Review paper about prospective studies concerning the natural history of alcoholism. Emphasizing Vaillant and the impact of his contribution to the evolution of the concepts of harmful use and dependence, as well as its most important therapeutic implications. The fact that the abstinence rates, in the treatment of a severe dependence, almost remaining the same in the last twenty-five years is ...

Although an increasing number of studies of technological, institutional and organizational change refer to the concepts of path dependence and path creation, few attempts have been made to consider these concepts explicitly in their methodological accounts. This paper addresses this gap and contributes to the literature by developing a comprehensive methodology that originates from the concept...

The objective of this study is to provide an operational definition of principles with which well-formed ontologies should comply. We define 15 such principles, related to classification (e.g., no hierarchical cycles are allowed; concepts have a reasonable number of children), incompatible relationships (e.g., two concepts cannot stand both in a taxonomic and partitive relation), dependence amo...

We studied families of discrete dynamical systems obtained by using iteration functions given by weighted power mean in order to understand the role of hyperrapid convergence in nonlinear maps. Our interest resides in concepts related to the velocity of convergence. We introduce new concepts regarding the time of convergence and we provide an ordering of these families according to their depend...

Observations of apparently random phenomena are commonplace in science. However, randomness and Christian belief are often seen as incompatible, both by naturalists and by theists. This article argues that the scientific concept of randomness and the historic Christian understanding of God’s nature are compatible. It argues that the existence of randomness cannot be settled scientifically; neve...

This document presents the results of the seminar “Conceptual Architecture Patterns” of the winter term 2002 in the Hasso–Plattner–Institute. It is a compilation of the student’s elaborations dealing with some conceptual architecture patterns which can be found in literature. One important focus laid on the runtime structures and the presentation of the patterns.

We argue that visual, analogical representations of mathematical concepts can be used by automated theory formation systems to develop further concepts and conjectures in mathematics. We consider the role of visual reasoning in human development of mathematics, and consider some aspects of the relationship between mathematics and the visual, including artists using mathematics as inspiration fo...

The gestures children spontaneously produce when explaining a task predict whether they will subsequently learn that task. Why? Gesture might simply reflect a child's readiness to learn a particular task. Alternatively, gesture might itself play a role in learning the task. To investigate these alternatives, we experimentally manipulated children's gesture during instruction in a new mathematic...

In the search for principles of pattern generation in complex biological systems, an operational approach is presented that embraces both theory and experiment. The central mathematical concepts of self-organization in nonequilibrium systems (including order parameter dynamics, stability, fluctuations, and time scales) are used to show how a large number of empirically observed features of temp...