If It Wasn’t Documented, It Didn’t Happen . . . or Did It?

How did we let it happen?

Born and raised on the outskirts of London, England, Joellyn Sheehy was home educated until her late teens, when she traveled to the U.S.A. for a year of high school and eventually college. She graduated summa cum laude from Union College in May 2014 with a B.S. degree in International Rescue and Relief and is presently employed with the college’s academic administration. Her areas of study inc...

Did It Happen? The Pragmatic Complexity of Veridicality Assessment

Natural language understanding depends heavily on assessing veridicality—whether events mentioned in a text are viewed as happening or not—but little consideration is given to this property in current relation and event extraction systems. Furthermore, the work that has been done has generally assumed that veridicality can be captured by lexical semantic properties whereas we show that context ...

Replacing Dopamine Neurons in Parkinson’s Disease: How did it happen?

The efforts to develop a dopamine cell replacement therapy for Parkinson's disease have spanned over more than three decades. Based on almost 10 years of transplantation studies in animal models, the first patients receiving grafts of fetal-derived dopamine neuroblasts were operated in Lund in 1987. Over the following two decades, a total of 18 patients were transplanted and followed closely by...

It Can't Happen Here?

Recently, it was announced that the Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to three West German scientists, Drs. Harmut Michel, Johann Deisenhofer, and Robert Huber, for their work on the x-ray crystallographic analysis of photosynthetic reaction centers from bacteria. This deserved award marks the third time in the past 2 decades that Nobel committees have recognized important plantrelated rese...

It shouldn't have happened, but it did.