The GMC: expediency before principle

Southall: the GMC responds.

Women and the GMC.

Dr George Percival joined the consultant staff when the new building was opened in 1936. Trained in Paris, Lausanne, and Zurich, he knew as well as Dr Jamieson how to deal with leg eczema. Sir Robert Grant, the head of a family already lavishly generous to the University of Edinburgh, was aware of the damage that skin disease could do to his employees, and was unhappy when he developed eczema o...

Absolute Expediency and Imitative Behaviour

This paper analyses a model of learning by imitation, where besides the decision maker, there is a population of individuals facing the same decision problem. We analyse a property called Absolute Expediency, which requires that the decision maker’s expected payo¤ increases from one round to the next for every decision problem and every state of the population. We give a simple characterisation...

The STAR automaton: expediency and optimality properties

We present the STack ARchitecture (STAR) automaton. It is a fixed structure, multiaction, reward-penalty learning automaton, characterized by a star-shaped state transition diagram. Each branch of the star contains D states associated with a particular action. The branches are connected to a central "neutral" state. The most general version of STAR involves probabilistic state transitions in re...

Before the pleasure principle: translation and its vicissitudes.

While from the point of view of precise translation, "desire and delight" may, perhaps, be the most accurate English equivalent, some additional factors may be worth considering before it is assumed that the translation is Freud's conception. The foremost consideration is that Freud's (1880) translation of Mill's (1866) essay on Plato regularly renders "pleasure" as Lust. The idea of a principl...