Uncited papers are not useless

Useless Actions Are Useful

Planning as heuristic search is a powerful approach to solving domain independent planning problems. In recent years, various successful heuristics and planners like FF, LPG, FAST DOWNWARD or SGPLAN have been proposed in this context. However, as heuristics only estimate the distance to goal states, a general problem of heuristic search is the existence of plateaus in the search space topology ...

Lymphocytes: not useless after all

Half a century ago, an immunologist named N. Avrion Mitchison showed that lymphocytes--then thought to be useless--triggered tumor rejection in mice.

How many scientific papers are not original?

Is plagiarism afflicting science? In PNAS, Citron and Ginsparg (1) count the number of authors who are submitting articles containing text already appearing elsewhere. They report disturbing numbers of authors resorting to copying, particularly in some countries where 15% of submissions are detected as containing duplicated material. I am on the editorial board of an Institute of Electrical and...

Choiceless, Pointless, but not Useless: Dualities for Preframes

We provide the appropriate common ‘(pre)framework’ for various central results of domain theory and topology, like the Lawson duality of continuous domains, the Hofmann–Lawson duality between continuous frames and locally compact sober spaces, the Hofmann–Mislove theorems about continuous semilattices of compact saturated sets, or the theory of stably continuous frames and their topological man...

Useless Disinfection