An authentic sickness history is the vantage point for juxtaposing a biomedical and a biographical-phenomenological reading. What, in a biomedical framework, appears to be a longstanding state of comorbidity of different and unrelated types of diseases is rendered transparent in a biographical reading. This particular reading, evidencing the shortcomings of a biomedical framework regarding iden...

Thirty-Nine prizes and awards will be presented during special sessions at three spring meetings of the Society: the 2014 March Meeting, March 3-7, in Denver, CO, the 2014 April Meeting, April 5-8, in Savannah, GA, and the 2014 Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics Meeting, June 2-6, in Madison, WI. Citations and biographical information for each recipient follow. Additional biographical inform...

We present the results of Michigan’s participation in DUC 2004. Our system, MEAD, ranked as one of the top systems in four of the five tasks. We introduce our new feature, LexPageRank, a new measure of sentence centrality inspired by the prestige concept in social networks. LexPageRank gave promising results in multi-document summarization. Our approach for Task 5, biographical summarization, w...

Traditional election forecasting models are estimated from time-series data on relevant variables and that limits the type and number of variables that can be used. Index models do not suffer from the same restrictions. We used as many as 60 biographical variables to create an index model for forecasting U.S. Presidential Elections. For each candidate, we simply counted the number of variables ...

The year was 1975; the first issue of Journal of Clinical Microbiology (JCM) was published. The advertisers included Microbiological Associates, Clinical Sciences, Inc., and General Diagnostics. Fifty U.S. dollars bought a 1-year subscription. The subjects of the published articles included Proteus morganii, a novel satellite test for Haemophilus spp., and rapid hippurate hydrolysis testing of ...

Albert Szent-Györgyi was a Hungarian biochemist and physiologist. He identified the structure and function of vitamin C, naming it as ascorbic acid. His research on cellular respiration and oxidation provided the basis for Krebs' citric acid cycle. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1937. With his collaborators, he discovered the biochemical basis of muscle contractility, isolating the basic pro...

The concept that infectious (and other) diseases emerge and reemerge is not new, and neither is the search for causes of disease emergence. However, societies frequently overlook or forget that microbes evolve, adapt, and emerge in response to nonmicrobial and even nonbiologic changes in the physical and social environment. Sometimes we need to be rudely reminded of this lesson. Two scientists ...

We present a method for discovering abstract event classes in biographies, based on a probabilistic latent-variable model. Taking as input timestamped text, we exploit latent correlations among events to learn a set of event classes (such as BORN, GRADUATES HIGH SCHOOL, and BECOMES CITIZEN), along with the typical times in a person’s life when those events occur. In a quantitative evaluation at...