FORTY YEARS AGO, this month, I started in practice, I confess without the benefit of vocational training; that came two months later when my chief had his first coronary. I was extremely fortunate in becoming assistant, and later partner, to John Taggart of the Antrim Road, one of the most distinguished practitioners of his day. Taggart was a County Antrim man, with all the bluntness and sagaci...

In the view of a clinician who has been providing methadone therapy since its inception 40 years ago, the status of the treatment today reflects the culmination of two trends: an increase in understanding, skills, and standards on the one hand, and a deterioration of patients' health on the other. A retreat of stigma, greater physician interest, and the evolution of standards are beginning to m...

N ot far outside Paris, in a small village, along a busy road, there is a gate leading into a park. The sound of the traffic dissipates as one follows the footpath. The trees are abundant enough to give the impression that one is simply walking through a serene wood, which has a slight incline that amplifies the rustle of the breeze through the treetops. But soon one reaches a small parking lot...

The complementation problem for nondeterministic word automata has numerous applications in formal verification. In order to check that the language of an automaton A1 is contained in the language of a second automaton A2, one checks that the intersection of A1 with an automaton that complements A2 is empty. Many problems in verification and design are reduced to language containment. In model ...

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Medicare Program. Medicare has achieved its two basic goals of ensuring access to care for elderly and disabled beneficiaries and protecting them from severe financial hardship. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 represents an important improvement by adding prescription drug coverage. Medicare's major future ch...

More than forty years have passed since a learning machine called the perceptron was proposed by Rosenblatt. It has played a major role for these forty years, not only in the area of computational neuroscience in elucidating the function of cerebellum, but also in theoretical and practical studies of learning machines. The present talk reviews these developments from my personal point