Apparently Ex Falso Quodlibet (or Explosion) cannot be isolated within CL (Classical Logic); if Explosion has to go, then so have other inference rules, for example either Addition or Disjunctive Syllogism. This certainly holds according to the standard abstract view on logic. However, as I shall show, it does not hold if a logic is defined by a procedure—a set of instructions to obtain a proof...

During an extended period of economic recession for most of the 1990s, broad and striking changes have been made to the Japanese employment system. How fundamental or reversible they are is harder to evaluate. This paper discusses the Japanese employment system and its changes. It is concluded that if the economic recovery prevails, a considerable stabilization of Japanese human resource practi...

Both the quality and quantity of human capital are important for growth. Although the quality aspects of human capital may have greater potential in explaining growth, given that the quantity effects of human capital have been found to be ambiguous, they have long been ignored in empirical growth literature. This paper empirically tests the joint effects of both the quantity and quality of huma...

Robotics is rapidly expanding into the human environment and vigorously staying engaged in its emerging challenges. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has undergone, by the turn of the new millennium, a major transformation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies to address the press...

Greetings This month marks the two-year anniversary of the founding of "Biomedical Engineering OnLine." As it is customary to mark such occasions one way or another, and since I am the editor, I am contributing an editorial. I sometimes think that there is a human gene that is activated on anniversaries and so helps us to remember significant events. Putting it in writing insures the memory las...

Why do similar economic reforms often produce dissimilar outcomes? We examine the impact of institutional environment on reform outcomes, exploiting a particular moment of institutional change: the 2004 Orange Revolution, which resulted in a dramatic shift in the balance of power among regions in Ukraine. Using a unique panel dataset of over 7,000 Ukrainian manufacturing enterprises, we estimat...