this commentary follows up on an editorial by eyal and colleagues in which these authors discuss the implications of the emergence of non-physician clinicians (npcs) on the health labour market for the education of medical doctors. we generally agree with those authors and we want to stress the importance of clarifying the terminology to describe these practitioners and of defining more formall...

Programming of software agents is a difficult task. As a result, online learning techniques have been used in order to make software agents automatically learn to decide proper condition-action rules from their experiences. However, for complicated problems this approach requires a large amount of time and might not guarantee the optimality of rules. In this paper, we discuss our study to apply...

This paper demonstrates that there is a strategic reason why software firms have followed consumers’ desire to drop software protection. We analyze software protection policies in a price-setting duopoly software industry selling differentiated software packages, where consumers’ preference for particular software is affected by the number of other consumers who ( ) legally or illegally use the...

2 Principal contact: This year our primary goal was to improve on the performance of our TREC-8 system. In addition to improving the system directly, we worked on a number of tools to aid our development. We continued our work on a tool for automatic scoring of system responses, a “judge” program. We designed a tool for doing regression testing of question answering systems. W...