Descriptive studies often represent the first scientific toe in the water in new areas of inquiry. A fundamental element of descriptive reporting is a clear, specific, and measurable definition of the disease or condition in question. Like newspapers, good descriptive reporting answers the five basic W questions: who, what, why, when, where. and a sixth: so what? Case reports, case-series repor...

Protection of privacy in databases has become of increasing importance. While a number of techniques have been proposed to query databases while preserving privacy of individual records in the database, very little is done to define a measure on how much privacy is lost after statistical releases. We suggest a definition based on information theory. Intuitively, the privacy loss is proportional...

Weakly recognizing morphisms from free semigroups onto finite semigroups are a classical way for defining the class of ω-regular languages, i.e., a set of infinite words is weakly recognizable by such a morphism if and only if it is accepted by some Büchi automaton. We consider the descriptional complexity of various constructions for weakly recognizing morphisms. This includes the conversion f...

The communication structure of parallel communicating grammar systems (PCGS) considered as the descriptional complexity of PCGS is investigated here. The aim of the paper is to compare computational power of PCGS’s with respect to their communication structure. Investigating the generation of the languages over one-letter alphabet the communication structures dags(directed acyclic graphs) and c...

We prove that the set of properties describable by a uniform sequence of rst-order sentences using at most k + 1 distinct variables is exactly equal to the set of properties checkable by a Turing machine in DSPACEn k ] (where n is the size of the universe). This set is also equal to the set of properties describable using an iterative deenition for a nite set of relations of arity k. This is a ...