Confounding is examined from first principles. In follow-up studies a confounder is a predictor of diagnosing the illness--by being either a risk indicator or a determinant of diagnostic errors; in addition, it shows different distributions between the exposed and nonexposed series. In case-referent studies confounding can arise in two ways. A priori confounders are correlates of exposure in th...

∗This paper was published in Mind , 115/459 (July 2006): 659–693. Note: In transferring the LTEX in this preprint to the format used for publication in Mind, a couple of symbols were omitted. This preprint can be used to determine what the missing symbols are. †I’d like to thank Adriano Palma and Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde for inviting me to prepare this material and present it at the École Normal...

This paper suggests ways to facilitate creativity and innovation in agile development. The paper applies four perspectives – Product, Project, Process, and People to identify ways to support creative software development based on agile principles. The paper then describes a new facility Software Innovation Research Lab (SIRL) and drafts a new method concept for software innovation called Essenc...

pneumonia and with that breakthrough, a whole therapeutic industry was born. As our technical knowledge grows exponentially we are forced to adapt our cultural, social, political and ethical frameworks in the wake of such profound changes. It is in this context of global change, both frightening and exhilarating, that contemporary nursing finds itself. Weathered by history and tradition, profes...

Preterm birth, defined as birth before 37 weeks gestation, is a major contributor to perinatal morbidity and mortality. It occurs in 12,000 pregnancies in the Netherlands per year. Of all perinatal mortality, 50-70% can be attributed to preterm birth. Preterm birth can be iatrogenic due to the condition of the mother or the child, but the majority occurs spontaneously, either starting with pret...

Ruby is a dynamic, object-oriented language with advanced features such as yield operator and dynamic class manipulation. They make Ruby a popular, highly productive scripting language, but they also make the semantics of Ruby complicated and difficult to understand. Even the JIS/ISO standard of Ruby seems to contain some ambiguities. For Ruby to be established as a reliable scripting language,...

Candida albicans is the most common and important factor causing candidiasis infections in human. As fungi are resistant to anti-fungal agents, and also with respect to the restrictions in treatment of fungal diseases such as their high costs and side effects, study of the combination of herbal medicine is truly required. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of herbal ess...

The term “service” is quite overused in the telecommunications research area. This paper continues previous research by the author toward a better understanding of the service concept. The term service in this paper means the “something” that a human user receives from the computing environment that includes mobile and fixed devices, various kinds of interconnected networks forming a larger who...