The Importance of Program Evaluation: How Can it be Applied to Diverse Genetics Education Settings?

The role of a genetic counselor often entails providing education to patient, community and/or health professional groups. While counseling supervision assists genetic counselors to be reflective about their clinical work and to enhance clinical skills, evaluation is a rather analogous process in the provision of education. Program evaluation of education activities can be applied to provide information about the needs of the target group (needs assessment), the delivery of the program (process evaluation) as well as determining the extent to which the education activity has met its intended aims (summative evaluation). Evaluation assists the educator to assess the impact of their program and provides an evidence base about genetics education. Although program evaluation can be a complex activity, the tools are ones that can be used by individuals to evaluate single or simple education activities. The components of evaluation are discussed with reference to genetic counseling practice and three very different examples of actual evaluations are provided to illustrate the diversity of evaluation strategy and programs to which it can be applied.     

CoTO: A novel approach for fuzzy aggregation of semantic similarity measures

Semantic similarity measurement aims to determine the likeness between two text expressions that use different lexicographies for representing the same real object or idea. There are a lot of semantic similarity measures for addressing this problem. However, the best results have been achieved when aggregating a number of simple similarity measures. This means that after the various similarity values have been calculated, the overall similarity for a pair of text expressions is computed using an aggregation function of these individual semantic similarity values. This aggregation is often computed by means of statistical functions. In this work, we present CoTO (Consensus or Trade-Off) a solution based on fuzzy logic that is able to outperform these traditional approaches.     

THE SUPERNATURAL AS LANGUAGE GAME

Abstract. For many in the Anglo‐American tradition of language analysis, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the great progenitor of twentieth‐century philosophy of language, showed conclusively that theological terms lack any referent in reality and therefore represent a discourse that can do no more than manifest the existential attitudes that speakers take toward reality as a whole. To think that such terms represent more is to be bewitched by the use of language. Is it possible, however, that theological language references a fundamental human drive? In this article I reexamine the dyad of nature and supernature from the perspective of Wittgenstein's philosophy. Perhaps surprisingly, Wittgenstein's thought on the subject offers much more than his famous, terse aphorism at the conclusion of his first masterwork, the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus ([1921] 1961, 74, §7): “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Furthermore, the basic Tractarian drive to determine the relationship between language and reality, which is redirected but not extinguished in Wittgenstein's second, divergent, opus, the Philosophical Investigations ([1953] 1967), may be the place for a renewed examination of what the supernatural means in human discourse. Does talk of God give expression to the fundamental transcendence of human knowledge? Is it a language game we can eschew?     

Mathematical Fuzzy Logic – What It Can Learn from Mostowski and Rasiowa

Important works of Mostowski and Rasiowa dealing with many-valued logic are analyzed from the point of view of contemporary mathematical fuzzy logic.A version of this paper has been presented during the conference Trends in Logic III, dedicated to the memory of A. MOSTOWSKI, H. RASIOWA and C. RAUSZER, and held in Warsaw and Ruciane-Nida from 23rd to 25th September 2005.     

Pure Extensions, Proof Rules, and Hybrid Axiomatics

In this paper we argue that hybrid logic is the deductive setting most natural for Kripke semantics. We do so by investigating hybrid axiomatics for a variety of systems, ranging from the basic hybrid language (a decidable system with the same complexity as orthodox propositional modal logic) to the strong Priorean language (which offers full first-order expressivity).We show that hybrid logic offers a genuinely first-order perspective on Kripke semantics: it is possible to define base logics which extend automatically to a wide variety of frame classes and to prove completeness using the Henkin method. In the weaker languages, this requires the use of non-orthodox rules. We discuss these rules in detail and prove non-eliminability and eliminability results. We also show how another type of rule, which reflects the structure of the strong Priorean language, can be employed to give an even wider coverage of frame classes. We show that this deductive apparatus gets progressively simpler as we work our way up the expressivity hierarchy, and conclude the paper by showing that the approach transfers to first-order hybrid logic.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the fifth conference on Advances in Modal Logic (AiML 2004) in Manchester. We would like to thank Maarten Marx for his comments on an early draft and Agnieszka Kisielewska for help with the proof reading.Special Issue Ways of Worlds II. On Possible Worlds and Related Notions Edited by Vincent F. Hendricks and Stig Andur Pedersen     

From Modal Discourse to Possible Worlds

The possible-worlds semantics for modality says that a sentence is possibly true if it is true in some possible world. Given classical prepositional logic, one can easily prove that every consistent set of propositions can be embedded in a ‘maximal consistent set’, which in a sense represents a possible world. However the construction depends on the fact that standard modal logics are finitary, and it seems false that an infinite collection of sets of sentences each finite subset of which is intuitively ‘possible’ in natural language has the property that the whole set is possible. The argument of the paper is that the principles needed to shew that natural language possibility sentences involve quantification over worlds are analogous to those used in infinitary modal logic.     

Definability and Interpolation in Non-Classical Logics

Algebraic approach to study of classical and non-classical logical calculi was developed and systematically presented by Helena Rasiowa in [48], [47]. It is very fruitful in investigation of non-classical logics because it makes possible to study large families of logics in an uniform way. In such research one can replace logics with suitable classes of algebras and apply powerful machinery of universal algebra. In this paper we present an overview of results on interpolation and definability in modal and positive logics,and also in extensions of Johansson's minimal logic. All these logics are strongly complete under algebraic semantics. It allows to combine syntactic methods with studying varieties of algebras and to flnd algebraic equivalents for interpolation and related properties. Moreover, we give exhaustive solution to interpolation and some related problems for many families of propositional logics and calculi. This paper is a version of the invited talk given by the author at the conference Trends in Logic III, dedicated to the memory of A. MOSTOWSKI, H. RASIOWA and C. RAUSZER, and held in Warsaw and Ruciane-Nida from 23rd to 25th September 2005. Presented by Jacek Malinowski     

Beyond Rasiowa's Algebraic Approach to Non-classical Logics

This paper reviews the impact of Rasiowa's well-known book on the evolution of algebraic logic during the last thirty or forty years. It starts with some comments on the importance and influence of this book, highlighting some of the reasons for this influence, and some of its key points, mathematically speaking, concerning the general theory of algebraic logic, a theory nowadays called Abstract Algebraic Logic. Then, a consideration of the diverse ways in which these key points can be generalized allows us to survey some issues in the development of the field in the last twenty to thirty years. The last part of the paper reviews some recent lines of research that in some way transcend Rasiowa's approach. I hope in this way to give the reader a general view of Rasiowa's key position in the evolution of Algebraic Logic during the twentieth century. This paper is an extended version of the invited talk given by the author at the conference Trends in Logic III, dedicated to the memory of A. MOSTOWSKI, H. RASIOWA and C. RAUSZER, and held in Warsaw and Ruciane-Nida from 23rd to 25th September 2005. Presented by Jacek Malinowski     

Subdirectly Irreducible Residuated Semilattices and Positive Universal Classes

CRS(fc) denotes the variety of commutative residuated semilattice-ordered monoids that satisfy (x ⋀ e)^k ≤ (x ⋀ e)^k+1. A structural characterization of the subdi-rectly irreducible members of CRS(k) is proved, and is then used to provide a constructive approach to the axiomatization of varieties generated by positive universal subclasses of CRS(k). Dedicated to the memory of Willem Johannes Blok