We developed a prototype of a visualization tool called LinkVis. It is a tool for visualizing complex psychotherapeutic actions, their effects and the states of the patients. The combination of different views enables the user to get new insights. Focusing on exploration tasks by the user we enhanced this tool by the Hyperbolic Hypotheses Tree. This feature supports the user in defining goals a...

OBJECTIVE: To review the literature concerning idiosyncratic drug-induced agranulocytosis, a rare but life-threatening potential adverse event of most drugs. DATA SOURCES: Articles were identified through searches of MEDLINE (January 1966 to March 2005). Unpublished data from our cohort of drug-induced agranulocytosis in the University Hospital of Strasbourg, France were also considered. DATA E...

The book, The river, is based on assumptions and not facts. Oral polio vaccine was produced entirely in rhesus monkey kidney cell cultures. Allegations that it was produced in chimpanzee kidneys at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia or, alternatively, that the vaccine was made in the then Belgian Congo in chimpanzee kidney has no basis in fact. As the only witness to the historical events lea...

Econometricians commonly want to confirm some precise hypothesis, such as a consequence of economic theory, an economic hypothesis, or a econometric modeling assumption. In practice, researchers routinely use significance tests that can only fail to reject the hypothesis of interest. Generalizing previous work by Romano (2005), I propose a new theoretical framework for confirmation of multivari...

In complex systems such as blood pressure homeostasis, physiological compensatory mechanisms effectively mask any perturbations to the status quo. When these mechanisms fail to restore homeostasis, the presenting phenotype may be far removed from the initial perturbation, making it difficult or even impossible to unravel the underlying etiology. This is the case with hypertensive rat models suc...

Abduction can be seen as the formal inference corresponding to human hypothesis making. It typically has the purpose of explaining some given observation. In classical abduction, hypotheses could be made on events that may have occurred in the past. In general, abductive reasoning can be used to generate hypotheses about events possibly occurring in the future (forecasting), or may suggest furt...

In this article I examine the constraints that skeptical hypotheses must satisfy in order to be used to raise significant skeptical challenges. I argue that skeptical hypotheses do not have to be logically, metaphysically or epistemically possible. They only need to depict scenarios that are subjectively indistinguishable from the actual world and must provide some indication of how subjects ca...

In many applications we want to build systems which must test the consistency of some theory (or set of axioms). This problem is general to many applications, for example abduction, learning, default reasoning, diagnosis, and is examined here in the context of theory formation from a fixed set of possible hypotheses [PGA87,Poole86]. There is a problem which arises when we are generating theorie...