This is a study of risk perception in relation to New Age (NA) beliefs, including traditional folk superstition and belief in paranormal phenomena, as well as use of alternative healing practices. Data were also obtained on trust dimensions and on personality and psychopathology variables, as well as religious involvement. It was found that four factors accounted for the investigated NA beliefs...

In this paper I compare two different the models of two-dimensional belief change, namely ‘revision by comparison’ (Fermé and Rott, Artificial Intelligence 157, 2004) and ‘bounded revision’ (Rott, in Hommage à Wlodek, Uppsala 2007). These revision operations are two-dimensional in the sense that they take as arguments pairs consisting of an input sentence and a reference sentence. Two-dimension...

We introduce the problem of self healing, in which a system is asked to self diagnose and self repair. The two problems of computing the diagnosis and the repair are often solved separately. We show in this paper how to tie these two tasks together: a planner searches a prospective plan on a sample of the belief state; a diagnoser verifies the applicability of the plan and returns a state of th...

Based on 36 years of research, this paper explores the impact of human height on chronic disease, life expectancy, and longevity. The findings presented challenge the common belief that promoting rapid growth and maximum height attainment is a desirable goal. Also presented, are the biological mechanisms related to height and longevity. This paper concludes with a review of paradoxes that face ...

Bayesians model one’s doxastic state by subjective probabilities. But in traditional epistemology, in logic-based artificial intelligence, and in everyday life, one’s doxastic state is usually expressed in a qualitative, binary way: either one accepts (believes) a proposition or one does not. What is the relationship between qualitative and probabilistic belief? I show that, besides the familia...

Using belief functions, this paper develops a model of the situation of a management team trying to decide if a cost process is in-control, or out-of-control and, thus, in need of investigation. Belief functions allow accounting for uncertainty and information about the cost processes, extending traditional probability theory approaches. The purpose of this paper is to build and investigate the...

We establish an intimate connection between Bayesian and credal nets. Bayesian nets are precise graphical models, credal nets extend Bayesian nets to imprecise probability. We focus on traditional belief updating with credal nets, and on the kind of belief updating that arises with Bayesian nets when the reason for the missingness of some of the unobserved variables in the net is unknown. We sh...

Limited scientific evidence about the safety and efficacy of traditional healing make it essential for policymakers to develop policies, regulations, strategies mitigate issues related this practice. Such include hit-and-miss operation, incorrect diagnosis, improper dosage, low hygiene standards, dominant lack statutory regulation practitioners practices owing secrecy some methods. On other han...