BACKGROUND Rapid reviews expedite the knowledge synthesis process with the goal of providing timely information to healthcare decision-makers who want to use evidence-informed policy and practice approaches. A range of opinions and viewpoints on rapid reviews is thought to exist; however, no research to date has formally captured these views. This paper aims to explore evidence producer and kno...

Long-term outcome studies are frequently hindered by a decreasing frequency of patient follow-up with the treating surgeon over time. Whether this attrition represents a "loss of faith" in their index surgeon or the realities of a geographically mobile society has never been assessed in a population of patients undergoing spinal surgery. The purpose of this article is to determine the frequency...

This opinion paper presents a view of the scope for artificial intelligence in information retrieval. It considers four potential roles for AI in IR, evaluating AI from a realistic point of view and within a wide information management context. The conclusion is that AI has limited potential, not just because AI is itself insufficiently developed, but because many information management tasks a...

Aspect-oriented Fine-grained Opinion Extraction (AFOE) aims to extract the aspect terms, corresponding opinion terms and sentiment polarity in a target sentence. Most previous methods treat AFOE as word-level or span-level task, which ignore complementarity of these two tasks. To integrate merits information, we construct an end-to-end Span-based Multi-Table Labeling (SpanMTL) framework. SpanMT...

Perceptual learning improves performance on many tasks, from orientation discrimination to the identification of faces. Although conventional wisdom considered sensory cortices as hard-wired, the specificity of improvement achieved through perceptual learning indicates an involvement of early sensory cortices. These cortices might be more plastic than previously assumed, and both sum-potential ...

In this paper the authors propose an ICT architecture for the support of collaborative tasks within a dispersed sales force training process in multinational pharmaceutical companies. Four areas of collaboration are identified through case studies. Each of these areas comprises a certain number of collaborative tasks. The equivocality and complexity of these tasks have to be taken into account ...

In previous continuous opinion dynamics models based on bounded confidence assumptions, individuals can only influence each other’s opinions when those opinions are sufficiently close; subsequently, agents construct their self-opinions using opinions collected from other agents. All of these models lack the element of an agent’s inner self-attitude. In this paper we describe our proposal for a ...

A major gap exists between fusion oriented surgeons and Pain Management leaders, bridged by transforaminal endoscopic surgeons represented by the International Intradiscal and Transforaminal Therapy Society (formerly IITS). Current surgical philosophy by key opinion leaders (KOL’s) focus on attaining fusion of the painful spinal segment by emphasizing femoral-pelvic and overall spine sagittal a...

The changing circumstances in which parties compete in contemporary democracies, coupled with the changing circumstances in which governments now govern, have led to a widening of the traditional gap between representative and responsible government. Although it is generally seen as desirable that parties in government are both representative and responsible, these two characteristics are now b...

Auditory cortex is necessary for the perceptual detection of brief gaps in noise, but is not necessary for many other auditory tasks such as frequency discrimination, prepulse inhibition of startle responses, or fear conditioning with pure tones. It remains unclear why auditory cortex should be necessary for some auditory tasks but not others. One possibility is that auditory cortex is causally...