In the case of Statoil A.S.A. v. Louis Dreyfus Energy Services L.P., Aikens J. has reasserted the traditional principles of English law governing unilateral mistake. On one level, it is an unexceptional decision. It applies the well-settled law relating to unilateral mistake, based on long-established authority and as a reflection of the approach taken recently by the Court of Appeal to the sig...

We investigated the gain-loss effect of virtual/personal assistant character, which provides intelligent assistance to humans, and focused on not only the first impression of using the assistance but also changing impression about the character when used multiple times for assistance. The experiment used a fictive retrieval system (searching onomatopoeia), and the virtual assistant character lo...

I first met Dov at a logic conference in Manchester, in August 1969, though we had begun a mathematical correspondence the previous year. Here are a few photos from the conference. As I recall, Dov planned to get married shortly after the conference. I found a letter in my files mentioning that I sent Dov a copy of the pictures in 1969, so this is for everybody else. Figure 1 shows Dov at Jodre...

Recently, three major ICT companies were confronted with public outrage about the way they collected massive amounts of personal data without informing data subjects, let alone obtaining their consent. Google harvested data concerning Wi-Fi routers while cruising around with their StreetView camera cars, Facebook tracked potentially every internet user with the help of tracking cookies and the ...

William Easterly (NYU) January 2007 “More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery... For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.” Harry S. Truman, Inaugural Address, 1949 “We have the opportunity in the coming decade to cut world poverty by half. Billions more people could enjoy the...

Since 2006, type 1 diabetes in Finland has plateaued and then decreased after the authorities' decision to fortify dietary milk products with cholecalciferol. The role of vitamin D in innate and adaptive immunity is critical. A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance (RDA) for vitamin D was recently discovered; in a correct analysis of the data used by the Insti...

INTRODUCTION There is a growing consensus that disclosure of medical mistakes is ethically and legally appropriate, but such disclosures are made difficult by medical traditions of concern about medical malpractice suits and by physicians' own emotional reactions. Because the physician may have compelling reasons both to keep the information private and to disclose it to the patient or family, ...

The experience of nursing students who make mistakes during clinical practice is poorly understood. The literature identifies clinical practice mistakes as a significant issue in nursing practice and education but there is very little research on the topic. This study used a grounded theory approach to explore the experience of undergraduate nursing students who had made at least one mistake in...

Chaui-Berlinck recently published a paper in which he claims that the original West, Brown and Enquist (WBE) model for metabolic scaling (West et al., 1997) is fundamentally flawed (Chaui-Berlinck, 2006). In particular, Chaui-Berlinck asserted that 'the minimization procedure [of the original WBE model] is mathematically incorrect and ill-posed' and that the model 'lacks self-consistency and co...