The notion of autocatalysis actually covers a large variety of mechanistic realisations of chemical systems. From the most general definition of autocatalysis, that is a process in which a chemical compound is able to catalyze its own formation, several different systems can be described. We detail the different categories of autocatalyses, and compare them on the basis of their mechanistic, ki...

The importance of scale to the psychology of space (perception, thinking, memory, behavior) is discussed. It is maintained that scale has an important influence on how humans treat spatial information and that several qualitatively distinct scale classes of space exist. Past systems of classification are reviewed and some novel terms and distinctions are introduced. Empirical evidence for the n...

Explores the problem of minimizing loss of significance when a concept set is considered too complex to be communicated comprehensibly to a particular audience. In such a case the set must be transformed, possibly by collapsing some distinctions, so as to reduce the number of conceptual elements in the set by a factor of 2, 3 or more. If collapsed in an orderly manner, maintaining integrative d...

Ontologies describe a conceptualization of a part of the world relevant to some application. What are the units of conceptualizations? Current ontologies often equate concepts with words from natural languages. Words are certainly not the smallest units of conceptualization, neither are the sets of synonyms of WordNet or other linguistically justified units. I suggest to take distinctions as ba...

WORDNET makes a great number of fine-grained word sense distinctions. However, what could be seen as an advantage has often been considered a problem from a computational point of view. A great number of sense distinctions makes harder the problem of word sense disambiguation. One way to face this issue is reducing the number of senses, for example by grouping them into equivalence classes whic...

PsA is a systemic inflammatory condition that affects 20-30% of patients with psoriasis. It is characterized by potential involvement of diverse tissues, including peripheral and axial joints, enthesitis, dactylitis and skin and nail disease. The degree of involvement in each domain can vary over time in individual patients and can differ substantially between PsA patients. The clinical heterog...