Fuzzy logic for decision support in chronic care

Computerized clinical guidelines can provide significant benefits in terms of health outcomes and costs, however, their effective computer implementation presents significant problems. Vagueness and ambiguity inherent in natural language (textual) clinical guidelines makes them problematic for formulating automated alerts or advice. Fuzzy logic allows us to formalize the treatment of vagueness in a decision support architecture. In care plan on-line (CPOL), an intranet-based chronic disease care planning system for general practitioners (GPs) in use in South Australia, we formally treat fuzziness in interpretation of quantitative data, formulation of recommendations and unequal importance of clinical indicators. We use expert judgment on cases, as well as direct estimates by experts, to optimize aggregation operators and treat heterogeneous combinations of conjunction and disjunction that are present in the natural language decision rules formulated by specialist teams.

Who gets the cats...you or me? Analyzing contact and residence issues regarding pets upon divorce or separation

Mills and Akers outline the statistical incidence of pet ownership and people's need for domestic pets, discuss ownership or property rights in domestic pets, outline the criteria used by the courts when ruling on implied contact and residence rights regarding domestic pets upon the irretrievable breakdown between the "owners" of the particular pets, and highlight both the shortcomings in the existing law and possible means of overcoming those shortcomings.

Macleod and the offence of defrauding the company in one-person businesses: the divergence between legal principle and logic widens

The recent High Court decision in Macleod v R establishes that a director and sole shareholder may be convicted of fraudulently applying a company's property even though the person has consented to the personal use of the company's property. It is contended that while this decision is consistent with the weight of precedent, it is wrong in principle. The decision implies that corporations are not only separate legal entities, but that they are highly virtuous legal entities -- incapable of being imbued with the dishonest intentions and activities of the individuals controlling the company.

Peer groups, power and pedagogy : the limits of an educational paradigm of separation

In contrast to the plethora of literature that suggests that the increasing gulf between teachers and young people is due to the shifting interests and expectations of young people, the focus of this paper is on the roles teachers play in this relationship. Provoking interest is a concern that some of the assumptions that underpin 'mainstream' pedagogic theory and practice might actually contribute, albeit unwittingly, to hardening rather than softening the communication divide. Drawing on an incident that took place between a group of 7–8 year old males in a primary school setting, the authors reveal the limits of a teaching paradigm that encourages teachers to adopt authoritative positions from which to separate and individualise student behaviour. In theoretical terms, they argue that the application of this paradigm asserts an exaggerated notion of agency to individuals in the construction of identity. In practical terms it promotes processes that individualise behaviour as a way of dealing with miscreance. Together these manifest themselves as a 'pedagogy of separation'. The process of building more productive pedagogic relationships, it is concluded, needs to begin with teachers better recognising and engaging with the collective investments of young people.

A new second-order method for blind signal separation from dynamic mixtures

This paper presents a new approach to separate colored stationary signals mixed by convolutive channels. A cost function is proposed by employing linear constraint to the demixing vectors. The linear constraint is shown to be sufficient for avoiding trivial solution. The minimization of the cost function is performed using the Lagrangian method. Simulation results demonstrate the performance of the algorithm.

Blind source separation based on phase and frequency redundancy of cyclostationary signals

This paper presents a new method for blind source separation by exploiting phase and frequency redundancy of cyclostationary signals in a complementary way. It requires a weaker separation condition than those methods which only exploit the phase diversity or the frequency diversity of the source signals. The separation criterion is to diagonalize a polynomial matrix whose coefficient matrices consist of the correlation and cyclic correlation matrices, at time delay .TAU. = 0, of multiple measurements. An algorithm is proposed to perform the blind source separation. Computer simulation results illustrate the performance of the new algorithm in comparison with the existing ones.

The separation of ownership and control under a happiness-based theory of the corporation

Explores the happiness-based theory of the corporation, suggesting that there is no conflict between the pursuance of economic and social objectives on the basis that their interplay is required to facilitate shareholder happiness. Considers: (1) the Berle-Means hypothesis and the separation of ownership and control, the dominant governance structure for large companies; (2) a happiness-based perspective on the separation; and (3) law reform applicable to a happiness-based theory. Argues that the separation of ownership and control is not in shareholders' best interests because the structure is not conducive to the happiness of individual shareholders and should be reformed.

Fuzzy logic based metric in software testing

How to provide cost-effective strategies for Software Testing has been one of the research focuses in Software Engineering for a long time. Many researchers in Software Engineering have addressed the effectiveness and quality metric of Software Testing, and many interesting results have been obtained. However, one issue of paramount importance in software testing – the intrinsic imprecise and uncertain relationships within testing metrics – is left unaddressed. To this end, a new quality and effectiveness measurement based on fuzzy logic is proposed. The software quality features and analogy-based reasoning are discussed, which can deal with quality and effectiveness consistency between different test projects. Experimental results are also provided to verify the proposed measurement.