In order to vindicate rational-choice theory as a mode of explaining social patterns in general – social patterns beyond the narrow range of economic behaviour – we have to recognize the legitimacy of explaining the resilience of certain patterns of behaviour: that is, explaining, not necessarily why they emerged or have been sustained, but why they are robust and reliable. And once we allow th...

Critical to the discovery and development of drugs and vaccines is the rational selection of biochemical, immunologic or molecular targets. To understand the rationale for target selection, we review strengths and weaknesses of the four main approaches: whole animal disease models; molecular targeting; epidemiology/observation studies, and genomics. After classifying diseases into those with a ...

Antibiotics frequently play an important central or adjunctive role in the therapeutic management of horses and foals with a variety of illnesses, including those requiring critical care, because diseases caused by primary or secondary bacterial infection are commonly encountered and may contribute to failure of single or multiple organs. However, it should be understood that supportive therapy...

This contribution deals with the problem of structure determination for generalized orthonormal basis models used in system identiication. The model structure is parameterized by a pre-speciied set of poles. Given this structure and experimental data a model can be estimated using linear regression techniques. Since the variance of the estimated model increases with the number of estimated para...

The paper studies an evolutionary model where players from a given population are randomly matched in pairs each period to play a coordination game. At each instant, a player can choose to adopt one of the two possible behavior rules, called the rational rule and the aspiring rule, and then take actions prescribed by the chosen rule. The choice between the two rules depends upon their relative ...

When a given tissue must, to be able to perform its various functions, consist of different cell types, each fairly evenly distributed and with specific probabilities, then there are at least two quite different developmental mechanisms which might achieve the desired result. Let us begin with the case of two cell types, and first imagine that the proportion of numbers of cells of these types s...

Rational Arnoldi is a powerful method for approximating functions of large sparse matrices times a vector. The selection of asymptotically optimal parameters for this method is crucial for its fast convergence. We present a heuristic for the automated pole selection when the function to be approximated is of Markov type, such as the matrix square root. The performance of this approach is demons...

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) prediction is generally treated as a problem of binary classification wherein negative data sampling is still an open problem to be addressed. The commonly used random sampling is prone to yield less representative negative data with considerable false negatives. Meanwhile rational constraints are seldom exerted on model selection to reduce the risk of false po...

In multi-attribute choice, decision makers use decision strategies to arrive at the final choice. What are the neural mechanisms underlying decision strategy selection? The first goal of this paper is to provide a literature review on the neural underpinnings and cognitive models of decision strategy selection and thus set the stage for a neurocognitive model of this process. The second goal is...