I propose a comprehensive account of negation as a modal operator, vindicating a moderate logical pluralism. Negation is taken as a quantifier on worlds, restricted by an accessibility relation encoding the basic concept of compatibility. This latter captures the core meaning of the operator. While some candidate negations are then ruled out as violating plausible constraints on compatibility, ...

a r t i c l e i n f o The sustainability of pay-as-you-go pension systems is a major concern in most European countries. Considering the inverse old-age dependency ratio (the proportion of the class of actives to pensioners) as a sustainability index, based on a classical demographic model, a new optimal control model is proposed where the sustainability index grows along a prescribed trajector...

Before discussing the pathogenesis and clinical aspects of this disease, clarification of some of the pertinent terminological definitions may be in order. Hypertrophic emphysema is the most commonly used designation of this disease. Also, it is known under the following names: genuine emphysema, idiopathic emphysema, diffuse vesicular emphysema, obstructive emphysema, dystrophlc emphysema, pul...

Our question answering system was built with a number of priorities in mind. First, we wanted to experiment with natural language processing (NLP) technologies such as shallow parsing, named entity tagging, and coreference chaining. We felt that the small number of terms in the questions coupled with the short length of the answers would make NLP technologies clearly beneficial, unlike previous...

2 Principal contact: This year our primary goal was to improve on the performance of our TREC-8 system. In addition to improving the system directly, we worked on a number of tools to aid our development. We continued our work on a tool for automatic scoring of system responses, a “judge” program. We designed a tool for doing regression testing of question answering systems. W...

There is one concept in medicine which is prominent, the symptom. The omnipresence of the symptom seems, however, not to be reflected by an equally prominent curiosity aimed at investigating this concept as a phenomenon. In classic, traditional or conventional medical diagnostics and treatment, the lack of distinction with respect to the symptom represents a minor problem. Faced with enigmatic ...

Annals of Ibadan Postgraduate Medicine. Vol. 14 No. 2, December 2016 56 Prior to the beginning of the 20th Century, infectious diseases accounted for high morbidity and mortality worldwide. The average life expectancy at birth was 47 years (46 and 48 years for men and women respectively) even in the industrialized world. Infectious diseases such as smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, pneumonia, typh...

in islamic jurisprudence we face phrases such as ‘unforgivable in continuity (survival, sustainability) is not unforgivable in the beginning’ whose context suggest that this is considered by scholars as a known and accepted rule. but, after examining the traces of the phrase in the books of jurisprudence and rules of islamic jurisprudence, there seems to be no consensus as regards the authentic...

Academic pursuits are inseparable from the medium within which they take place - life. The lives of medical trainees can present many challenges that are independent of academic demands. Poor psychological health has been found to develop in medical trainees. Can medical educators minimize this decline in well-being? Positive education - learning skills for traditional academia and to foster ha...

SYSTEM R is a variant of the original STRIPS by Fikes and Nilsson (1971) (called forwardchaining, recursive STRIPS in Nilsson [1998]). Briefly speaking, given a conjunction of simple goals, it selects one of them to work on. If there is an action that is executable and will make this simple goal true once executed, then it does this action and then tries to achieve the other simple goals in the...