Evidence-based practice is an important component of health care service delivery. However, there is a tendency, embodied in tools such as Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation, to focus principally on the classification of study design, at the expense of a detailed assessment of the strengths and limitations of the individual study. Randomized controlled trials (RCT...

Game theoretical analyses of communication (e.g. Lewis, Crawford & Sobel) demand cooperation between conversational partners for reliable information exchange to take place. Similarly, in pragmatics, the theory of language use, it is standard to assume that communication is a cooperative affair. Recently, this standard view has come under attack by Durcot and Merin, and it has been proposed tha...

Clinical trials are sometimes classified as being explanatory or pragmatic, although they are rarely reported in that way. Explanatory trials may seek to investigate the efficacy of new treatments by imposing strict limitations on many aspects of trial design, including, for example, recruiting only those patients who are most likely to respond. In contrast, the objective of pragmatic trials is...

New forms of collaboration between organizations based on open source principles are rapidly emerging. The collaboration is typically done in a spirit of co-opetition whereby companies, often SMEs, share cost and risk by developing software jointly and openly. The paper elaborates how this emerging phenomenon of open source ecosystems can be understood from the perspective of actability and the...

The desideratum for the concept of a semiotic web is proposed. It combines both the recent semantic web and the pragmatic web initiatives but surpasses them in being faithful to Charles S. Peirce’s pragmatic approach to inquiry. I will address some conceptual shortcomings of the semantic and pragmatic web proposals, and suggest that in a semiotic web, one can to operationalise its basic ideas i...

BACKGROUND Modern clinical-research practice favors placebo controls over usual-care controls whenever a credible placebo exists. An unrecognized consequence of this preference is that clinicians are more limited in their ability to provide the benefits of the non-specific healing effects of placebos in clinical practice. METHODS We examined the issues in choosing between placebo and usual-ca...

To date, little research on pragmatic transfer has considered a multilingual situation where there is an interaction among three different languages spoken by one person. Of interest was whether pragmatic transfer of refusals among three languages spoken by the same person occurs from L1 and L2 to L3, L1 to L2 and then to L3 or from L1 and L1 (if there are more than one L1) to L2. This study ai...

STUDY OBJECTIVES Assess the potential health impacts of the proposed International Astronomy and Space Exploration Centre on the population of New Wallasey. Contribute to the piloting of health impact assessment methods. DESIGN Prospective health impact assessment involving brainstorming sessions and individual interviews with key informants and a literature review. SETTING New Wallasey Sin...

The assessment of process modeling exams is a time consuming and complex task. It is desirable to give each student a detailed feedback on their solution in terms of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic quality. It is obvious that especially in the case of mass courses with hundreds of participants, individual grading of modeling exams by humans is challenging: Besides reliability, consistency, a...