Relevance of “irrelevant” facts in medical education

The clinical relevance of physical activity education in medical school

P hysical activity is a vital component of good health, and it also helps reduce the severity of many chronic conditions (1). Currently, evidence suggests that physical activity counselling to patients by healthcare professionals is not being fully utilised (2). In a recent article, Dacey et al. (3) assessed the impact of medical school education on counselling knowledge and skills by future cl...

On the Relevance of Irrelevant Alternatives

Multinomial logistic regression is a powerful tool to model choice from a finite set of alternatives, but it comes with an underlying model assumption called the independence of irrelevant alternatives, stating that any item added to the set of choices will decrease all other items’ likelihood by an equal fraction. We perform statistical tests of this assumption across a variety of datasets and...

The relevance of the irrelevant beginning

There are many paradoxes associated with the concept of infinity. I would like to set forth and comment on one which, though well-known in principle, I have not seen stated in the following form. A PARADOX Given a sequence of real numbers, x1, x2, x3,..., Determine whether the sequence is convergent or divergent. If it is convergent, what is its limit value? For any finite integer, n, the deter...

Ignoring Irrelevant Facts and Operators in Plan Generation

It is traditional wisdom that one should start from the goals when generating a plan in order to focus the plan generation process on potentially relevant actions. The graphplan system, however, which is the most eecient planning system nowadays, builds a \planning graph" in a forward-chaining manner. Although this strategy seems to work well, it may possibly lead to problems if the planning ta...

Minocycline (Dynacin) Medical Facts