Theories of the lexical semantics of modal language live in the shadow of modal logic. Being a junior partner in this relationship has many advantages for us linguists: we get to make use of technical results that come from modal logic, and we benefit from the linguistic insights of smart philosophers, many of whom might not bother with natural language if they didn’t think that modal expressio...

n engl j med 367;17 nejm.org october 25, 2012 1651 in this study. Indeed, only 66 patients with mutated-PIK3CA tumors used aspirin after a diagnosis of colorectal cancer and only 3 of them died of colorectal cancer during the follow-up period. Assuming these findings are confirmed in large prospective studies, one may predict that the PIK3CA mutation status of colorectal tumors will become a us...

Many discussions enforce the need to encourage Society’s involvement and participation in public issues. This paper moves towards the idea that the use of conversations about public services encourages closer ties between Society and Government. It presents a tool to support discussion and share of information about public service processes. The tool also enables the use of information obtained...

This paper reviews the rational addiction (RA) model of Becker and Murphy (1988) (BM) to demonstrate how its conclusions are based on assumptions about model parameters. The BM analysis emphasises the existence of an unstable steady state but the presumption of instability imposes strong restrictions on model parameters and is unlikely. Moreover, with two steady states (one stable, one unstable...

'Would you tell me please, which way I should go from here?' 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. 'I don't much care where,' said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat. (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Lewis Carroll) In this issue, Wass et al. report a study of the reliability of the oral component of the Royal College of General Pract...