Open vascular surgery procedures: how will we learn to do them and will they have the same quality?

Libet Do We Have Free Will ?

I have taken an experimental approach to this question. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical change in the brain (the ‘readiness potential’, RP) that begins 550 ms before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350–400 ms after RP starts, but 200 ms. before the motor act. The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious funct...

When will we learn to love complaints?

I have just made a complaint to an electricity company. We recently moved house, changed our supplier, and needed to pay off a small final sum to the company. Because of a glitch in their online payment system, it proved impossible to do this. After receiving a threat to send bailiffs round, I finally managed to speak to someone in the debts department, and paid the bill. I also suggested they ...

Pbd Systems: When Will They Ever Learn?

We trace the tragicomic courtship between programming by demonstration and machine learning, two fields that seem made for each other but have never quite got together. A long-term historical perspective illuminates the twin roles of interaction and sequence learning in programming by demonstration, and reveals the parallel growth of machine learning as a research area in its own right. A view ...

Will they come and will they stay?

Homoeologs: What Are They and How Do We Infer Them?

The evolutionary history of nearly all flowering plants includes a polyploidization event. Homologous genes resulting from allopolyploidy are commonly referred to as 'homoeologs', although this term has not always been used precisely or consistently in the literature. With several allopolyploid genome sequencing projects under way, there is a pressing need for computational methods for homoeolo...