The fact that natural language proper names are rigid designators is an empirical discovery about natural language. However, unlike other empirical discoveries about language made in the past few decades, it is one which has been taken to have great philosophical significance. One reason for this is that it helped simplify the formal semantical representation of ordinary modal discourse. But th...

Obesity is a public health challenge throughout the world. Ongoing monitoring of trends in obesity is important to assess interventions aimed at preventing or reducing the burden of obesity. Since the 1960s, measured height and weight have been collected in the United States as part of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). In Canada, data on measured height and weight h...

Studies have suggested that obesity prevalence varies by income and educational level, although patterns might differ between high-income and low-income countries (1-3). Previous analyses of U.S. data have shown that the prevalence of obesity varied by income and education, but results were not consistent by sex and race/Hispanic origin (4). Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Exa...

Risk tolerance is fundamental to decision-making and behaviour. Here we show that individuals' tolerance of risk follows a weekly cycle. We observed this cycle directly in a behavioural experiment using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (Lejuez et al., 2002; Study 1). We also observed it indirectly via voting intentions, gathered from 81,564 responses across 70 opinion polls ahead of the Scottish ...

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We construct a minimal rK-degree, continuum many, in fact. We also show that every minimal sequence, that is, a sequence with minimal rK-degree, must have very low descriptional complexity, that every minimal sequence is rK-reducible to a random sequence, and that there is a random sequence with no minimal sequence rK-reducible to it.

This paper reports on a extensive survey of research work related to machine learning as applied to automated planning over the past 30 years. Major research contributions are characterized broadly by learning method and then into descriptive subcategories. Survey results reveal learning techniques that have been extensively applied and a number that have received scant attention. We extend the...