OBJECTIVE Understanding cultural dimensions concerning Mexican and Colombian healthcare workers suffering from dengue to produce information and elements for healthcare and prevention. METHOD This was a cognitive anthropological study. Purposive sampling was used to select 197 healthcare workers in Morelia, Mexico, and Santiago de Cali, Colombia; free associations lists and pile sorting were ...

In the past decade, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was used in many NLP approaches with sometimes remarkable success. However, its abilities to express semantic relatedness have been not yet systematically investigated. In this work, the semantic similarity measures as provided by LSA (based on a term-by-term matrix) are compared with human free associations. Three tasks have been performed: (i...

Using a combined experimental and theoretical approach named binding-unbinding correlation spectroscopy (BUCS), we describe the two-dimensional kinetics of interactions between fibrinogen and the integrin αIIbβ3, the ligand-receptor pair essential for platelet function during hemostasis and thrombosis. The methodology uses the optical trap to probe force-free association of individual surface-a...

This qualitative study was performed based on the Social Representations Theory, using a structured approach. The objective was to analyze the social representations of intensive care for professionals who work in mobile intensive care units, given the determination of the central nucleus and the peripheral system. This study included the participation of 73 health care professionals from an Em...

OBJECTIVES to analyze the process of the constitution and evolution of social representations and practices referent to aids, based on studies carried out in the last eleven years among health professionals. METHOD a comparison of representational structures of aids in different decades was undertaken, accompanied by a study of the silent zone, involving health professionals. Data collection ...

We consider several open problems of Karhum aki, Mignosi, and Plandowski, cf. [KMP], concerning the expressibility of languages and relations as solutions of word equations. We show rst that the (scattered) subword relation is not expressible. Then, we consider the set of k-power free nite words and solve it negativelly for all nontrivial integer values of k. Finally, we consider the Fibonacci...

An asymmetric one-mode data matrix has rows and columns that correspond to the same set of objects. However, the roles of the objects frequently differ for the rows and the columns. For example, in a visual alphabetic confusion matrix from an experimental psychology study, both the rows and columns pertain to letters of the alphabet. Yet the rows correspond to the presented stimulus letter, whe...

We present a simple model that allows the extraction of semantic similarity relations from free association information. In our study, we use two acclaimed databases of linguistic relationships between pairs of words, feature-based and association-based. We apply a complex networks methodology to disentangle feature based relationships on top of a free association network. As a consequence, we ...

Cognitive processing models of risky sexual behaviour have proliferated in the two decades since the first reporting of HIV/AIDS, but far less attention has been paid to individual and group representations of the epidemic and the relationship between these representations and reported sexual behaviours. In this study, 494 business people and medics from Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland and Ru...