This study had two aims: first, to investigate the attitudes of deaf and hearing people towards deafness; and, secondly, to study the difference between how deaf people perceive the attitudes of hearing people towards deafness, and how hearing people perceive the attitudes of deaf people towards deafness. The results showed that the deaf had more negative attitudes towards deafness than the hea...

After considering some problems facing exiting versions of consequentialism, I present the schematic outline of an alternative version of consequentialism, which I call Actual Rule Consequentialism (ARC). I then consider three ways in which one might attempt to ground ARC by deriving it from some more fundamental principle. The first attempt is to derive ARC from a principle of fairness, the se...

This thesis proposes a new notion of semantic coverage in formal testing: actual coverage. It is defined for test case and test suite executions, as well as for sequences of their executions. A fault is considered to be completely covered if an execution showed its presence, and it is considered partly covered if an execution increased the confidence in its absence. Actual coverage can be used ...

The counterfactual tradition to defining actual causation has come a long way since Lewis started it off. However there are still important open problems that need to be solved. One of them is the (in)transitivity of causation. Endorsing transitivity was a major source of trouble for the approach taken by Lewis, which is why currently most approaches reject it. But transitivity has never lost i...

We look more carefully at the modeling of causality using structural equations. It is clear that the structural equations can have a major impact on the conclusions we draw about causality. In particular, the choice of variables and their values can also have a significant impact on causality. These choices are, to some extent, subjective. We consider what counts as an appropriate choice. More ...

PURPOSE The purpose of this research was to determine the clinical usefulness of the Tool for Assessing Wheelchair disComfort (TAWC) by examining floor and ceiling effects and responsiveness when used with two groups of wheelchair users--one known to have experienced real changes in discomfort levels and the other with unchanged levels. METHOD In a retrospective analysis of data from two prev...

This study aimed to investigate the relations among mental disorders, physical discomfort, household work and farm work among women. We conducted a cross-sectional study based on the administration of a structured questionnaire to 182 female farm workers. The data were analyzed by means of Poisson regression, where the significance level was set to 5%. Results indicated that 111 (61%) participa...

Laboratory and field experiments were conducted to determine the best procedure for predicting the discomfort caused by multi-axis vibration. In the laboratory experiment, 11 seated subjects compared single-axis vibration in one axis to single-axis vibration in another axis, and compared dual-axis vibration to single-axis vibration. In the field experiment, 22 lorry drivers rated the discomfort...