The NIPS 2008 workshop on causality provided a forum for researchers from different horizons to share their view on causal modeling and address the difficult question of assessing causal models. There has been a vivid debate on properly separating the notion of causality from particular models such as graphical models, which have been dominating the field in the past few years. Part of the work...

This chapter develops a unified modeling framework for analyzing the strategic behavior of forecasters. The theoretical model encompasses reputational objectives, competition for the best accuracy, and bias. Also drawing from the extensive literature on analysts, we review the empirical evidence on strategic forecasting and illustrate how our model can be structurally estimated.

Clouds and aerosols are known to play crucial roles in the climate system; however, they are also main sources of uncertainty in our knowledge, and especially large efforts are needed to evaluate their interactions (IPCC 2007). The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is carrying out the EarthCARE (Earth Clouds, Aerosols, and Radiation Explorer) mission in cooperation with the European Spa...

If one considers what the majority of the graduates of our medical schools do in their professional lives, the answer is, of course, that which is termed "general practice." Therefore, the objective of a medical education, it is customarily assumed, is that which will develop the best general practitioner. Of course, the qualities required of him are well recognized, but their relative importan...

According to Article 4(4) of Directive 92/43/EEC, “once a site of Community importance has been adopted in accordance with the procedure laid down in paragraph 2, the Member State concerned shall designate that site as a special area of conservation as soon as possible and within six years at most, establishing priorities in the light of the importance of the sites for the maintenance or restor...

Cardiovascular failure or shock, of any etiology, is characterized by ineffective perfusion of body tissues, inducing derangements in the balance between oxygen delivery and consumption. Impairment in oxygen availability on the cellular level causes a shift to anaerobic metabolism, with an increase in lactate and hydrogen ion production that leads to lactic acidosis. The degree of hyperlactatem...

The first step in planning orthodontic therapy is to establish treatment objectives. It is impossible to achieve the correct end result if the appropriate goals or objectives have not been identified before treatment. In adolescent patients with complete dentitions, orthodontic treatment objectives tend to be idealistic. After all, if a young patient has an intact dentition without restorations...

Background: Pain of mild to moderate grade is difficult to detect in laboratory mice because mice are prey animals that attempt to elude predators or man by hiding signs of weakness, injury or pain. In this study, we investigated the use of telemetry to identify indicators of mild-to-moderate postlaparotomy pain. Results: Adult mice were subjected to laparotomy, either combined with pain treatm...

When used as a surrogate objective for maximum likelihood estimation in latent variable models, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) produces state-of-the-art results. Inspired by this, we consider the extension of the ELBO to a family of lower bounds defined by a particle filter’s estimator of the marginal likelihood, the filtering variational objectives (FIVOs). FIVOs take the same arguments as th...

nowadays, paying attention to the environmental needs and desires of consumersand trying to satisfy them by designing marketing activities in an environmentallyfriendly way, is the best way to increase their satisfaction and finally, gaincompetitive advantage. prior research has paid much attention to the consumerbehavior and marketing activities of corporate organizations, but none has studied...