BACKGROUND To impact on the obesity epidemic, interventions that prevent weight gain across populations are urgently needed. However, even the most efficacious interventions will have little impact on obesity prevention unless they are successfully implemented in diverse populations and settings. Implementation research takes isolated efficacy studies into practice and policy and is particularl...

This paper presents an open-domain textual Question-Answering system that uses several feedback loops to enhance its performance. These feedback loops combine in a new way statistical results with syntactic, semantic or pragmatic information derived from texts and lexical databases. The paper presents the contribution of each feedback loop to the overall performance of 76% human-assessed precis...

Although a growing body of clinical research has begun to evaluate the efficacy and safety of t'ai chi as a therapeutic tool for a variety of health conditions, little attention has been devoted to evaluating "how" t'ai chi is scientifically studied, and the advantages or limitations of different methodological approaches. In a companion to this paper (Part I), we argued that t'ai chi is a comp...

Psychokinesis research is encountering difficulties in replicating its findings. While experimental and analysis methods became more and more professional in the last decades, researchers complain about a loss of effect size and evidence. Walter von Lucadou explained this erosion of evidence with his “Model of Pragmatic Information” (MPI). He proposed a new experimental paradigm for future rese...

In this paper we present the problem of representing the morphosyntactic relations in wordnets, especially the problems that arise when wordnets for languages that differ significantly from English are being developed on the basis of the Princeton wordnet, which is the case for Bulgarian and Serbian. We present the derivational characteristics of these two languages, how these characteristics a...

Game theoretical analyses of communication (e.g. Lewis, Crawford & Sobel) demand cooperation between conversational partners for reliable information exchange to take place. Similarly, in pragmatics, the theory of language use, it is standard to assume that communication is a cooperative affair. Recently, this standard view has come under attack by Durcot and Merin, and it has been proposed tha...

Clinical trials are sometimes classified as being explanatory or pragmatic, although they are rarely reported in that way. Explanatory trials may seek to investigate the efficacy of new treatments by imposing strict limitations on many aspects of trial design, including, for example, recruiting only those patients who are most likely to respond. In contrast, the objective of pragmatic trials is...

New forms of collaboration between organizations based on open source principles are rapidly emerging. The collaboration is typically done in a spirit of co-opetition whereby companies, often SMEs, share cost and risk by developing software jointly and openly. The paper elaborates how this emerging phenomenon of open source ecosystems can be understood from the perspective of actability and the...

The desideratum for the concept of a semiotic web is proposed. It combines both the recent semantic web and the pragmatic web initiatives but surpasses them in being faithful to Charles S. Peirce’s pragmatic approach to inquiry. I will address some conceptual shortcomings of the semantic and pragmatic web proposals, and suggest that in a semiotic web, one can to operationalise its basic ideas i...

BACKGROUND Modern clinical-research practice favors placebo controls over usual-care controls whenever a credible placebo exists. An unrecognized consequence of this preference is that clinicians are more limited in their ability to provide the benefits of the non-specific healing effects of placebos in clinical practice. METHODS We examined the issues in choosing between placebo and usual-ca...