The concept of heuristic developed by philosophers of science depicts a theoretical way of investigating the world of models and the problematic relations models may have to other models, to theories, and to empirical data. The heuristic is a set of abstractions elaborated as stories, interpretations, speculations, metaphors, and other forms of abstract speculations. The heuristic is a device f...

Finite-State Machine (FSM) applications are important for many domains. But FSM computation is inherently sequential, making such applications notoriously difficult to parallelize. Most prior methods address the problem through speculations on simple heuristics, offering limited applicability and inconsistent speedups. This paper provides some principled understanding of FSM parallelization, an...

In his letter, Gordon (1) raises questions concerning the findings of our prospective cohort study of breastfeeding and respiratory illness (2) based on his unproven speculations about the etiology of respiratory illnesses in children. In a series of previous letters to the editor, he has advanced a "mechanical theory" for the occurrence of respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses in infants....

Speculations about the contribution of sensory feedback to balance corrections have been strongly influenced by the clinical observations of balance disorders following vestibular or proprioceptive sensory loss. Unfortunately, those speculations have been more influenced by early rudimentary concepts of postural control tested under a limited set of circumstances. For example, from examinations...

BACKGROUND The coexistence of Rosai-Dorfman disease (RDD) with Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH) is very rare, as to date only 17 cases have been reported in the english literature. The pathophysiology of this uncommon co-occurrence still remains enigmatic and a subject of various speculations. CASE PRESENTATION We report a case of a 30-year-old female patient who presented with a pathologi...

This paper explores the concept of micro-architectural loops and discusses their impact on processor pipelines. In particular, we establish the relationship between loose loops and pipeline length and configuration, and show their impact on performance. We then evaluate the load resolution loop in detail and propose the distributed register algorithm (DRA) as a way of reducing this loop. It dec...