When vagotomy fails.

When Bellman's Principle Fails

We present several examples which show that the well known statements about Markov Decision Processes can fail if the loss function is not bounded.

When Sharing Fails

When Abstraction Fails

Reasoning about programs is mostly deduction: the reasoning from the abstract model to the concrete run. Deduction is useful because it allows us to predict properties of future runs—up to the point that a program will never fail its specification. However, even such a 100% correct program may still show a problem: the specification itself may be problematic, or deduction required us to abstrac...

When face recognition fails.

Two studies investigated recognition of pictures of faces, focusing on the effects of changes in appearance of the face from presentation to test and type of processing or encoding. Experiment 1 demonstrated that (a) previously seen faces changed in pose and facial expression were discriminated from "new" faces essentially as well as pictures identical at presentation and test; (b) major change...

Epilepsy – When Chaos Fails

Temporal lobe epilepsy is characterized by episodic paroxysmal electrical discharges (ictal activity) originating in mesial structures of the temporal lobe. These discharges consist of organized synchronous activity of mesial temporal neurons, particularly those of the hippocampus. This activity is seen as rhythmic medium to high amplitude slow waves or spike and slow wave discharges on the ele...