The fact that any two choices are necessarily asynchronous raises the question of whether some alternative x at moment t remains the same alternative x at moment t + 1. It is argued that this question cannot be answered without taking into account the decision-maker’s perception of the choice problem. Consequently, an objective description of a choice problem is impossible for each description ...

In 2 experiments the authors investigated how verb choice in question formulation influences respondents' answers. These studies show that (a) as hypothesized, the choice of verb type (action vs, state) in forming a question influences interviewees' narratives systematically by impacting, inter alia, which individual is implicitly described as the causal originator of a social event; (b) interv...

Data mining research has developed many pattern discovery algorithms dedicated to specific data and pattern characteristics. We argue that a user should not be responsible for choosing the most efficient algorithm to solve a particular data mining problem. Instead, a data mining query optimizer should follow the cost-based optimization techniques to select an appropriate algorithm to solve the ...

The popularity of information retrieval has led users to a new problem: nding which text databases (out of thousands of candidate choices) are the most relevant to a user. Answering a given query with a list of relevant databases is the text database discovery problem. The rst part of this paper presents a practical method for attacking this problem based on estimating the result size of a quer...

We investigate the question of whether one can characterize complexity classes in terms of efficient reducibility to the set of Kolmogorov-random strings RK. We show that this question is dependent on the choice of universal machine in the definition of Kolmogorov complexity. We show for a broad class of reductions that the sets reducible to RK have very low computational complexity. Further, w...

People spend much of their waking time in their workplaces (approximately 33% on a weekly basis), which raises the possibility that the conditions they experience at work influence their health and well-being. The workplace design literature has given scant attention to mental health outcomes, instead focusing on healthy populations. Conversely, the mental health literature gives scant attentio...

Most Americans are accustomed to gaining a few pounds from time to time. Unfortunately, more and more of us are sitting down to enjoy the bounty of summer celebrations at an already unhealthy weight. More frightening than our own health statistics—nearly 70% of American adults are overweight—are the repercussions of our poor lifestyle choices now evident in the health statistics of our children...

It was a Bic—the biro—that changed my life. I’ve wondered since if the doctor using it knew that many years later his signature that day would still have impact. I hadn’t seen it coming. I do now; watching for it affects all my interactions in healthcare. But that day, when the doctor arrived in the emergency department, I thought he’d come to discuss my blood tests. Less than 10 minutes later ...

An analysis of parliamentary debates and media resources that cover them can provide insight into the political climate of a country. Although debates are now regularly published on official government portals, their analysis remains a cumbersome and challenging task for historians and political scientists. One of the main tasks of the PoliMedia project is to allow easy crossmedia comparisons a...

Utility based models are common in both the risky and intertemporal choice literatures. Recently there have been efforts to formulate models of choices which involve both risks and time delays. An important question then is whether the concept of utility is the same for risky and inter-temporal choices. We address this question by fitting versions of two popular utility based models, Cumulative...