THE SPECIES PROBLEM AND ITS LOGIC: Inescapable Ambiguity and Framework-relativity\ud

For more than fifty years, taxonomists have proposed numerous alternative definitions of species while they searched for a unique, comprehensive, and persuasive definition. This monograph shows that these efforts have been unnecessary, and indeed have provably been a pursuit of a will o' the wisp because they have failed to recognize the theoretical impossibility of what they seek to accomplish. A clear and rigorous understanding of the logic underlying species definition leads both to a recognition of the inescapable ambiguity that affects the definition of species, and to a framework-relative approach to species definition that is logically compelling, i.e., cannot not be accepted without inconsistency. An appendix reflects upon the conclusions reached, applying them in an intellectually whimsical taxonomic thought experiment that conjectures the possibility of an emerging new human species

A Theory of General Reduction of Gene-Expression \ud Manifesting as Autism (1993 with 2014 revisions of presentation)

This paper was originally written for a very different audience around 25 years ago, since when a great deal has changed both in autism research and in the wider world. Thus there was no mention of mercury (of which I knew almost nothing at the time) or of the autism increase (of which no-one else knew much either back then). And also I have become much more experienced in writing than back then. And paper-printed journals were very hostile to “excessive” length such that at least one paragraph got rather more squashed than I am happy to see it now. \ud So for these reasons I am making some minor changes to the writing, which do not change the actual content or meaning but which make for a better reading experience. For the convenience of cynics I will list all those changes at the end. In addition I am adding in some update notes in the text, indicated thus: [2014 Update: blah blah...

How Does Seating Arrangement Matter While Teaching in Small Groups?

A circular seating arrangement is best suited for small group discussions

Seasonal Variation of Delivery Rate: A Four Years Study in a Rural Tertiary Care Centre

Objective: To determine if there are monthly variations in the rate of deliveries in Burdwan Medical College West Bengal, India. Materials and Methods: A retrospective descriptive study carried out in the Burdwan Medical College. We extracted the total number of deliveries from the hospital records for over four year period and analyzed the figures for the monthly variation in delivery rates. This was repeated for a standardized 30-day month and the findings noted. The extracted data then fed into a computer and analysis was performed, based on the grouping of the delivery rates per month. Results: The monthly distribution of total deliveries showed a slightly sinusoidal pattern with two peaks. A major peak spanning two months, August and September and another small peak in April and May. The figure also depicted the nadir number of deliveries to occur majorly in February and March and another in December. Conclusion: There is a seasonal variation in delivery rates in our study

Comparative Evaluation of Cash Benefit Scheme of Janani Suraksha Yojana for Beneficiary Mothers from Different Health Care Settings of Rewa District, Madhya Pradesh, India

Introduction: For better outcomes in mother and child health, Government of India launched the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in 2005 with a major objective of providing accessible, affordable and quality health care to the rural population; especially the vulnerable. Reduction in MMR to 100/100,000 is one of its goals and the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) is the key strategy of NRHM to achieve this reduction. The JSY, as a safe motherhood intervention and modified alternative of the National Maternity Benefit Scheme (NMBS), has been implemented in all states and Union territories with special focus on low performing states. The main objective and vision of JSY is to reduce maternal, neo-natal mortality and promote institutional delivery among the poor pregnant women of rural and urban areas. This scheme is 100% centrally sponsored and has an integrated delivery and post delivery care with the help of a key person i.e. ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist), followed by cash monetary help to the women. Objectives: 1)To evaluate cash benefit service provided under JSY at different health care settings. 2) To know the perception and elicit suggestions of beneficiaries on quality of cash benefit scheme of JSY. Methodology: This is a health care institute based observational cross sectional study including randomly selected 200 JSY beneficiary mothers from the different health care settings i.e., Primary Health Centres, Community Health Centres, District Hospital and Medical College Hospital of Rewa District of Madhya Pradesh state. Data was collected with the help of set pro forma and then analysed with Epi Info 2000. Chi square test was applied appropriately. Results: 60% and 80% beneficiaries from PHC and CHC received cash within 1 week after discharge whereas 100% beneficiaries of District Hospital and Medical College Hospital received cash at the time of discharge; the overall distribution of time of cash disbursement among beneficiaries of PHC, CHC, DH and Medical College Hospital were found to be statistically significant.(Chi-square =45.04, p-value: 0.0000). Shortage of doctors at Health Care Centers was found to be a major cause for the delay in cash disbursement

Analysis of minimal complex systems and complex problem solving require different forms of causal cognition

