The issue of the impact of human activities on the stratospheric ozone layer emerged in the early 1970s. But international regulations to mitigate the most serious effects were not adopted until the mid-1980s. This case holds lessons for addressing more complex environmental problems. Concepts that should inform discussion include 'latency,' 'counter-factual scenario based on the Precautionary ...

This paper takes it as a premise that a distinction between matters of fact and of law is important in the causal inquiry. But it argues that separating factual and legal causation as different elements of liability is not the best way to implement the fact/law distinction. It is partly a legal question what counts as a cause-in-fact; and certain liabilitylimiting doctrines under the umbrella o...

How do individuals form opinions about new technologies? What role does factual information play in that process? We address these questions by incorporating two critical dynamics, typically ignored in extant work: competition between information and over-time processes. We present results from experiments on two technologies: carbon-nanotubes and genetically modified foods. We find that factua...

A change from a system of road-safety delivery rooted in opinion, intuition, and folklore to one that is founded in science and based on factual knowledge is underway. Change, as always, faces obstacles. The main obstacle is the near absence of professionals who can be the carriers and providers of factual road-safety knowledge. The second important obstacle is the weakness of the knowledge in ...

There are several RDF (Resource Description Framework) knowledge bases that store community-generated categories of entities and conceptual or factual information about entities. These two types of information may have strong associations; for example, entities categorized in People from Korea (categorial information) have a high probability of being a person (conceptual information) and being ...

Previous studies suggest that factual learning, that is, learning from obtained outcomes, is biased, such that participants preferentially take into account positive, as compared to negative, prediction errors. However, whether or not the prediction error valence also affects counterfactual learning, that is, learning from forgone outcomes, is unknown. To address this question, we analysed the ...

Counterfactual thinking is ubiquitous in everyday life and an important aspect of cognition and emotion. Although counterfactual thought has been argued to differ from processing factual or hypothetical information, imaging data which elucidate these differences on a neural level are still scarce. We investigated the neural correlates of processing counterfactual sentences under visual and aura...

OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESIS Within otolaryngology residency training, the annual Otolaryngology Training Examination (OTE) is the primary method used to assess, quantify, and compare the factual knowledge acquired by each resident. The objective of this study was to develop a more frequent method for tracking of factual knowledge to prevent educational delay. STUDY DESIGN Retrospective analysis of ...

Children’s emotional ond cognitive responses to factual and fictional television programs depicting family conflict were investigated. 97 third and fourth graders saw one of three 15min versions of the same content: documentary, drama, or realistic drama. Self-reports of emotion and facial expressions varied with the content portrayed, and emotions were similar to those perceived for the people...

introduction: database evaluation indicators include management, content, technical, and search indicators. a database must have a high level of information retrieval. as search features is one of the most important factors in database evaluation, this research tried to evaluate search input and output in online databases of isfahan university of medical sciences (iums) central library website ...