This paper introduces fuzzy belief nets (FBN). The ability to invert arcs between nodes is key to solving belief nets. The inversion is accomplished by defining closeness measures which allow diagnostic reasoning from observed symptoms to cause of failures. The closeness measures are motivated by a Lukasiewicz operator which takes into account the distance from an observed symptom set to the mo...

[The] understanding which is relevant to the sciences of man is something more than this implicit grasp on things. It is related rather to the kind of understanding we invoke in personal relations when we say, for instance: ‘I find him hard to understand’; or at last I understand her’. To switch for a minute to another language, it is the kind of understanding one invokes in French when one say...

T esticular germ cells are clingy, adhering to the cells that nurture them. Huang and Stanley (1) reveal a protein whose activity promotes this togetherness by making glycoproteins on the germ cells’ surface stickier. Many proteins sport carbohydrate attachments called N-glycans (2). Cells affi x and modify N-glycans as a glycoprotein wends its way through the secretory pathway (3). How a prote...

Now, when, according to recent Web evolution trends, a human becomes a very dynamic and proactive player in a large highly heterogeneous and distributed environment with a huge amount of different kind of data, services, devices, etc., it is quite necessary to provide a technology and tools for easy and handy human information access and manipulation. Context-awareness and intelligence of user ...

Cultural differences in individualism and collectivism (I-C) describe important variations in how the self relates to others, but existing scales may be too broadband to precisely measure this aspect of I-C. They also do not distinguish among particular ingroups and types of interdependence with them. The Circles of Closeness scale addresses these limitations. Initial results from Euro-American...

This study aims at contributing to the literature on the effect of political competition on voting turnout. I test the Downsian Closeness Hypothesis (DCH) using data on runoffs elections in Hungary. This research design allows for estimating the effect of expected closeness using the variation of margins in the first round races to avoid the endogeneity problem inherent in ex post measures of c...

The present research addresses the interplay between agency motives and objective dyadic closeness with regard to the functioning of intimate couple relationships. Applying a Person × Situation approach, we hypothesized (a) that partners' implicit and explicit agency motives predict their selection of dyadic living arrangements characterized by high or low objective closeness (coresidence or li...

While historically under-studied in comparison to other family relationships, the fatherdaughter relationship is an important dyad within the family sytem and has been associated with a number of significant psycho-social developmental outcomes for women as they grow from young girls to young adults. Of particular importance is the quality of the emotional connection shared by fathers and daugh...

Analyzing networks requires complex algorithms to extract meaningful information. Centrality metrics have shown to be correlated with the importance and loads of the nodes in network traffic. Here, we are interested in the problem of centrality-based network management. The problem has many applications such as verifying the robustness of the networks and controlling or improving the entity dis...

Today, publication of medical data faces high legal barriers. On the one hand, publishing medical data is important for medical research. On the other hand, it is neccessary to protect peoples’ privacy by ensuring that the relationship between individuals and their related medical data remains unknown to third parties. Various data anonymization techniques remove as little identifying informati...