Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War

Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination's effects. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history.

Negation as failure. II

AbstractThe use of the negation as failure rule in logic programming is often considered to be tantamount to reasoning from Clark's “completed data base” [2]. Continuing the investigations of Clark and Shepherdson [2,7], we show that this is not fully equivalent to negation as failure either using classical logic or the more appropriate intuitionistic logic. We doubt whether there is any simple and useful logical meaning of negation as failure in the general case, and study in detail some special kinds of data base where the relationship of the completed data base to negation as failure is closer, e.g. where the data base is definite Horn or hierarchic

Assessment and analysis of H.pylori infection treatment strategies of St. Vincent Hospital\u27s family and internal medicine clinics

Helicobacter pylori is a gram-negative bacteria that is responsible for causing chronic gastritis, ulcers in the stomach and intestine, and eventually even gastric lymphoma or cancer. Multiple treatment options have been recommended for treating an H. pylori infection based on kidney function, previous antibiotic exposure, and whether or not the infection is recurrent. The most common regimens used at St. Vincent\u27s primary care centers closely mimic the American College of Gastroenterology\u27s clinical guidelines. However, these medications (clarithromycin and levofloxacin) have been associated with high rates of resistance in other countries. The United States has very limited data on H. pylori\u27s resistance rates to these medications and there is not sufficient data to prove the efficacy of these regimens. This project aims to identify what percentage of H. pylori infections diagnosed at St. Vincent\u27s Family Medicine and Internal Medicine clinics are being successfully treated with current, guideline-directed therapy. It also aims to obtain a general understanding of H. pylori resistance rates to clarithromycin and levofloxacin in the Indianapolis area based on treatment failure rates

Mechanical ventilation in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients, noninvasive vs. invasive method (randomized prospective study) [Usporedba neinvazivne i invazivne umjetne ventilacije kod bolesnika s kroničnom opstruktivnom plućnom bolesti: prospektivna randomizirana studija]

Acute respiratory failure due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) presents an increasing problem throughout the world. The aim of this study was to compare invasive and non-invasive mechanical ventilation (MV) for patients with COPD. A prospective, randomized trial was performed in a multidisciplinary intensive care unit for the period of 36 months and included 156 patients with COPD. MV procedure was performed using standard methods, and was applied as either invasive MV (IMV) or noninvasive MV (NIMV). Patients were randomized in two groups for application of MV using closed, nontransparent envelops. Comparison was made based on patient characteristics, objective parameters on admission and 1h, 4h, 24h, and 48h after admission and based on treatment outcome. We have confirmed that NIMV method is superior to IMV for patients with COPD. MV duration NIMV:IMV was 94:172 hours, p<0.001, time spent in Intensive Care Unit 120:223 hours, p<0.001. Ventilator associated pneumonia 5(6%):29(37%), p<0.001.The advantage of NIMV in COPD patients, especially in the early stages was confirmed

Planning, Acting, and Learning in Incomplete Domains

The engineering of complete planning domain descriptions is often very costly because of human error or lack of domain knowledge. Learning complete domain descriptions is also very challenging because many features are irrelevant to achieving the goals and data may be scarce. Given incomplete knowledge of their actions, agents can ignore the incompleteness, plan around it, ask questions of a domain expert, or learn through trial and error. Our agent Goalie learns about the preconditions and effects of its incompletely-specified actions by monitoring the environment state. In conjunction with the plan failure explanations generated by its planner DeFault, Goalie diagnoses past and future action failures. DeFault computes failure explanations for each action and state in the plan and counts the number of incomplete domain interpretations wherein failure will occur. The questionasking strategies employed by our extended Goalie agent using these conjunctive normal form-based plan failure explanations are goal-directed and attempt to approach always successful execution while asking the fewest questions possible. In sum, Goalie: i) interleaves acting, planning, and question-asking; ii) synthesizes plans that avoid execution failure due to ignorance of the domain model; iii) uses these plans to identify relevant (goal-directed) questions; iv) passively learns about the domain model during execution to improve later replanning attempts; v) and employs various targeted (goal-directed) strategies to ask questions (actively learn). Our planner DeFault is the first reason about a domain\u27s incompleteness to avoid potential plan failure. We show that DeFault performs best by counting prime implicants (failure diagnoses) rather than propositional models. Further, we show that by reasoning about incompleteness in planning (as opposed to ignoring it), Goalie fails and replans less often, and executes fewer actions. Finally, we show that goal-directed knowledge acquisition - prioritizing questions based on plan failure diagnoses - leads to fewer questions, lower overall planning and replanning time, and higher success rates than approaches that naively ask many questions or learn by trial and error

Differential Attributions of the Causes of Subordinate Success and Failure by Aggressive and Non-Aggressive Individuals

This dissertation examined the differential causal attributions of non-aggressive and aggressive individuals responding to incidents of subordinate success and failure. Participants (N = 407) were presented with 16 vignettes (eight describing subordinate success and eight describing subordinate failure) that utilized unique combinations of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency information. Participants made attributions regarding the cause of the subordinate’s behavior (i.e., person, task, circumstances, or any combination of the three) and indicated their preferred behavioral response (i.e., praise/reward, reprimand/punish, coach/train, redesign the task, or do nothing). When responding to incidents of subordinate success, the causal attributions of aggressive individuals were similar to those of non-aggressive individuals. However, when responding to incidents of subordinate failure, in an apparent attempt to make the subordinate more worthy of hostility, the causal attributions of aggressive individuals deviated from those of non-aggressive individuals for two information patterns (i.e., low consensus, high distinctiveness, and high consistency; low consensus, low distinctiveness, and low consistency). Moreover, for aggressive individuals, the processing of information relating to subordinate failure was considerably less complex than the processing of information relating to subordinate success. Implications, potential limitations, and directions for future research are discussed