The Second-Century Šīʿite Ġulāt: Were They Really Gnostic?

Gnostic cells in the 21st century.

In this short review, I revise the notion of gnostic cells posited by Konorski, together with similar arguments by James, Lettvin and Barlow--namely, the idea of pontifical, grandmother and cardinal cells, respectively. I then discuss whether the characteristics of the recently discovered concept cells, i.e. neurons in the human medial temporal lobe with a very high degree of specificity and in...

They really do go.

While it is technically correct that 70-80% of rural or underserved origin candidates do not go ‘outside’ current concentrations of physicians and health resources, the appropriate statistical analysis reveals that they really do go at rates 2, 4, 6, or 10 times higher than the typical medical students. Others also go, such as the 75% of rural physicians who have urban origins or those with top...

Chatbots: Are they Really Useful?

Chatbots are computer programs that interact with users using natural languages. This technology started in the 1960’s; the aim was to see if chatbot systems could fool users that they were real humans. However, chatbot systems are not only built to mimic human conversation, and entertain users. In this paper, we investigate other applications where chatbots could be useful such as education, i...

Metrics, Do They Really Help?

Maturing a well designed framework requires a set of software metrics to steer the iterative development process. Based on a case study of the VisualWorks/Smalltalk framework for user-interface building, we conclude that today’s size and inheritance metrics are not reliable to detect problems but are useful in measuring stability. We expect that this work will contribute to the application of m...

"And They Were Silent": Reflections on Legalism