Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 24, No. 4, 691–701 (2005) © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/pam.20133 The editors of JPAM have asked us to help readers make sense of the competing claims about the efficacy of the Special Suppleme...

Learners’ step-by-step solutions can offer insight into their misunderstandings. Because of the difficulty of automatically interpreting freeform solutions, educational technologies often structure problem solving into particular patterns. Hypothesizing that structured interfaces may frustrate some learners, we conducted an experiment comparing two interfaces for solving equations: one requires...

An effective field theory (EFT) is a theory of the dynamics of a physical system at energies small compared to a given cut-off. Low-energy states with respect to this cut-off are effectively independent of states at high energies; hence one may study the low-energy dynamics without the need for a detailed description of the high-energy dynamics. Many authors have suggested that, because of the ...

The wide and complex spectrum of regulations, especially in the financial services industry, calls for machine assistance in making sense of, and in consuming, regulatory text. This paper describes an approach to interpreting regulations with SBVR. The purpose is to clarify ambiguity in regulations by developing a shared vocabulary and shared guidance based on the regulatory text. The on-going ...

dipstick testing cannot lower the post-test probability sufficiently to exclude urinary tract infection if a patient presents with one or more symptoms. Urine culture, however, has a value beyond confirming the diagnosis in that it can also direct treatment, on the basis of results of tests for antimicrobial susceptibility. The table summarises the findings of two systematic reviews. When featu...

We take for granted that sentences describe situations [2, 12]. One of the most important properties of situations are then their temporal locations, which are indicated by tense and aspect and temporal adverbials in the surface form. In [10, 22], we offered a formal theory for English tense and aspect and an algorithm that computes the temporal relationships between the situations implicitly i...

This paper presents a formal axiomatic semantics for the essential model notations of Syntropy, where an essential model provides a step towards the speci cation of an object-oriented system. Syntropy like other objectoriented development methods uses intuitive and easy to understand graphical notations for expressing the static and dynamic aspects of the model. However, Syntropy di ers from ot...

Regression via ordinary least squares (OLS) is a commonly applied statistical technique in political science. However, when the dependent variable is dichotomous (0-1) rather than continuous, ordinary least squares becomes an inefficient estimation technique, and the underlying linear probability model (LPM) that is being estimated represents a poor apriori choice of model specification (Aldric...

What is the significance of combining expressions in a natural human language? A complex expression is not a mere list of words. Combining expressions, as in 'red ball' or 'ball that Pat kicked yesterday' has a semantic effect. But how is the meaning of a phrase related to the meanings of its constituents? And how are the meanings of predicates, simple or complex, related to the meanings of sen...