When teachers use systematic progress monitoring to track their students progress in reading, mathematics, or spelling, they are better able to identify students in need of additional or different forms of instruction, they design stronger instructional programs, and their students achieve better. This document first describes progress monitoring procedures for which experimental evidence demon...

The adversarial structure of the American judicial system encourages critical reviews and challenges of forensic evidence. As a result, the discriminatory power of friction ridge skin impression evidence has been a prime target of debate among critics of the latent print discipline for years, the primary argument being friction ridge skin examination is neither scientif ically reliable nor lega...

Our use case for comparative effectiveness research requires an ontology of drugs that enables querying National Drug Codes (NDCs) by active ingredient, mechanism of action, physiological effect, and therapeutic class of the drug products they represent. We conducted an ontological analysis of drugs from the realist perspective, and evaluated existing drug terminology, ontology, and database ar...

The concept of hyperventilation and the principle of a vicious circle provide an elegant explanation for the development of a wide range of somatic and psychological symptoms, the so-called hyperventilation syndrome (HVS). The model has a high degree of credibility and has led to the development of therapeutic interventions that appeared beneficial. However, recent investigations dismiss hyperv...

In order to control the growth of human population it is helpful to understand correctly the mechanism of growth, and the first essential step is to investigate current interpretations and reject any unscientific explanations. One of such popular but questionable interpretations is the concept of the Epoch of Malthusian Stagnation. We discuss its origin, narrative and claims. We explain why thi...

Given an edge-weighted graph G, let PerfMatch(G) denote the weighted sum over all perfect matchings M in G, weighting each matching M by the product of weights of edges in M. If G is unweighted, this plainly counts the perfect matchings of G. In this paper, we introduce parity separation, a new method for reducing PerfMatch to unweighted instances: For graphs G with edge-weights 1 and −1, we co...

Compatibility is an issue that relates to the improvement of vehicle safety. After frontal and side impact self protection, partner protection, a key component of compatibility, represents the next step forward for passive safety improvement. Compatibility is complicated to achieve, because it requires world-wide industry to take steps in a similar direction. A harmonized approach is difficult ...

It may be possible to scientifically test philosophical skepticism; at least this is what I shall maintain. The argument develops the naturalistic insight that there may be no particular reason to suppose that nature has selected Homo sapiens’ epistemic capacities such that we are ideally suited to forming a true theory of everything, or indeed, a true theory of much of anything. Just as chimpa...