world in terms of persisting objects. It is striking that the same themes populate explorations of persistence in these two very different fields—e.g. the roles of spatiotemporal continuity, persistence through property change, and cohesion violations. Such similarities (...) may reflect an underlying connection, in that psychological mechanisms of object persistence (especially relevant parts of mid-level visual object processing) may serve to underlie the intuitions about persistence that fuel metaphysical theories. This would be a way for cognitive science to join these two disparate fields, helping to explain the possible origins and reliability of some metaphysical intuitions, and perhaps leading to philosophical progress. (shrink)

Research on human infants has begun to shed light on early-developing processes for segmenting perceptual arrays into objects. Infants appear to perceive objects by analyzing three-dimensional surface arrangements and motions. Their perception does not accord with a general tendency to maximize figural goodness or to attend to nonaccidental geometric relations in visual arrays. Object perception does accord with principles governing the motions of material bodies: Infants divide perceptual arrays into units that move as connected wholes, that move separately from (...) one another, that tend to maintain their size and shape over motion, and that tend to act upon each other only on contact. These findings suggest that o general representation of object unity and boundaries is interposed between representations of surfaces and representations of objects of familiar kinds. The processes that construct this representation may be related to processes of physical reasoning. (shrink)

What is it like to perceive a feared object? According to a popular neo-Gibsonian theory in psychology, fear biases our perceptions of objects so as to encourage particular kinds of actions: when we are afraid, spiders may be perceived as physically closer than they are in order to promote fleeing. Firestone mounted severe criticisms against this view, arguing that these cases are better explained by non-perceptual biases that operate on accurate perceptions of the external environment. In this paper I (...) will argue that fear might indeed distort our perceptions of the world, but not in the way neo-Gibsonians suppose. In the view I favor, perceptual distortions occur as by-products of fearful attention, a special mode of attention that is part of an orchestrated defensive response that prepares the organism to deal effectively with a threat. To argue for this view I will rely on empirical evidence that fearful attention narrows down the focus of attention and favors processing of local rather than global features of stimuli, which may jointly explain why perceptual distortions might occur in fearful object seeing. This view has consequences not only for empirical investigations in fearful perceptual distortions, but also for an explanation of the intentionality of fear and the phenomenal integration of bodily and intentional elements in fear episodes. (shrink)

We reply to various arguments by Otavio Bueno and Edward Zalta (‘Object Theory and Modal Meinongianism’) against Modal Meinongianism, including that it presupposes, but cannot maintain, a unique denotation for names of fictional characters, and that it is not generalizable to higher-order objects. We individuate the crucial difference between Modal Meinongianism and Object Theory in the former’s resorting to an apparatus of worlds, possible and impossible, for the representational purposes for which the latter resorts to a distinction between (...) two kinds of predication, exemplification and encoding. We show that encoding has fewer forerunners in the history of philosophy than Bueno and Zalta want, and that there’s a reason why the notion has been found baffling by some. (shrink)

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is a contemporary form of realism concerned with the investigation of “objects” broadly construed. It may be characterised in terms of a metaphysical pluralism to the extent that it recognises infinitely many different kinds of emergent entities, and this fact in turn leads to a number of questions concerning the nature of objects and emergence in OOO: what is the precise meaning of an emergent entity in OOO? How has emergence been denied throughout the history of (...) Western thought? Is there a specific object-oriented account of emergence? What is the causal mechanism which provides the conditions of possibility for the generation of emergent entities? In this article, I aim to answer all these questions by constructing the first extensive account of real emergence in the context of Object-Oriented Ontology, and I also seek to tie this analysis to the notion of “vicarious” or indirect causation. (shrink)

Ordinary cases of object seeing involve the visual perception of space and spatial location. But does seeing an object require such spatial perception? An empirical challenge to the idea that it does comes from reflection upon Bálint's syndrome, for some suppose that in Bálint's syndrome subjects can see objects without seeing space or spatial location. In this article, I question whether the empirical evidence available to us adequately supports this understanding of Bálint's syndrome, and explain how the aforementioned (...) empirical challenge can be resisted. (shrink)

Firstly, I present some of my most important answers to Miščević’s objections to my 2014 paper which I fully disagree with. Secondly and more importantly, I point out that there is a possible confusion or misunderstanding about the distinction between the object-level (sentence produced) and meta-level (sentence judged). I argue that competentionalist actually conflates object and meta levels and show the final consequences of such a conflation. The ordinarist firmly believes that there should be a separation between the (...) object-level and meta-level and provides the explanation for this. Finally, I briefly comment on the so-called ‘Route Question’, the path from the underlying competence to the central processor and argue that competentionalist cannot provide an explanation for it. The hope is that this discussion brings us closer to understanding the difference between the two opposing views. (shrink)