One often hears the lament that medical care in India lags behind that of developed countries. At times, however, one cannot help but feel that in some ways this is a blessing in disguise, because by the time a particular method of treatment gets accepted and adopted in India, we also have knowledge of its various short-comings. If such information is appropriately made use of, it should enable...

iscussions about evidence-based medicine (EBM) have engendered both positive and negative reactions from clini-cians, researchers, and policymakers since the term was first coined in the early 1990s (1, 2). These discussions were brought to the forefront again in a recent commentary by Dr. Bernadine Healy, former Director of National Institutes of Health (NIH), in US News and World Report(3). S...

Many models of markets are based on assumptions of rationality, transparency, efficiency, and homogeneity in various combinations. They assume, at least implicitly, that decision makers understand the structure of the market and how it produces the dynamics which can be observed or might potentially occur. Are these models acceptable simplifications, or can they be seriously misleading? The res...

This paper examines two mistakes regarding David Lewis’ Principal Principle that have appeared in the recent literature. These particular mistakes are worth looking at for several reasons: the thoughts that lead to these mistakes are natural ones, the principles that result from these mistakes are untenable, and these mistakes have led to significant misconceptions regarding the role of admissi...

We re-examine the commonly held view that learning and memory necessarily require potentiation of synapses. A simple neuronal model of self-organized learning with no positive reinforcement is presented. The strongest synapses are selected for propagation of activity. Active synaptic connections are temporarily "tagged" and subsequently depressed if the resulting output turns out to be unsucces...

Usually we teach formal methods relying for a large part on one kind of reasoning technique about a formal model. For instance, we either use formal proof or we use model-checking. It would appear that it is already hard enough to learn one technique and having to cope with two puts just another burden on the students. This is not our experience. Especially model-checking is easily used to comp...

To illustrate, Folk stakes sensitivity says that all else equal, people are less likely to say that Sarah knows that her health insurance is current, if she is about to get hit by a bus and incur huge medical bills. Folk stakes sensitivity holds intrinsic interest to anyone interested in the psychological basis of knowledge ascription. It holds further interest to epistemologists by featuring a...

Most scientists admit to their errors but, as Eve Marder explains, the scientific community as a whole needs to rethink the way it recognizes achievement.