arrangements for physical illness. Patients are to be admitted without formality?so that even voluntary status is an unnecessary concept: safeguards and standards of individual care are to be those that any doctor or hospital authority would naturally employ. The needs of the patient are more important in determining the type of hospital he goes to than scientific classifications. All this mean...

A discourse planner for (task-oriented) dialogue must be able to make choices about whether relevant, but optional information (for example, the "satellites" in an RST-based planner) should be communicated. We claim that e ective text planners must explicitly model aspects of the Hearer's cognitive state, such as what the hearer is attending to and what inferences the hearer can draw, in order ...

In order to perform effective communication agents must be able to foresee the effects of their utterances on the addressee’s mental state. In this paper we investigate on the update of the mental state of an hearer agent as a consequence of the utterance performed by a speaker agent. Given an agent communication language with a STRIPSlike semantics, we propose a set of criteria that allow to b...

It is generally accepted that understanding a text involves more than simply recognising its words and grammatical structures. It is not enough, therefore, for student readers to learn to decode what a text explicitly says. Indeed, whenever readers find themselves unable to decode some part of what a text explicitly says, then it is other, largely inferential and problem-solving skills which co...

Two ethical frameworks have dominated the discussion of organ donation for long: that of property rights and that of gift-giving. However, recent years have seen a drastic rise in the number of philosophical analyses of the meaning of giving and generosity, which has been mirrored in ethical debates on organ donation and in critical sociological, anthropological and ethnological work on the gif...

BACKGROUND Clinical uncertainty is cited as a cause of geographic variation. However, little is known about the effect of comparative effectiveness research on variation. We examined whether geographic variation in the use of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) for stable ischemic heart disease (SIHD) declined after publication of the Clinical Outcomes Utilizing Revascularization and Aggre...

We introduce therapeutic techniques that encourage voice hearers to view their voices as coming from intentional agents whose behavior may be dependent on how the voice hearer relates to and interacts with them. We suggest that this approach is effective because the communicative aspect of voice hearing might fruitfully be seen as explanatorily primitive, meaning that the agentive aspect, the a...

This paper examines the use of clue words in argument dialogues. These are special words and phrases directly indicating the structure of the argument to the hearer. Two main conclusions are drawn: I) clue words can occur in conjunction with coherent transmissions, to reduce processing of the hearer 2) clue words must occur with more complex forms of transmission, to facilitate recognition of t...