Here we respond to some comments by Alday concerning headedness in linguistic theory and the validity of the assumptions of a mathematical model for word order. For brevity, we focus only on two assumptions: the unit of measurement of dependency length and the monotonicity of the cost of a dependency as a function of its length. We also revise the implicit psychological bias in Alday’s comments...

Leong and Silva have likened the sexually violent predator (SVP) laws to fictional serial slashers in horror movies. Like Jason in Friday the 13th, these cannot be vanquished and reappear in sequel after sequel, meaner and naughtier. The latest episode of the SVP trilogy premiered on January 22, 2002, in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court. The analogy with serial slasher movies, although on...

This study includes a global sensitivity analysis of the water productivity model AquaCrop. The study rationale consisted in a comprehensive evaluation of the model and the formulation of guidelines for model simplification and efficient calibration. The global analysis comprehended a Morris screening followed by a variance-based Extended Fourier Amplitude Sensitivity Test (EFAST) under diverse...

Over the past 20 years increasing interest has been given to children's rights that grant special protections to children living apart from their biological parents. The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 was promulgated to prevent unnecessary removal of children from their original families and to ensure permanency when return to their families could not be secured. The psychiat...

This Article explores the institutional characteristics of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and places the court’s role in context. The most important institutional question facing the court today involves choosing between two approaches to implementing its special role in the patent system—in one, the court acts as a “decider” of cases, and in the other, it acts as a “manager”...

The goal of our research is to find ways of supporting and encouraging musical behavior by non-musicians in shared public performance environments. Previous studies indicated simultaneous music listening and performance is difficult for non-musicians, and that visual support for the task might be helpful. This paper presents results from a preliminary user study conducted to evaluate the effect...

Following the development of the selectionist theory of the immune system, there was an attempt to characterise many biological mechanisms as being ‘selectionist’ as juxtaposed with ‘instructionist’. However, this broad definition would group Darwinian evolution, the immune system, embryonic development, and Chomsky’s principlesand-parameters (P&P) language-acquisition mechanism together under ...

Various theories of linguistics have proposed that the differences among natural languages can be parameterized. Certainly syntactic theories such as Principles and Parameters (Chomsky, 1981) assume the existence of such parameters. Along with the problem of defining parameters, we need to address the problem of a child’s acquisition of the settings of these parameters. Several algorithms for p...

Today, quality is part of our practice. Anaesthetists are involved in a medical science and want to be excellent at it. Anaesthetists are also involved in departmental organisation and are providers of care, a service to the patients. Quality is a method to obtain efficiency (efficacy and economical advantages). We consider our patients no longer as such, but as health-customers. Anaesthetists ...

Centering Theory is the best known conceptual framework for theorizing about local coherence and salience; however, its claims are articulated in terms of notions which are only partially specified, such as ‘previous utterance’, ‘realization’, or ‘ranking’, and can be viewed as PARAMETERS of the theory. A great deal of research has been concerned with providing more detailed specifications for ...