Cultural Survival in B. F. Skinner: Possibilities for Conceptual Refinement

A daughter's retrospective of B. F. Skinner.

This paper describes characteristic behaviors of my father, B. F. Skinner, using family documents and my own recollections. Early contingencies in his upbringing strengthened his love of building things and his independence in discovering how the world works. Those skills, combined with a lack of supervision in graduate school, set the stage for his discovery of the operant. He did not stop wit...

Pavlov And Skinner: Two Lives In Science (An Introduction To B. F. Skinner's "Some Responses To The Stimulus 'Pavlov' ").

The sesquicentennial of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s birth in September 1999 is being celebrated in Russia by a special issue of the Russian Journal of Physiology (the former I. M. Sechenov Physiological Journal, founded by Pavlov in 1917). The following article and the address by Skinner that it introduces are scheduled to appear in Russian translation in that special issue. Skinner’s ‘‘Some Respon...

Possibilities for refinement and reduction: future improvements within regulatory testing.

Approaches and challenges to refining and reducing animal use in regulatory testing are reviewed. Regulatory testing accounts for the majority of animals reported in the most painful and/or distressful categories in the United States and Canada. Refinements in testing, including the use of humane endpoints, are of increasing concern. Traditional approaches to reduction (e.g., improving experime...

Conceptual Modelling and Ontology: Possibilities and Pitfalls

Automatic Refinement Checking for B

While refinement is at the heart of the B Method so far no automatic refinement checker has been developed for it. In this paper we present a refinement checking algorithm and implementation for B. It is based on using an operational semantics of B, obtained in practice by the ProB animator. The refinement checker has been integrated into ProB toolset and we present various case studies and emp...