SIGNIFICANT This has been with us for decades. It is sometimes accompanied by statistical probability values in parentheses. It literally means ‘‘full of meaning or import’’ [1]. Used alone it means the authors are stressing, but not justifying, the scientific importance of their results. Even if significant, the results are often unimportant, uninteresting and unconvincing. Unfortunately the w...

We develop a criterion for coalition formation among goal-directed agents, the indecomposable do-ut-des property. The indecomposable do-ut-des property refines the do-ut-des property (literally give to get) by considering the fact that agents prefer to form coalitions whose components cannot be formed independently. A formal description of this property is provided as well as an analysis of alg...

Some recent studies have investigated the scale and scope of a remarkable series of late classic prehistoric (est. 1350 CE) water management structures found in Arizona’s upper Gila Valley. These canal systems are characterized by their being literally "hung" on the edges of steep sided, gently sloping mesas formed from remnant Quaternary age bajadas. The mesas today will appear characteristica...

Making a difference to the health of populations, however small, is what most people in public health hope they are doing. Epidemiologists are no ex10 ception. But often caught up in the minutiae of our day-to-day work, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Is health improving, mortality declining, are things moving in a positive direction? Getting out and taking in the view (metaphor...

The deceitful nature of irony has not been lost on artists and writers, who have manipulated it for various purposes, most notably, the insertion of novel, dissident ideas (Giora, submitted; Walker 1991). Irony's indirectness acts as a shield which masks a genuine intent deemed risky by the speaker. Consider the following poem by the Israeli poet, Yona Wallach (1997), which has been taken liter...

We explore the modal possibility operator and its dual necessity operator in qualitative data analysis , and show that it (quite literally) complements the derivation operator of formal concept analysis; we also propose a new generalisation of the rough set approximation operators. As an example for the applicability of the concepts we investigate the Morse data set which has been frequently st...

Over the past several years, the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) has developed methodology to perform statistical analyses that, in effect, integrate data in multiple, distributed databases, but without literally bringing the data together in one place. In this paper, we summarize that research, but focus on issues that are not understood. These include inability to perform ex...

In this paper, we propose a method to improve the security challenges in Nigeria by embedding literally hundreds of invisible computers into the environment with each computer performing its tasks without requiring human awareness or a large amount of human intervention to monitor human behaviour, natural disasters and search for stolen or lost items. Ubiquitous Dynamic Surveillance cameras emb...

A statement in this recently published paper makes a point that is largely at odds with the main point of the paper that is cited. Stating that higher air temperatures lead to greater evapotranspiration is an oversimplification; the true story is more complex. Although this is by no means central to the conclusions of the paper being commented on, we have demonstrated the danger in taking too l...

Macroepibenthic communities associated with the hydrocoral Errina antarctica from the Chilean fjord region: Does bathymetry influence community structure? Statutory declaration I declare that I have authored this thesis independently, that I have not used other than the declared sources, especially no internet-sources not listed in the list of literature, and that I have explicitly marked all m...