rFC Validation - Simpler than you thought

Skins Are Simpler Than You Think

Dermatology is an incredibly simple subject. The fact that there are over 1000 different skin diseases, each of which may appear in several disguises, with a correspondingly confusing nomenclature, is irrelevant, since diagnosis is not necessary for successful therapy. Dermatological diagnosis is undoubtedly useful for impressing less gifted colleagues who are only to be trusted with mechanisti...

Varicella surveillance: simpler than you think?

In the article 'Surveillance of viral pathogens in Australia: varicella-zoster virus' published in the previous issue of Communicable Diseases Intelligence, 1 the authors dismiss passive surveillance as unworkable because of 'the large numbers of cases of chickenpox and the small proportion of cases who seek medical attention'. It is not clear if they believe that passive surveillance is imprac...

Is Belief Revision Harder Than You Thought?

Suppose one wishes to construct, use, and maintain a knowledge base (KB) of beliefs about the real world, even though the facts about that world are only partially known. In the AI domain, this problem arises when an agent has a base set of beliefs that reflect partial knowledge about the world, and then tries to incorporate new, possibly contradictory knowledge into this set of beliefs. We cho...

Pancreatic Cancer – More Familial than You Thought

Although pancreatic cancer accounts for only 2% of new cancer cases, it is the fifth leading cause of cancerrelated death in Western countries. The high mortality rate is mainly caused by the fact that most cases are detected at a stage when curable resection is not an option anymore and prognosis is poor [45,55]. The etiology of pancreatic cancer is poorly understood. Several putative risk fac...

Data Integration Is Harder than You Thought