324 British Journal of General Practice, June 2013 My next patient walks in confidently wearing a big smile. All the training I’ve done in non-verbal communication kicks in and I suspect that his depression is starting to get better. He hands me a PHQ-9 with a flourish which confirms my initial impressions. I’m usually sceptical of these scoring tools, but this is no ordinary PHQ-9, this a luxu...

Coset enumeration, based on the methods described by Todd & Coxeter, is one of the basic tools for investigating nitely presented groups. The process is not well understood, and various pathological presentations of, for example, the trivial group have been suggested as challenge problems. Here we consider one such presentation. We show that it is much easier than it rst appears, albeit at the ...

In this paper, Finite-State-Automata (FSA) and theorem-proving approaches to spoken dialogue systems (SLDS) are contrasted to each other. FSA are too rigid to deal with unpredictable user reactions, such as corrections or counter-questions, whereas plan-based approaches are usually too complex to be effectively used, given the unreliability of word recognition and the elliptical and unconven-ti...

We give in this paper a different and simpler proof of the tractability of Mal’tsev contraints.

The purpose of this paper is to give actuaries an easy‐to‐use approach to modelling stochastic mortality. Whilst the approach described can be used with tailor‐made projections, it can also be applied to published base tables and improvement factors. The methodology is not particularly new or ground‐breaking; however, it is hopefully accessible and will allow actuaries to use a stochastic app...

Standard state-machine replication involves consensus on a sequence of totally ordered requests through, for example, the Paxos protocol. Serialized request processing seriously limits our ability to leverage prevalent multicore servers. This tension between concurrency and consistency is not inherent because the total-ordering of requests is merely a simplifying convenience that is unnecessary...

This paper describes the interaction and object representation features of the visual database editor ESCHER which is based on the nested relational data model. In particular we like to indicate the multiple two-dimensional cursors and their way of moving in and out of nested objects, cut-and-paste operations, the QBE-like query mechanism, interactive schema design, and the unusual, self-refere...

With the explosion in the number of images and videos on the Internet and ongoing amassing of huge volumes of visual data from digital cameras and mobile devices, we are unknowingly logging our own history. Consider that the number of digital cameras and camera phones in the world has surpassed one billion and that 500 billion consumer photos are taken each year. Given the world’s population of...

eukocytes have a better chance of sticking to neighboring cells with the right ligands if they rotate on their way by, based on results from Dwir et al. (page 649). Flowing leukocytes are captured via L-selectin interactions with carbohydrate ligands on vessel walls and subsets of other leukocytes. L-selectin is an unusual adhesive molecule—shear stress improves its adherance to ligands, wherea...