Communitarian philosophers understand morality as emerging in communities through the interaction between agents in practices. At first sight, communitarianism therefore seems to provide a suitable perspective for conceptualising morality in economics, since the economy might be regarded as a sequence of such practices in communities of business, households, and trading. But several well-known ...

Amniocentesis, a procedure which can detect during pregnancy whether or not the fetus will develop into a mongol or one affected by other serious chromosomal defects, if given to all pregnant women aged 40 and over, would save both human suffering and economic loss to the community. The procedure is not at present widely used for various reasons, not all of them medical, and, if the test result...

LADII (leukocyte adhesion deficiency type II)/CDGIIc (congenital disorder of glycosylation type IIc) is a rare autosomal recessive disease characterized by leukocyte adhesion deficiency as well as severe neurological and developmental abnormalities. It is caused by mutations in the Golgi GDP-fucose transporter, resulting in a reduction of fucosylated antigens on the cell surface. A recent study...

Conservative recent estimates of the Web’s current size refer to its 10 billion documents and a growth rate that tops 60 terabytes of new information per day (Roush 2004). In 2000 the entire World-Wide Web consisted of just 21 terabytes of information, now it grows by 3 times this every single day (Lyman & Varian 2003). This growth frames the information overload problem that is threatening to ...

Intelligent agency requires some ability to predict the future. An agent must ask itself what is presently its best course of action given what it now knows about what the world will be like when it intends to act. This paper presents a system that uses a probabilistic model to reason about the e ects of an agent's proposed actions on a dynamic and uncertain world, computing the probability tha...

The advent of managed health care has focused attention on the methodology for analyzing patient health care costs. Standard methods of analysis apply to a varying degree, but there are unique challenges inherent in constructing and analyzing cost data. Adjustments in basic statistical procedures are necessary to account for changes in the value of money over time, marked skewness due to catast...

Extracting and Managing Structured Web Data Michael John Cafarella Co-Chairs of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Oren Etzioni Computer Science and Engineering Professor Dan Suciu Computer Science and Engineering The Web contains a large amount of structured data embedded in natural language text, two-dimensional tables, and other forms. This “Structured Web” of data is vast, messy, and dive...

We are working on a project aimed at building next generation analyst support tools that focus analysts’ attention on the most critical and novel information found within the data,, thus helping analysts deal with the information overload problem. .This paper discusses the Case-based Reasoning for Knowledge Discovery (CBR for KD) which is designed to support the Internet-based search and inform...

The information resources on the Web are vast, but much of the Web is based on a browsing paradigm that requires someone to actively seek information. Instead, one would like to have information agents that continuously attend to one's personal information needs. Such agents need to be able to extract the relevant information from web sources, integrate data across sites, and execute efficientl...

Web metasearch requires a mechanism for combining rank-ordered lists of ratings returned by multiple search engines in response to a given user query. We view this as being analogous to the need for combining degrees of belief in probabilistic and uncertain reasoning in artificial intelligence. This paper describes a practical method for performing web metasearch based on a novel transformation...