Asthma is a common and important disease, characterized by widespread bronchial obstruction that is reversible either spontaneously or with therapy. Its principal causes seem to be allergy, infections, irritants, and psychophysiologic reactions, usually in combinations. Induction of asthma by allergens is related to the presence of IgE antibodies fixed to mast cells and basophils. When these an...

Frequently, the logic designer deals with functions with symbolic input variables. The binary encoding of such symbols should be chosen to optimize the final implementation. Conventionally, this input encoding problem has been solved in a two step process. First step generates constraints on the relationship between binary codes for different symbols, called group constraints. In a following st...

There is a huge need in general relativity for a consistent and useful mathematical theory defining the multiplication of tensor distributions in a geometric (diffeomorphism invariant) way. Significant progress has been made through the concept of Colombeau algebras, and the construction of full Colombeau algebras on differential manifolds for arbitrary tensors. Despite the fact that this goal ...

A variety of theories have been put forth to explain the function of imagination, most notably that imagination engages and develops children’s theory of mind and counterfactual reasoning. Here, we propose that a primary role for imagination is as a cognitive mechanism for efficiently generating new ideas without observing new evidence. Learners must generate hypotheses before they can assess t...

Almost 90 years have passed since Alexander Fleming discovered the antimicrobial activity of lysozyme, the first natural antibiotic isolated from our body. Since then, various types of molecules with antibiotic activity have been isolated from animals, insects, plants, and bacteria, and their use has revolutionized clinical medicine. So far, more than 1,200 types of peptides with antimicrobial ...

Password generators that generate site-specific passwords on demand are an alternative to password managers. Over the last 15 years a range of such systems have been described. We propose the first general model for such systems, and critically examine options for instantiating it. The model enables an objective assessment of the design of such systems; it has also been used to sketch a possibl...

This paper continues the research that considers a new cognitive model based strongly on the human brain. In particular, it considers the neural binding structure of an earlier paper. It also describes some new methods in the areas of image processing and behaviour simulation. The work is all based on earlier research by the author and the new additions are intended to fit in with the overall d...

During the last years some new variants of Permutation entropy have been introduced and applied to EEG analysis, among them a conditional variant and variants using some additional metric information or being based on entropies different from the Shannon entropy. In some situations it is not completely clear what kind of information the new measures and their algorithmic implementations provide...

Crowdsourcing initiatives are becoming a popular tool for new idea generation for firms. On crowdsourced ideation initiatives, individuals contribute new product ideas and vote on other's ideas which they would like the firm to implement. The firm then decides which ideas to implement. Although such initiatives are widely adopted in many different industries, they face increasing criticism as t...

How does gesturing help children learn? Gesturing might encourage children to extract meaning implicit in their hand movements. If so, children should be sensitive to the particular movements they produce and learn accordingly. Alternatively, all that may matter is that children move their hands. If so, they should learn regardless of which movements they produce. To investigate these alternati...