Human beings are sometimes said to be different from mere computers and their associated algorithms (software) in that humans can reason and make decisions in settings where information is incomplete, conflicting, uncertain, imprecise or even partly wrong [1,2]. In recent decades workers in varied fields like computer science, psychology and cognitive engineering have attempted to “formalize” t...

Evidence-based medicine is probably best understood as a decision-making framework that facilitates complex decisions across different and sometimes conflicting groups. It involves considering research and other forms of evidence on a routine basis when making healthcare decisions. Such decisions include clinical decisions about choice of treatment, test, or risk management for individual patie...

We introduce an alternative approach to extracting word pair associations from corpora, based purely on surface distances in the text. We contrast it with the prevailing windowbased co-occurrence model and show it to be more statistically robust and to disclose a broader selection of significant associative relationships owing largely to the property of scale-independence. In the process we pro...

The thymus manufactures new T cells throughout life but contains no self-renewing potential. Instead, replenishment depends on recruitment of bone marrow-derived progenitors that circulate in the blood. Attempts to identify thymic-homing progenitors, and to assess the degree to which they are precommitted to the T cell lineage, have led to complex and sometimes conflicting results. As described...