In medicine, there are many diseases which cannot be precisely characterized but are considered as natural kinds. In the communication between health care professionals, this is generally not problematic. In biomedical research, however, crisp definitions are required to unambiguously distinguish patients with and without the disease. In practice, this results in different operational definitio...

We propose a simple order-theoretic generalization, possibly non monotone, of settheoretic inductive definitions. This generalization covers inductive, co-inductive and bi-inductive definitions and is preserved by abstraction. This allows structural operational semantics to describe simultaneously the finite/terminating and infinite/diverging behaviors of programs. This is illustrated on gramma...

Logic programming with fixed-point definitions is a useful extension of traditional logic programming. Fixed-point definitions can capture simple model checking problems and closed-world assumptions. Its operational semantics is typically based on intuitionistic provability. We extend the operational semantics of these languages with game semantics. This extended semantics has several interesti...

Although the "science of science communication" usually refers to the flow of scientific knowledge from scientists to the public, scientists direct most of their communications not to the public, but instead to other scientists in their field. This paper presents a case study on this understudied type of communication: within a discipline, among its practitioners. I argue that many of the conte...

BACKGROUND Operational research (OR) is the discipline of using models, either quantitative or qualitative, to aid decision-making in complex implementation problems. The methods of OR have been used in healthcare since the 1950s in diverse areas such as emergency medicine and the interface between acute and community care; hospital performance; scheduling and management of patient home visits;...

The most popular way to define asthma based on questionnaires is to use definitions taken from cross-sectional international studies on asthma. These definitions may not, however, be optimal for future studies focusing on risk factors of asthma. The current authors, therefore, compared the performance of different operational definitions of asthma. The European Community Respiratory Health Stud...

Objective This paper proposes definitions of safety and safety promotion. They apply both to unintentional and intentional injuries or violence. Method These definitions are the result of a consensus reached over a two-year period through a variety of activities involving nearly 50 experts from different sectors (public security, transportation, justice, health and social services, sports and r...

BACKGROUND The concept of walkable neighborhoods is increasingly important in physical activity research and intervention. However, limited theoretical understanding and measurable definitions remain a challenge. METHODS This paper reviews theories defining neighborhoods and offers an empirical approach to identify measurable attributes and thresholds of walkable neighborhoods. Bivariate and ...

In contrast to the careful consideration given to the issue of what we can infer from dissociations in single-case studies, the more basic question of how we decide whether a dissociation is present has been relatively neglected. Proposals are made for fully operational definitions of a deficit, classical and strong dissociations, and double dissociations. In developing these definitions it was...