Following the development of the selectionist theory of the immune system, there was an attempt to characterise many biological mechanisms as being ‘selectionist’ as juxtaposed with ‘instructionist’. However, this broad definition would group Darwinian evolution, the immune system, embryonic development, and Chomsky’s principlesand-parameters (P&P) language-acquisition mechanism together under ...

When/(z) is given by a known power series expansion, it is possible to construct the power series expansion for/(z; p) = e~p:f(z). We define popl to be the value of p for which the expansion for/(z; p) converges most rapidly. When/(z) is an entire function of order 1, we show that pofl is uniquely defined and may be characterized in terms of the set of singularities z, = I/o, of an associated f...

Various theories of linguistics have proposed that the differences among natural languages can be parameterized. Certainly syntactic theories such as Principles and Parameters (Chomsky, 1981) assume the existence of such parameters. Along with the problem of defining parameters, we need to address the problem of a child’s acquisition of the settings of these parameters. Several algorithms for p...

Today, quality is part of our practice. Anaesthetists are involved in a medical science and want to be excellent at it. Anaesthetists are also involved in departmental organisation and are providers of care, a service to the patients. Quality is a method to obtain efficiency (efficacy and economical advantages). We consider our patients no longer as such, but as health-customers. Anaesthetists ...

Centering Theory is the best known conceptual framework for theorizing about local coherence and salience; however, its claims are articulated in terms of notions which are only partially specified, such as ‘previous utterance’, ‘realization’, or ‘ranking’, and can be viewed as PARAMETERS of the theory. A great deal of research has been concerned with providing more detailed specifications for ...

principles of judicial review in administrative law are basic criteria developed through judicial decisions. most of these principles have a legal value in modern administrative law. in this paper some of these principles and criteria have been studied in switzerland administrative law. in this country the legality, equality, public interest, good faith, hearing and proportionality principles h...

The right to internal self-determination offers a legal ‘checklist’ for the UN to provide both legitimacy and sustainability to peacebuilding processes. The right both clarifies the actors of postconflict reconstruction and also concretises to what extent these actors should be incorporated into peacebuilding processes. Although the concept of local ownership has become an often-cited concept i...

How do disagreements between judges on collegial (multimember) courts affect legal policy? We address this question by developing an account of the nature of judicial disagreements in the case-space model of judicial choice. We distinguish between different types of disagreement, from disagreements about case facts to disagreements about how legal rules should treat varying case facts, and cons...

How accurately can deterministic modes be identified from a finite record of noisy data? In this paper we answer this question by computing the Cramer-Rao bound on the error covariance matrix of any unbiased estimator of mode parameters. The bound is computed for many of the standard parametric descriptions of a mode, including autoregressive and moving average parameters, poles and residues, a...

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires that schools make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) towards the goal of having 100 percent of their students become proficient by year 2013-14. Through simulation analyses of Maine and Kentucky school performance data collected during the 1990s, this study investigates how feasible schools would have met the AYP targets if the mandate had been...