One of the key points addressed by Per Bak in his models of brain function was that biological neural systems must be able not just to learn, but also to adapt—to quickly change their behaviour in response to a changing environment. I discuss this in the context of various simple learning rules and adaptive problems, centred around the Chialvo-Bak ‘minibrain’ model [Neurosci. 90 (1999) 1137–1148].

It is well-known that there are polysemous words like sentence whose ‘‘meaning’’ or ‘‘sense’’ depends on the context of use. We have recently reported on two new word-sense disambiguation systems, one trained on bilingual material (the Canadian Hansards) and the other trained on monolingual material (Roget’s Thesaurus and Grolier’s Encyclopedia). As this work was nearing completion, we observed...

We describe a fatal case of paraquat poisoning as a result of per vaginal contact with the herbicide. Death occurred 18 days later from hepatic, renal and respiratory failure.

24 and close to that achieved by. Berliner and McConnell 1] deal with the diiculty in nding optimistic and pessimistic bounds on the real values of game-tree positions. However, their results are not applicable for multi-model search where we look for bounds on the sum of two functions. The sum-bounds for a multi-model search reeect the maximal possible diierence between the subjective evaluati...

People increasingly live their lives in an online setting. This observation is fundamental to a growing body of work that aims at describing, understanding and exploiting the abundance of online personal information. The strong potential of social media platforms for understanding people’s behavior has already played an important role in scientific literature and as we increasingly integrate so...

one of the most important parameters essential in different water supplies, treatment, transfer and distribution projects, is water consumption per capita. but unfortunately in many cases, statistics and date available in texts or irrelevant samplings are used. varamin is a region located in south east of tehran. among the most important problems in this region, insufficiency of personnel prolo...