92 www.medical-acupuncture.co.uk/aimintro.htm Editor – I wish to comment on two articles in the December issue of Acupuncture in Medicine which are both of interest to me. One of the articles is by Filshie et al on acupuncture for vasomotor symptoms, and the other is on a review of one of my own papers. I am commenting on these articles to stress the absolute necessity of a complete, thorough a...

We present a new algorithm for mining frequent itemsets. Past studies have proposed various algorithms and techniques for improving the efficiency of the mining task. We integrate a combination of these techniques into an algorithm which utilize those techniques dynamically according to the input dataset. The algorithm main features include depth first search with vertical compressed database, ...

Objectives To compare the effect of acupuncture (manual and electroacupuncture) with that of a nonpenetrating sham (‘placebo’ needle) in patients with osteoarthritic knee pain and disability who are blind to the treatment allocation. Methods Acupuncture naïve patients with symptomatic and radiological evidence of osteoarthritis of the knee were randomly allocated to a course of either acupunctu...

Background Myofascial trigger points are commonly described in humans, and many studies have shown abnormal spontaneous electrical activity, spike activity and local twitch responses at these sites. Myofascial trigger points have only rarely been described in horses, and studies of their electrophysiological characteristics have not previously been published. The objective of this study was to ...

Many machine learning tasks are just too hard to be solved with a single processor machine, no matter how efficient algorithms we use and how fast our hardware is. Luckily genetic programming is well suited for parallelization compared to standard serial algorithms. This paper describes the first parallel implementation of an AIM-GP system creating the potential for an extremely fast system. Th...

During the last five years a large number of randomised controlled clinical trials (RCTs) have been published on the efficacy of acupuncture in different conditions. In most of these studies verum is compared with sham acupuncture. In general both verum and sham have been found to be effective, and often with little reported difference in outcome. This has repeatedly led to the conclusion that ...

Abstract I defend the thesis that constitutive aim of inquiring into some question, Q , is improving one’s epistemic standing with respect to . Call this epistemic-improvement view consider and ultimately reject two alternative accounts inquiry—namely, inquiry aims at knowledge (justified) belief—and use my criticisms as a foil for clarifying motivating view. also pair normative theses about wh...

Purpose: The patient-centered medical home (PCMH, or medical home) aims to reinvigorate primary care and achieve the triple aim of better quality, lower costs, and improved experience of care. This study systematically reviews the early evidence on effectiveness of the PCMH. Methods: Out of 498 studies published or disseminated from January 2000 through September 2010 on U.S.-based intervention...