Is anybody out there?

Rural surgery in British Columbia: is there anybody out there?

OBJECTIVE To document surgical procedures performed in British Columbia between 1996 and 2001 at rural hospital sites with no resident specialist surgeons and to define the scope of practice of general practitioner (GP)-surgeons at these small-volume surgical sites. METHODS We obtained data from published information available in the medical directories for British Columbia and from the Popul...

Is There Anybody Out There? The Effects of Legislators’ Communication with their Constituents

Are legislators responsive to their constituents in their public communication? To what extent are they able to shape voters’ preferences, as expressed by the issues they discuss? We address this twofold question with an analysis of all tweets sent by U.S. Members of Congress and a random sample of their followers from January to August 2013. Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, we extrac...

Is there anybody out there? Neural circuits of threat detection in vertebrates

Avoiding or escaping a predator is arguably one of the most important functions of a prey's brain, hence of most animals' brains. Studies on fear conditioning have greatly advanced our understanding of the circuits that regulate learned defensive behaviours. However, animals possess a multitude of threat detection mechanisms, from hardwired circuits that ensure innate responses to predator cues...

Does Anybody Out There Understand the Requirements Process ?

Is Anybody out There? the Detection of Intelligent and Generic Language-like Features

The authors present an overview of their language-detection research to date, along with considerations for further research. The research focuses on the unique structure of communication, seeking to identify whether a given signal has features within it that display intelligence or language-like characteristics, and comparing this with current methods used in searches for extra-terrestrial int...