This paper discusses the genesis of human DNA patents and the legal confusion and ramifications that ensued. Beginning in the mid-1970s with policymakers and lawmakers in the United States, confronted with an economy impacted by an oil crisis, inflation, growing and persistent unemployment and the fledgling biotechnology industry, this paper tracks the development of the practice until its banning in the US Supreme Court in June 2013. The paper raises serious questions regarding the relevance of a patent system—a system that, (...) as the patenting of naturally occurring biological materials demonstrates, is so easily manipulated through the use of legal contrivances. The paper outlines that potential future manipulation poses as a significant threat to the national economy and security of the United States if history is allowed to repeat itself in the context of biological materials. (shrink)

Ontologies represent the standard way to model the knowledge about specific domains. This holds also for the legal domain where several ontologies have been put forward to model specific kinds of legal knowledge. Both for standard users and for law scholars, it is often difficult to have an overall view on the existing alternatives, their main features and their interlinking with the other ontologies. To answer this need, in this paper, we address an analysis of the state-of-the-art in legal ontologies (...) and we characterise them along with some distinctive features. This paper aims to guide generic users and law experts in selecting the legal ontology that better fits their needs and in understanding its specificity so that proper extensions to the selected model could be investigated. (shrink)

This paper describes the Eunomos software, an advanced legal document and knowledge management system, based on legislative XML and ontologies. We describe the challenges of legal research in an increasingly complex, multi-level and multi-lingual world and how the Eunomos software helps users cut through the information overload to get the legal information they need in an organized and structured way and keep track of the state of the relevant law on any given topic. Using NLP tools to semi-automate the lower-skill (...) tasks makes this ambitious project a realistic commercial prospect as it helps keep costs down while at the same time allowing greater coverage. We describe the core system from workflow and technical perspectives, and discuss applications of the system for various user groups. (shrink)

The concepts of molecular structure and molecular shape are ubiquitous in the chemical literature, where they are often taken as synonyms, with unavoidable drawbacks in chemistry teaching. A third concept, molecular topology, is less frequent but it is a reference term in molecular research domains such as Quantitative Structure–Activity Relationships. The present paper proposes an epistemological analysis of these three notions, aimed at clarifying the nature of their relationship, as well as the contiguities and differences between them. At first, we (...) discuss the various acceptations of the terms molecular structure and molecular shape. Then, we examine some crucial milestones in the history of these concepts and we analyse the relationship between structure, shape and topology from an epistemological viewpoint. We point out the distinguishing features of each concept and we show that their semantic openness, that may be fruitful in a specialized context, turns into a source of incoherence and inaccuracy in the teaching context, fostered by the misleading use of these terms made by textbooks. Eventually, we propose a criterion fit to discriminate between the conceptual domains of molecular shape, molecular structure and molecular topology. (shrink)

Summary By introducing the concept of “invariants”, Koffka endowed perceptual psychology with a flexible theoretical tool, which is suitable for representing vision situations in which a definite part of the stimulus pattern is relevant but not sufficient to determine a corresponding part of the perceived scene. He characterised his “invariance principle” as a principle conclusively breaking free from the “old constancy hypothesis”, which rigidly surmised point-to-point relations between stimulus and perceptual properties. In this paper, we explain the basic terms and (...) assumptions implicit in Koffka’s concept, by representing them in a set-theoretic framework. Then, we highlight various aspects and implications of the concept in terms of answers to six separate questions: forms of invariants, heuristic paths to them, what is invariant in an invariant, roots of conditional indeterminacy, variability vs. indeterminacy, and overcoming of the indeterminacy. Lastly, we illustrate the lasting value and theoretical power of the concept, by showing that Koffka’s insights relating to it do occur in modern perceptual psychology and by highlighting its role in a model of perceptual transparency. (shrink)

Using a large sample of retail investors as well as experimental data we find that risk and ambiguity aversion are positively correlated. We provide evidence that a common link is decision mode: intuitive thinkers tolerate more risk and ambiguity than effortful reasoners. One interpretation is that intuitive thinking confers an advantage in risky or ambiguous situations. We present supporting lab and field evidence that intuitive thinkers outperform others in uncertain environments. Finally, we find that risk and ambiguity aversion vary with (...) individual characteristics and wealth. The wealthy are less risk averse but more ambiguity averse, which has implications for financial puzzles. (shrink)

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is universally acknowledged as the prominent reference textbook for the diagnosis and assessment of psychiatric diseases. However, since the publication of its first version in 1952, controversies have been raised concerning its reliability and validity and the need for other novel clinical tools has emerged. Currently the DSM is in its fourth edition and a new fifth edition is expected for release in 2013, in an intense intellectual debate and in a (...) call for new proposals. (shrink)

A review of the achievements of Fr. Busa over the course of his 60 years of work in the area of computational linguistics: internal hypertexts, the systematization of allographs, lemmatization, homographs and typologies; the lexical system; the laws of economy for graphemes, for semantic typology, for heterogeneity among terms, and of the two lexical hemispheres. Finally, the project of disciplined languages is mentioned, a response to the linguistic challenge resulting from informational globalization.

We introduce a reciprocity criterion for coalition formation among goal-directed agents, which we call the indecomposable do-ut-des property. It refines an older reciprocity property, called the do-ut-des or give-to-get property by considering the fact that agents prefer to form coalitions whose components cannot be formed independently. A formal description of this property is provided as well as an analysis of algorithms and their complexity. We provide an algorithm to decide whether a coalition has the desired property, and we show that (...) the problem to verify whether a single coalition satisfies the property is tractable. Moreover, we provide an algorithm to search all the sub-coalitions of a given coalition satisfying the new property. Even if this problem is not computationally tractable, we show that in several cases, also the complexity of this problem may decrease considerably. (shrink)

1. Critica de capire e altri scritti. 2. Scritti kantiani. 3. L'analitica trascendentale. 4. Il problema della scienza e il giudizio storico.

1. Teoria del diritto -- 2. Teoria della democrazia -- 3. La sintassi del diritto.

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, “I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say.” Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate (...) background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to “educate the human heart as God made it.” In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom. (shrink)

Simple assumptions represent a decisive reason to prefer one theory to another in everyday scientific praxis. But this praxis has little philosophical justification, since there exist many notions of simplicity, and those that can be defined precisely strongly depend on the language in which the theory is formulated. The language dependence is a natural feature—to some extent—but it is also believed to be a fatal problem, because, according to a common general argument, the simplicity of a theory is always trivial (...) in a suitably chosen language. But, this trivialization argument is typically either applied to toy-models of scientific theories or applied with little regard for the empirical content of the theory. This paper shows that the trivialization argument fails, when one considers realistic theories and requires their empirical content to be preserved . In fact, the concepts that enable a very simple formulation, are not necessarily measurable, in general. Moreover, the inspection of a theory describing a chaotic billiard shows that precisely those concepts that naturally make the theory extremely simple are provably not measurable. This suggests that—whenever a theory possesses sufficiently complex consequences—the constraint of measurability prevents too simple formulations in any language. This explains why the scientists often regard their assessments of simplicity as largely unambiguous. In order to reveal a cultural bias in the scientists’ assessment, one should explicitly identify different characterizations of simplicity of the assumptions that lead to different theory selections. General arguments are not sufficient. (shrink)