“They Think We Have No Ears”

[Who do they think we are?].

How many people think they have hay fever, and what they do about it.

Little is known about the number of people who perceive themselves to be sufferers of hay fever. This study investigated how many people between the ages of 15 and 59 years perceived themselves to be hay fever sufferers and how they treated themselves. The study was carried out in a general practice in Arnold, Nottingham, using a postal questionnaire, to which the response rate was 77% from a s...

Should recognizers have ears?

Recently, techniques motivated by human auditory perception are being applied in main-stream speech technology and there seems to be renewed interest in implementing more knowledge of human speech communication into a design of a speech recognizer. The paper discusses the author's experience with applying auditory knowledge to automatic recognition of speech. It advances the notion that the rea...

Editorial: Adhesive dentistry - no future? We don't think so!

Maybe it was due to a lack of printable topics for newspapers as usual at the beginning of a new year, but in early January we had several cumulated press interviews regarding regenerative issues in restorative dentistry. Focusing on scientific papers dealing with stem cells, dentin and enamel regeneration, several journalists from different newspapers and journals raised similar questions, whi...

No eye for ears

A 50-year-old man was seen for chronic renal failure of unknown origin. He had been diagnosed in 1981 and monitored continuously while his renal functions had deteriorated slowly; his current glomerular filtration rate was 17 ml/min. On this occasion, he was seen by a new doctor who observed that he was hard of hearing. The day was unusually bright and sunny; hence lateral cervical scars, 3 cm ...