Philosophy is the oldest of the disciplines that have been taught in places that we have called universities for centuries. Many of the readers of this journal have a PhD—nominally we are doctors of philosophy—even if you hadn’t especially cared or even noticed. This is, of course, a holdover of a history and tradition that dates back to the ancient Greeks and is based on the primacy of philoso...

Stress in doctors is a product of the interaction between the demanding nature of their work and their often obsessive, conscientious and committed personalities. In the face of extremely demanding work, a subjective lack of control and insufficient rewards are powerful sources of stress in doctors. If demands continue to rise and adjustments are not made, then inevitably a "correction" will oc...

Joint parameter and state estimation is proposed for linear state-space model with uniform, entry-wise correlated, state and output noises (LSU model for short). The adopted Bayesian modelling and approximate estimation produce an estimator that (a) provides the maximum a posteriori estimate enriched by information on its precision, (b) respects correlated noise entries without demanding the us...

We describe an investigation into the use of the Aurora parallel Prolog system in two applications within the area of computational molecular biology. The computational requirements were large, due to the nature of the applications , and were carried out on a scalable parallel computer, the BBN \But-terry" TC-2000. Results include both a demonstration that logic programming can be eeective in t...

Numerical simulations can be the key to the thorough understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of transient detonation waves. But the accurate approximation of realistic detonations is extremely demanding, because a wide range of different scales need to be resolved. This paper describes an efficient simulation strategy based on a generic implementation of a blockstructured dynamically adap...

Multimedia applications such as Video On-Demand, Tele-Shopping, or Distance Learning require a storage facility for audio and video data, called video server. All these applications are very demanding in terms of storage capacity, storage bandwidth, and transmission bandwidth. A video server must also meet the requirements that stem from the continuous nature of audio and video. It must guarant...