Certainly Uncertain

The DSM-5 and the art of medicine: certainly uncertain.

The recently published Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) (1), is regarded as the primary source of information for psychiatric diagnostic criteria. Criticisms of the new edition have centered on the relative lack of scientific evidence for specific diagnostic classifications and unclear boundaries between true “illness” and the normal stresses of life....

Certainly Unsupervisable States

This paper proposes an abstraction method for compositional synthesis. Synthesis is a method to automatically compute a control program or supervisor that restricts the behaviour of a given system to ensure safety and liveness. Compositional synthesis uses repeated abstraction and simplification to combat the state-space explosion problem for large systems. The abstraction method proposed in th...

Almost-Certainly Runlength-Limiting Codes

Standard runlength-limiting codes – nonlinear codes defined by trellises – have the disadvantage that they disconnect the outer errorcorrecting code from the bit-by-bit likelihoods that come out of the channel. I present two methods for creating transmissions that, with probability extremely close to 1, both are runlength-limited and are codewords of an outer linear error-correcting code (or ar...

Repetitive perhaps, but certainly not boring

Introduction of non-native freshwater fish can certainly be bad

We wish to accept Gozlan’s (2008) invitation: ‘The aim of this paper is to open a critical debate on the real threat posed by the introduction of non-native fishes’ (p. 107). Gozlan (2008, p. 106) states that: ‘Here I show that on the global scale, the majority of freshwater fish introductions are not identified as having an ecological impact while having great societal benefits.’ We strongly d...