We show how the wide range in strengths of intensifying degree adverbs (e.g. very and extremely) could be explained by pragmatic inference based on differing cost, rather than differing semantics. This predicts a linear relationship between the meaning of intensifiers and their length and log-frequency. We test this prediction in two studies, using two different dependent measures, finding that...

The power of Steiner points was studied in a number of different settings in the context of metric embeddings. Perhaps most notably in the context of probabilistic tree embeddings Bartal and Fakcharoenphol et al. [8, 9, 21] used Steiner points to devise near-optimal constructions of such embeddings. However, Konjevod et al. [24] and Gupta [22] demonstrated that Steiner points do not help in thi...

Network of packages with regulatory interactions (dependences and conflicts) from Debian GNU/Linux operating system is compiled and used as analogy of a gene regulatory network. Using a trace-back algorithm we assembly networks from the potential pool of packages for both scale-free and exponential topology from real and a null model data, respectively. We calculate the maximum number of packag...