This quasi-experimental study investigated the effect of bottom-up and top-down instructional approaches on English as a foreign language (EFL) vocabulary recall and retention. To this end, 44 high school students from two intact classes were assigned to bottom-up (n = 21) and top-down (n = 23) groups. The participants were exposed to 20 hours of explicit vocabulary instruction during 10 weeks ...

Sequential decision theory formally solves the problem of rational agents in uncertain worlds if the true environmental prior probability distribution is known. Solomonoff’s theory of universal induction formally solves the problem of sequence prediction for unknown prior distribution. We combine both ideas and get a parameter-free theory of universal Artificial Intelligence. We give strong arg...

We put forward a framework for cosmology that combines the string landscape with no boundary initial conditions. In this framework, amplitudes for alternative histories for the universe are calculated with final boundary conditions only. This leads to a top down approach to cosmology, in which the histories of the universe depend on the precise question asked. We study the observational consequ...

The mechanization and automation of combination of logics, expressive ontologies and notions of context are prominent current challenge problems. I propose to approach these challenge topics from the perspective of classical higher-order logic. From this perspective these topics are closely related and a common, uniform solution appears in reach.

Malaria continues to be a great burden on both morbidity and mortality as well as economic development across the world. In highly endemic areas, such as Nigeria, malaria can claim hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of dollars yearly. Typically, when selecting intervention strategies to control malaria, research is focused on the cost-effectiveness and general applicability of individu...

Detecting multiple planes in images is a challenging problem, but one with many applications. Recent work such as J-Linkage and Ordered Residual Kernels have focussed on developing a domain independent approach to detect multiple structures. These multiple structure detection methods are then used for estimating multiple homographies given feature matches between two images. Features participat...

A multi-name credit derivative is a security tied to an underlying portfolio of corporate bonds or other credit-sensitive securities. It enables investors to buy and sell protection against the default losses in the portfolio. The value of a multiname derivative depends on the distribution of portfolio loss at multiple horizons. Intensity-based models of the loss point process that are specifie...

This paper introduces a systematic approach to organizing the discipline of clinical chemistry. The approach is called a top-down systems approach because it starts at the top with the most general concepts and works down through less general concepts to the most specific details and techniques. The hypothesis is that the discipline can be organized into hierarchical levels of functional proces...