Why do computers need emotional intelligence? Science fiction often portrays emotional computers as dangerous and frightening, and as a serious threat to human life. One of the most famous examples is HAL, the supercomputer onboard the spaceship Discovery, in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL could express, recognize and respond to human emotion, and generally had strong emotional skills – t...

Vagueness is not undecidability, but undecidability does enter into an explanation of why there is vagueness. My theory, called the Undecidability Theory of Vagueness, explains vagueness largely as a result of the fact that we are computationally bound.1 Vagueness is not due to any particularly human weakness, but due to a weakness that any computationally bound agent possesses; even HAL from 2...

When measured over decades in countries that have been relatively stable, returns from stocks have been substantially better than returns from bonds. This is often attributed to investors’ risk aversion: stocks are thought to be riskier than bonds, and so investors will pay less for an expected return from stocks than for the same expected return from bonds. The game-theoretic probability-free ...

It is well-documented that proper hand hygiene reduces nosocomial infections (Centers for Disease Control, 2000), while it is also well-documented that compliance by health care providers to proper hand hygiene remains less than satisfactory (Larson et al., 2001). It is the purpose of this brief communication to propose a theoretically driven approach that can be used by health educators in a v...

We argue that in analyzing panel-data econometric models, researchers rely excessively on statistical criteria to determine model specification, treating it primarily as a matter of inference. This inferential emphasis is most obvious the common practice using tests (e.g., Hausman test) choose between fixed- and random-effects specifications, often ignoring assumptions underpinning these tests....

A new species of Habralictus Moure (Apoidea, Halictidae) is described from the island of Dominica, Habralictus gonzalezisp. n. The species is distinguished from other West Indian Habralictus and a key is provided to the West Indian Habralictus. Brief comments on the genus Habralictus and bee species of Dominica are provided.

We measured the mechanical properties of the respiratory system of C57BL/6 mice using the optimal ventilation waveform method in closed- and open-chest conditions at different positive end-expiratory pressures. The tissue damping (G), tissue elastance (H), airway resistance (Raw), and hysteresivity were obtained by fitting the impedance data to three different models: a constant-phase model by ...

We regard histogram density estimation as a model selection problem. Our approach is based on the information-theoretic minimum description length (MDL) principle. MDLbased model selection is formalized via the normalized maximum likelihood (NML) distribution, which has several desirable optimality properties. We show how this approach can be applied for learning generic, irregular (variable-wi...