Memory consistency models are notorious for being difficult to define precisely, to reason about, and to verify. More than a decade of effort has gone into nailing down the definitions of the ARM and IBM Power memory models, and yet there still remain aspects of those models which (perhaps surprisingly) remain unresolved to this day. In response to these complexities, there has been somewhat of...

OBJECTIVE The best combination of questions to define asthma in epidemiological asthma studies is not known. We summarized the operational definitions of asthma used in prevalence studies and empirically assess how asthma prevalence estimates vary depending on the definition used. METHODS We searched the Thomson Reuters ISI Web of knowledge and included (1) cross-sectional studies (2) on asth...

While controlled trials with SRIs have demonstrated a selective efficacy in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), up to 40-60% of patients do not have a satisfactory outcome. Non-response to treatment in OCD is associated with serious social disability. There are a large number of non-responsive patients, and they are difficult to cluster due to ambiguities in the diagnostic criteria, possibilit...

While a low-level, operational definition of a language’s semantics is a straightforward way of specifying the behaviour of programs written in that language, it is not necessarily very suitable for formal activities such as program verification. This is clearly the case with languages such as C, where the language definition is complicated by much tedious detail. However, the work described he...