In the last 20 years, a stream of research emerged under the label of „complex problem solving“ (CPS). This research was intended to describe the way people deal with complex, dynamic, and intransparent situations. Complex computer-simulated scenarios were as stimulus material in psychological experiments. This line of research lead to subtle insights into the way how people deal with complexity and uncertainty. Besides these knowledge-rich, realistic, intransparent, complex, dynamic scenarios with many variables, a second line of research used more simple, knowledge-lean scenarios with a low number of variables („minimal complex systems“, MCS) that have been proposed recently in problem-solving research for the purpose of educational assessment. In both cases, the idea behind the use of microworlds is to increase validity of problem solving tasks by presenting interactive environments that can be explored and controlled by participants while pursuing certain action goals. The main argument presented here is: both types of systems - CPS and MCS – can only be dealt with successfully if causal dependencies between input and output variables are identified and used for system control. System knowledge is necessary for control and intervention. But CPS and MCS differ in their way of how causal dependencies are identified and how the mental model is constructed; therefore, they cannot be compared directly to each other with respect to the cognitive processes that are necessary for solving the tasks. Knowledge-poor MCS tasks address only a small fraction of the cognitive processes and structures needed for knowledge-rich CPS situations

Abilità linguistiche, extralinguistiche e paralinguistiche in pazienti con lesioni focali all’emisfero destro

Pazienti con lesioni focali all’emisfero destro (RHD), pur mostrando abilità linguistiche complessivamente preservate, riportano frequentemente una compromissione delle abilità comunicative (Cummings, 2009), che interessa in modo particolare la sfera pragmatica: deficit nelle abilità conversazionali (Lehman, 2006), nella comprensione di espressioni non letterali (Papagno et al., 2006), nel riconoscimento della prosodia (Pell, 2007) e delle espressioni facciali (Kucharska-Pietura et al., 2003).\ud La maggior parte degli studi (e.g Cheang & Pell, 2006; McDonald, 2000) ha valutato le competenze pragmatiche dei pazienti RHD attraverso il canale linguistico, mentre è stata meno studiata la componente gestuale (Brownell, 1999). La Teoria della Pragmatica Cognitiva (Bara, 2010), propone un modello unitario della comunicazione, in cui la competenza comunicativa è indipendente dal mezzo, linguistico o extralinguistico, utilizzato per veicolare significati; conferme a tale modello si ritrovano in studi su popolazioni cliniche (Gabbatore et al., 2014, Angeleri et al., 2008). \ud Cutica et al. (2006), in particolare, hanno studiato le abilità pragmatiche in comprensione con un campione di pazienti con lesioni all’emisfero destro e sinistro (LHD), evidenziando come i pazienti RHD, rispetto a quelli LHD, mostrassero deficit più gravi nella componente extralinguistica, a conferma di una specializzazione dell’emisfero destro nelle componenti extralinguistiche e paralinguistiche. Data la grande variabilità di profili associati ai deficit comunicativi nei pazienti RHD (Myers, 2005), è fondamentale l’utilizzo di strumenti di assessment che permettano una valutazione globale ed approfondita (Angeleri et al., 2012). Un assessment puntuale è inoltre necessario per impostare trattamenti riabilitativi mirati (e.g. Bosco et al., 2013)

Spontaneous Evisceration of an Incisional Hernia Presenting One Year After Primary Surgery

Spontaneous evisceration is a rare complication associated with incisional hernia which demands an emergency surgery. A few cases have been reported on this. We report a spontaneous evisceration of bowel with strangulation which was managed by bowel resection and anastomosis and anatomical repair of incisional hernia

Structure and Dynamics in Implementation of Computations

Without a proper restriction on mappings, virtually any\ud system could be seen as implementing any computation. That\ud would not allow characterization of systems in terms of\ud implemented computations and is not compatible with a\ud computationalist philosophy of mind. Information-based criteria for independence of substates within structured states are proposed as a solution. Objections to the use of requirements for transitions in counterfactual states are addressed, in part using the partial-brain argument as a general counterargument to neural replacement arguments

Targetable Named Entity Recognition in Social Media

We present a novel approach for recognizing what we call targetable named entities; that is, named entities in a targeted set (e.g, movies, books, TV shows). Unlike many other NER systems that need to retrain their statistical models as new entities arrive, our approach does not require such retraining, which makes it more adaptable for types of entities that are frequently updated. For this preliminary study, we focus on one entity type, movie title, using data collected from Twitter. Our system is tested on two evaluation sets, one including only entities corresponding to movies in our training set, and the other excluding any of those entities. Our final model shows F1-scores of 76.19% and 78.70% on these evaluation sets, which gives strong evidence that our approach is completely unbiased to any particular set of entities found during training