Talking about nothing

D-Theory: Talking about Talking about Trees

Linguists, including computational linguists, have always been fond of talking about trees. In this paper, we outline a theory of linguistic structure which talks about talking about trees; we call this theory Description theory (D-theory). While important issues must be resolved before a complete picture of D-theory emerges (and also before we can build programs which utilize it), we believe t...

A Matter of Perspectives: Talking About Talking About Topic Maps

This presentation is a contribution to the discussion about the future of semantic technologies, and more specifically the discussion about the proposed Topic Maps Reference Model. In this paper I will attempt to show that the terms which are used to describe the work being done in the semantic technologies are somewhat misleading, and I will propose using the term "perspective" instead of the ...

Much ado about nothing?

I t all started with the submission of an unsolicited review on idiopathic pulmonary haemosiderosis by IOACHIMESCU et al. [1]. During the review process of this excellent manuscript, the idea evolved to launch a whole series on rare (orphan) interstitial lung disorders in the European Respiratory Journal. Why bother? Well, admittedly, these diseases are rare, but for the affected patient that d...

Doing Much About Nothing

One of the interesting problems concerning experimental results is what happens when an experiment gives a null result, when the phenomenon expected is not observed. Is it because the experimental apparatus and the associated analysis procedures cannot detect or measure the phenomenon in question or is it because the phenomenon is not present? This is a real problem in the practice of physics. ...

Much ado about nothing.