This note points to certain similarities of orientation and outcome between Derek Parfit’s quest for a theory of beneficence and Amartya Sen’s quest for a suitable realvalued representation of poverty. It suggests that both projects, in a certain sense, have been instructive failures. Using Sen’s own work, the note also suggests a logically natural way of dealing with some of the problems in po...

For more than 30 years, the quest for interventions that can preserve viability in ischemic myocardium has been ongoing. The search began with the pioneering studies of Maroko and colleagues in the 1970s.1 Although reperfusion therapy has emerged as a great success story, we are still on a quest for an intervention that can preserve viability until blood flow can be restored in the setting of a...

Whilst many governments are placing restrictions on antibiotic use [4], this is too little, too late. The current situation has made the quest for new antibiotics and antibiotic alternatives a matter of great importance. Given the development costs, the complexity in finding new drug targets, and the timescales involved, the prospect of antibiotic alternatives remains low; therefore, greater pr...

Many computational models of narrative include representations of possible worlds—events that never actually occur in the story but that are planned or perceived by the story’s characters. Psychological tools such as QUEST are often used to validate computational models of narrative, but they only represent events which are explicitly narrated in the story. In this paper, we demonstrate that au...

Association rule mining (ARM) is an important subtask in Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Existing ARM algorithms have largely been tested using artificial data generated by the QUEST program developed by Agrawal et al. [2]. Concerns have been raised before [7, 25] on the significance of such sample data. We provide the first theoretical investigation of the statistical properties of the datab...

We showcase QUEST (QUEry generator for STructured sources), a search engine for relational databases that combines semantic and machine learning techniques for transforming keyword queries into meaningful SQL queries. The search engine relies on two approaches: the forward, providing mappings of keywords into database terms (names of tables and attributes, and domains of attributes), and the ba...

Ensuring access to specialized web-collections in a fast evolving web environment requires flexible techniques for orientation and querying. The adoption of meta search techniques for web-collections is hindered by the enormous heterogeneity of the resources. In this paper we introduce QUEST — a system for querying specialized collections on the web. One focus of QUEST is to unify search fields...

In this era of computerization, education has also revamped itself and is not limited to old lecture method. The regular quest is on to find out new ways to make it more effective and efficient for students. Nowadays, lots of data is collected in educational databases, but it remains unutilized. In order to get required benefits from such a big data, powerful tools are required. Data mining is ...

Let pn/qn be the n-th convergent of a real irrational number α, and let εn = αqn−pn. In this paper we investigate various sums of the type ∑ m εm, ∑ m |εm|, and ∑ m εmx m. The main subject of the paper is bounds for these sums. In particular, we investigate the behaviour of such sums when α is a quadratic surd. The most significant properties of the error sums depend essentially on Fibonacci nu...

Observations of QSOs at z ∼ 5.7 − 6.4 show the appearance of Gunn-Peterson troughs around z ∼ 6, and a change in the slope of the IGM optical depth τ(z) near z ∼ 5.5. These results are interpreted as a signature of the end of the reionization era, which probably started at considerably higher redshifts. However, there also appears to be a substantial cosmic variance in the transmission of the I...