Anecdotal evidence suggests that believing in conspiracy theories is widespread in the Italian public opinion, impacting dramatically on a number of aspects of the public debate. So far, little empirical evidence has been collected to assess the spread of beliefs in conspiracy theories and to test similarities and differences with other countries. This paper aims at assessing the quantitative d...

Alice is a charismatic quantum cryptographer who believes her parties are unmissable; Bob is a glamorous string theorist who believes he is an indispensable guest. To prevent possibly traumatic collisions of self-perception and reality, their social code requires that decisions about invitation or acceptance be made via a cryptographically secure variable bias coin toss (VBCT). This generates a...

Team Empowerment (Kirkman et al. 2004) [Cronbach α: .93; mean: 3.44; standard deviation: 0.36] (Potency) 1. Our team has confidence in itself. 1. My team believes that we can produce high quality work. 2. My team believes that we can be very productive. (Meaningfulness) 1. Our team cares about what it does. 2. Our team feels that its tasks are worthwhile. 3. My team feels that its work is meani...

The review describes the heated dispute on the present state of recovered traumatic memories. There are two main schools concerning the status of recovered memories of child abuse. One school believes in their authenticity unconditionally. Those who oppose the authenticity claim False Memory Syndrome's existence. They describe it as "a serious form of psychopathology characterized by strongly b...

When attempting to persuade an agent to believe (or disbelieve) an argument, it can be advantageous for the persuader to have a model of the persuadee. Models have been proposed for taking account of what arguments the persuadee believes and these can be used in a strategy for persuasion. However, there can be uncertainty as to the accuracy of such models. To address this issue, this paper intr...

The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) believes that medication safety is a fundamental responsibility of all members of the profession of pharmacy. For a medication safety program to succeed, however, it is essential that there be an innovative leader to set a vision and direction, identify opportunities to improve the medication-use system, and lead implementation of error-p...

Representing what an intelligent agent knows or believes can be an important feature for an entity that acts in a collaborative environment. Epistemic logic programs are a clear way to reason about what an intelligent agent knows or believes, but the complexity of the reasoning is exponential. The paper presents a new kind of logic programs, the logic programs with two types of negation as fail...

A doctor has a duty to give his patient what he believes to be the best treatment. An ethical prerequisite of recommending her to enter a randomised clinical trial (RCT), in which his patient will be randomly allotted to one of two or more treatments, is, as Michael Baum in his chapter stresses, that he is ignorant about their relative efficacy and, hence, justifiably indifferent as to which sh...

The propositional content of a reference is the proposition attributing to the referent the properties that correspond to the nouns and modiiers in the reference (for example, the propositional content of`Mary' is that the referent is named`Mary'). During language comprehension, the hearer or reader must determine the set of beliefs with respect to which the propositional content of a reference...