In the case of a philosophical work... such an explanation seems not only superfluous but, in view of the nature of the subject-matter, even inappropriate and misleading. For whatever might appropriately be said about philosophy in a preface – say a historical statement of the main drift and the point of view, the general content and results, a string of random assertions and assurances about t...

The ends and means of public health activities are suggested to be at odds with the values held by human individuals and communities. Although promoting longer lives in better health for all seems like an endeavour that is obviously acceptable, it can be challenged by equally self-evident appeals to autonomy, happiness, integrity and liberty, among other values. The result is that people's actu...

Contrary to popular belief and assurances by the U.S. media and the cancer establishment--the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and American Cancer Society (ACS)--mammography is not a technique for early diagnosis. In fact, a breast cancer has usually been present for about eight years before it can finally be detected. Furthermore, screening should be recognized as damage control, rather than mi...

In this paper we present an analytical method to study the distribution of the backoff delay in an 802.11 DCF WLAN under saturation conditions. We show that, with our method, the probability that the delay is below a given threshold can be computed accurately and efficiently. We also discuss how our analysis can be used to perform admission control on the number of accepted stations in the WLAN...

The war lingers on, and despite assurances to the contrary from the Nixon Administration, there appear to be few hopes for lasting peace. Precipitous technological advances during the last generation have left the world on the brink of devastation. Geological studies record " many examples of species that have failed to survive because of inadaptability to environmental change, but only Homo Sa...

This report was prepared by Arthur D. Little for the account of Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corporation and the DOE’s Office of Industrial Technologies. This report represents Arthur D. Little’s best judgment in light of information made available to us. This report must be read in its entirety. The reader understands that no assurances can be made that all financial liabilities have been i...

This paper describes a programmable switch architecture that can be dynamically tuned to support flexible quality of service metrics for flows in the Internet. The switch architecture consists of six key components: scheduling, flow aggregation, queueing, packet-level admission control, packet dropping, and feedback. We show that it is possible to achieve a wide range of QoS behavior ranging fr...

If two translation systems differ differ in performance on a test set, can we trust that this indicates a difference in true system quality? To answer this question, we describe bootstrap resampling methods to compute statistical significance of test results, and validate them on the concrete example of the BLEU score. Even for small test sizes of only 300 sentences, our methods may give us ass...