It is a widely shared opinion among specialists that language is an evolutionary innovation, or that it contains some key evolutionary innovations. However, such claims are not based on a correspondingly consensual concept of “evolutionary innovation,” but are rather expressed on atheoretical grounds. This fact has thus far acted as an obstacle for the collaborative effort upon which the task o...

One common principle in the study of belief is what has been called the “consensual validation of reality”: the idea that persons in highly inbred social networks alter their beliefs regarding the external world by repeated interaction with each other rather than by direct observation. This notion accounts for phenomena such as panics, in which a substantial number of actors in a given populati...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder associated to dementia in late adulthood. Amyloid precursor protein, presenilin 1 and presenilin 2 genes have been identified as causative genes for familial AD, whereas apolipoprotein E epsilon4 allele has been associated to the risk for late onset AD. However, mutations on these genes do not explain the majority of cases. ...

Anisocoria in darkness and during reflex responses to unilateral light stimulation was studied in 150 normal subjects with television pupillometry. It was commonly found that the direct light reaction of the stimulation eye exceeded the consensual reaction of the other eye. This light-induced anisocoria, termed 'contraction anisocoria', had a mean value of 0.075 mm or 6.1 % of light reflex ampl...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder associated with dementia in late adulthood. Mitochondrial respiratory chain impairment has been detected in the brain, muscle, fibroblasts and platelets of AD patients, indicating a possible involvement of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in the etiology of the disease. Several reports have identified mtDNA mutations in AD patients...

People taking part in argumentativedebates through collective annotations face a highly cognitive taskwhen trying to estimate the group’s global opinion. In order to reduce this effort, we propose in this paper to model such debates prior to evaluating their “social validation.” Computing the degree of global confirmation (resp. refutation) enables the identification of consensual (resp. contro...

Patients choose to seek a second opinion in matters related to their health for a variety of reasons, and the total cost associated with these second opinion visits is estimated to be billions of dollars annually. Understanding the reasons behind second opinion self-referrals is key to improving patient satisfaction and reducing redundancy in delivered health care. This study represents a retro...

The Abridged Big Five-Dimensional Circumple~ (ABSC; Hofstee, de Raad, & Goldberg, 1992) was used to locate consensus across different conceptualizations of the "Big Five" or Five-Factor ModeL Trait rating data from instruments representing four different versions of the Big Five (Goldberg, 1992; Hogan & Johnson, 1981; McCrae & Costa, 1985; Norman, 1963) were subjected to separate ABSC analyses ...

imamiah jurisprudents have disagreed about the requirement of successor's justice in contractual will from past to now. some of them have considered it as the condition of accuracy of will, and others consider it ineffective in accuracy and inaccuracy of will. considering that this issue has much scientific and practical results and that if we accept any of these two views, our understandi...