Stability of word order: Even simple questions need careful answers

Stability of word order: Even simple questions need careful answers

Dunn et al. (2011) attempt an exciting piece of research, investigating which word-order parameters are co-dependent or independent, and which are stable or not. Claims about “universality” have to be taken with several grains of salt, since they investigate only four families, compared to the dozens of families that have been part of samples for the last several decades. More significantly, ho...

Complex Questions Rarely Have Simple Answers.

The subject of this monograph—sex differences in science and mathematics—is controversial. Although a topic of discussion for years, this issue was brought to public attention again in 2005 by the much-quoted comments of Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard University, suggesting that at least part of the reason for the dearth of women at the top in math and science professions is a lack...

Phosphorus and survival: key questions that need answers.

First-Order Inference and the Interpretation of Questions and Answers

Building on work by Groenendijk and Stokhof, we develop a theory of question and answer interpretation for first-order formalisms. The proposed framework is less fine-grained than its higher-order ancestor, but instead offers attractive implementational properties as it deals with the combinatorial explosion problem underlying Groenendijk and Stokhof’s original theory. To incorporate the treatm...

noninvasive tests of fibrosis: to get the right answers, we need to ask the right questions