simile is the most important principle of rhetorical figures that other principles such as metaphor, metonymyandallusion are caused by it. in this study, different types of imagery have been evaluated, classified, and compared with each other in veis and ramin, and khosrow and shirin from the various common aspects such as analogies, metaphors, similes, emotionality or rationality, simplicity o...

Conventional approaches to the modelling of autonomous agents and agent communication rely heavily on the ascription of mental properties like beliefs and intentions to the individual agents. While indeed very powerful, these “mentalistic” approaches are largely incompatible with the concept of open environments populated by truly autonomous, self-interested (greyor black-box) agents. We propos...

Is there anything new that is intellectually engaging, politically instructive or educationally useful to say about the last two decades of quality assurance in higher education or to insert into quality assurance systems in their multiplying manifestations around the world? A glance at the literature on quality assurance indicates that its policy hawks and doves; its enthusiasts, flag-bearers ...

Existing approaches to knowledge representation and reasoning in the context of open systems either deal with “objective” knowledge or with beliefs. In contrast, there has been almost no research on the formal modelling of opinions, i.e., communicatively asserted ostensible beliefs. This is highly surprising, since opinions are in fact the only publicly visible kind of knowledge in open systems...

High-dimensional datasets are well-approximated by low-dimensional structures. Over the past decade, this empirical observation motivated the investigation of detection, measurement, and modeling techniques to exploit these low-dimensional intrinsic structures, yielding numerous implications for high-dimensional statistics, machine learning, and signal processing. Manifold learning (where the l...

Collusion, says the much venerated Oxford English Dictionary, is a Fraudulent secret understanding, especially between ostensible opponents. Why Bal(l) uses this word to describe the holding of a medical conference by a medical association is beyond comprehension. The pharmaceutical industry does offer financial support to such academic activities, but there is nothing secret about this. Associ...

Disasters are often caused by insuffi cient preventive care. We argue that there is a problem of prevention in that this lack of care often stems from agents’rational calculations. Positive experiences lead agents to underestimate the risks of disasters; technological improvements and redundancies designed for safety induce agents to reduce their care. While lower care increases the chances of ...