This is the revised version of an invited keynote lecture delivered at the 1st Australian Computing and Philosophy Conference (CAP@AU; the Australian National University in Canberra, 31 October – 2 November, 2003). The paper is divided into two parts. The first part defends an informational approach to structural realism. It does so in three steps. First, it is shown that, within the debate abo...

Background: Offspring sex ratio (OSR) serves as an important social factor, and various other factors are hypothesized to be associated with it, such as maternal diet, time of ovulation and insemination, environmental phenomena, parental age, and infertility treatment. Objectives: This research was performed to assess the association between mothers’ menarche age, first pregnancy age, and sex r...

Complex abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) can preclude the use of endovascular repair. In patients unable to undergo open surgical repair (OSR), endografts outside instructions for might be only option. We present case a woman with highly angulated infrarenal AAA neck who was unsuitable OSR and successfully treated using Gore C-TAG conformable thoracic stent graft (W.L. Associates, Inc, Flagsta...

BACKGROUND No randomized controlled trial has compared laparoscopic sigmoid resection (LSR) to open sigmoid resection (OSR) for symptomatic diverticulitis of the sigmoid colon. This study tested the hypothesis that LSR is associated with decreased postoperative complication rates as compared with OSR. METHODS This was a prospective, multicenter, double-blind, parallel-arm, randomized controll...

PURPOSE To present an economic evaluation of endovascular versus open surgical repair of ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA). METHODS Endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) is currently being appraised by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence. To aid in this appraisal, a health economic model developed to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of EVAR for elective treatment of non-rup...

Introduction: Prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster), are a commonly used model of nonhuman social monogamy. Traditional monogamous systems are comprised of male-female pairs that share territory and care for offspring. Operational sex ratio (OSR), the relative ratio of males to females that are sexually receptive, can affect sexual selection, and in monogamous systems, OSR tend to be about 1:1. ...

This paper argues that ontic structural realism (OSR) faces a dilemma: either it remains on the general level of realism with respect to the structure of a given theory, but then it is, like epistemic structural realism, only a partial realism; or it is a complete realism, but then it has to answer the question how the structure of a given theory is implemented, instantiated or realized and thu...

Thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) has shown lower mortality compared with open surgical repair (OSR). However, the risk of spinal cord ischaemia (SCI) remains similar than OSR. As a prophylactic measure to reduce the risk of SCI, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) drainage has been widely used in OSR. In TEVAR, the utility of this adjunct is still controversial. We report a case of a 56-year-o...

In open set recognition (OSR), almost all existing methods are designed specially for recognizing individual instances, even these instances collectively coming in batch. Recognizers decision either reject or categorize them to some known class using empirically-set threshold. Thus the threshold plays a key role. However, selection it usually depends on knowledge of classes, inevitably incurrin...

The ’ontic’ form of structural realism (OSR), roughly speaking, aims at a complete elimination of objects of the discourse of scientific theories, leaving us with structures only. As put by the defenders of such a claim, the idea is that all there is are structures and, if the relevant structures are to be set theoretical constructs, as it has also been claimed, then the relations which appear ...