We are fortunate to live in an exciting time. Today, new technologies enable the design and execution of straightforward experiments, many of which were not possible just a few years ago. These experiments hold the potential to bring new discoveries and to improve medical care. An abundance of obvious-next-step experiments creates a buzz of activities and excitement that is quite palpable among...

The knowability paradox is an instance of a remarkable reasoning pattern (actually, a pair of such patterns), in the course of which an occurrence of the possibility operator, the diamond, disappears. In the present paper, it is pointed out how the unwanted disappearance of the diamond may be escaped. The emphasis is not laid on a discussion of the contentious premise of the knowability paradox...

Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of high-quality teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, which recent research finds to be only weakly correlated with value-added measures of teachers’ performance. We examine attrition and mobility of teachers using teacher value-added measures for early-career teachers in North Carolina public schoo...

We study the formal properties of extensions of the basic public announcement logic by standard modal axioms such as D, T, 2, 4, and 5. We show that some of them fail to be conservative extensions of the underlying modal logic. This leads us to propose new truth conditions for announcements that better suit these extensions. The corresponding reduction axioms postulate the suitability of the up...

Understanding how genes regulate each other and how gene expression is controlled in living cells is crucial to cure genetic diseases such as cancer and represents a fundamental step towards personalised medicine. The complexity and the high concurrency of gene regulatory networks require the use of formal techniques to analyse the dynamical properties that control cell proliferation and differ...

The JMLR study Do we need hundreds of classifiers to solve real world classification problems? benchmarks 179 classifiers in 17 families on 121 data sets from the UCI repository and claims that “the random forest is clearly the best family of classifier”. In this response, we show that the study’s results are biased by the lack of a held-out test set and the exclusion of trials with errors. Fur...

We provide an analysis of best answers (as chosen by questioners) on Yahoo Answers, a popular online Q&A site with millions of monthly contributors. Our analysis is done mainly through the lens of prediction: we compile a dataset that is as large and fine-grained as any considered before, generate features across a range of different classes, and build a classifier to predict which answers will...

What are the Best Practices of QFD? This was the driving question approx. a dozen experienced users of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) wanted to answer during various two-day workshops. The QFD Institute Germany e.V. (QFD-ID) had invited to come up for discussion on the Best Practices of QFD. The QFD-ID exists for almost 10 years now, but the origins of QFD and its successful application worl...

Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 18, No. 3, March 2012 541 “T is a kind of commerce betwixt beasts and us, a certain relation and mutual obligation, whereof there is no other reason, but that they belong to one and the same master, and are of the same family that we are,” wrote French philosopher and theologian Pierre Charron. Not a new idea, this partnership between humans...