This paper presents a discussion of the literature on animal-assisted interventions and describes limitations surrounding current methodological quality. Benefits to human physical, psychological and social health cannot be empirically confirmed due to the methodological limitations of the existing body of research, and comparisons cannot validly be made across different studies. Without a soli...

AIM To evaluate methodological quality and the extent of concordance among meta-analysis and/or systematic reviews on surgical interventions for gastric cancer (GC). METHODS A comprehensive search of PubMed, Medline, EMBASE, the Cochrane library and the DARE database was conducted to identify the reviews comparing different surgical interventions for GC prior to April 2014. After applying inc...

Abstract We juxtapose (positive and negative) compositional effects of school-average achievement socioeconomic status (SES) on students’ academic self-concept (ASC), final high-school grade-point-average (GPA), long-term outcomes at age 26 (educational attainment educational occupational expectations). used doubly-latent multilevel models with a large, nationally representative longitudinal sa...

Islands across the world have evolved at the interface between land and sea, thus comprising landscapes and seascapes. Many islands have also been influenced by anthropogenic factors, which have given rise to mosaics of anthromes (sensu Ellis and Ramankutty). These elements of landscapes, seascapes, and cultural impacts in varied proportions, generate unique environments which merit a unique te...

This paper is concerned with some methodological and philosophical problems related both to the long-term objective of building human-like robots (like those ‘in the movies’) and shortand medium-term objectives of building robots with capabilities of more or less intelligent animals. In particular, we claim that organisms are informationprocessing machines, and thus information-processing conce...