Concerns about Passive Smoking

Statistics and Passive Smoking

Drinking and passive smoking.

I read with great interest the special report, “The health risks of passive smoking” (Chest 1983; 84:90-5). The nonsmokers’ rights movements have little power in Japan at present. In many cases, Japanese smokers themselves should be chastised for their smoking habits. They smoke in public, on trains, and even in the office at work. The harmful effects of passive smoking on nonsmokers do not app...

Concerns about peer review process.

I am concerned about the lack of proper scrutiny during the peer review process. Although I exemplify it in one paper in a field in which I have some expertise, I believe that this single case shows severe failure of peer review, and it should not have happened. I refer to the article by Nankivil et al. in the latest edition of IOVS Vol 55 No. 7. There seems to be no evidence of scientific rigo...

Reasoning About Compositions of Concerns

In this paper we propose a framework for defining and reasoning about compositions of concerns, based on multivalued logics. Rather than providing a small set of built-in composition operations, our framework provides a mechanism for constructing arbitrary types of composition. Our multi-valued logic model checker, chek allows us to reason about the properties of compositions of concerns.

Known Concerns About Fuzzy Logic

I thank Charles Elkan for bringing into the open questions about fuzzy inferences that seem to bother him and others. I hope the result of this discussion will be a clearer understanding of many-valued logics in general, and fuzzy logic in particular. My comments address three topics: questions about Theorem 1, the “watermelon” example, and the issue of fuzzy logic in control. Much of the confu...