Abstract : Evolution, broadly construed, has become a powerful unifying concept in much of science -not only in the biological evolution of plants and animals, but also in the physical evolution of stars and planets, and the cultural evolution of society and its many varied products. This paper (1

This paper discusses the need for a clear set of system dependability concepts and terminology, adequate for situations in which there are uncertainties about system boundaries, the very complexity of systems (and their specifications, if they have any) is a major problem, judgements as to possible

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The notion of Timeline has been used informally in spacecraft operations software for some time, but it has not heretofore been formalized and unified either syntactically or semantically. We have formalized and unified the Timeline so that the commonality can be exploited to reduce the cost

. It offers a unified view of energy medicine modalities as well as a fresh perspective for biology and medicine and new questions for further research. 2.

Multiple sclerosis can follow very different patterns of evolution and variable rates of disability accumulation. This raises the issue whether it represents one or several distinct diseases. We assessed demographic and clinical characteristics in 1844 patients with multiple sclerosis that we categorized according to the classi-fication of Lublin and Reingold (1996) into 1066 (58%) relapsing–remitting, 496 (27%) secondary progressive, 109 (6%) progressive relapsing and 173 (9%) primary progressive cases of multiple sclerosis. Relapsing–remitting and secondary progressive cases shared similar age at disease onset (median = 28.7 versus 29.5 years; P = 0.21), initial symptoms of the relapsing–remitting phase, degree of recovery from the first neurological episode, and time from the first to the second episode. By contrast, disease duration was twice as long in secondary progressive than in relapsing–remitting cases (mean6 SD = 17.66 9.6 versus 8.76 8.6 years; P < 0.001). Progressive relapsing and primary progressive cases were essentially similar in their clinical char-acteristics. In patients experiencing a progressive course, median age at onset of progressive phase was similar in secondary progressive cases and in cases who were progressive from onset (39.1 versus 40.1 years; P = 0.47). The proportion of cases with superimposed relapses during progression was 40 % in both categories. Finally, the 1562 patients with an exacerbating–remitting initial course and the 282 patients with a progressive initial course of the disease were essentially similar with respect to the time course of disability accumulation from

. The authors develop an unified concept for blocks and processes in SDL. The current principles for a structural decomposition of a system into a set of nested block definitions have been applied to SDL processes. This enables a decomposition of processes into contained processes and opens also

Valiant’s learnability model is extended to learning classes of concepts defined by regions in Euclidean space E”. The methods in this paper lead to a unified treatment of some of Valiant’s results, along with previous results on distribution-free convergence of certain pattern recognition