We have explored pattern recognition by examining how observers identify letters. We expected 26-way classification of familiar forms to challenge the popular notion of independent feature detection (“probability summation”), but find instead that this theory parsimoniously accounts for our results. We measured the contrast required for identification of a letter briefly presented in visual noi...

The preliminary results were validated in a prospective series of 353 women. The only difference was that two fingerbreadths tallied with a gestational age of 8 9 weeks (instead of 9 10 weeks). There were 18 false-negatives (5.1%) and 31 false-positives (8.8%). The false-negatives occurred at a mean gestational age of 7.9 weeks (95% confidence interval (CI): 7.1, 8.7). The sensitivity was 93.2%...

To the Editor: In their article, “Geographic distribution of wild rabies risk and evaluation of the factors associated with its incidence in Colombia, 1982–2010,” Brito and colleagues (1) analyzed the spatial distribution of batborne rabies in Colombia and showed an association of occurrence of rabies outbreaks with climatic tendencies. The authors also identified risk clusters for rabies based...

Are violations to temporal Bell inequalities there when somebody looks? (received ; accepted) PACS. 03.65Bz – Foundations, theory of measurement, miscellaneous theories (including Aha-ronov–Bohm effect, Bell inequalities, Berry's phase). PACS. 42.50Lc – Quantum fluctuations, quantum noise, and quantum jumps. PACS. 85.25Dq – Superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs). Abstract. – The ...

To the Editor: Inspired by C. P. Panayiotopoulos’ letter to you and F. Andermann’s response about epilepsy of Kozhevnikov (Epilepsia 2002:43:948–9), I would like to defend the famous name of John Hughlings Jackson because it seems to me his importance is underestimated. His priority in study of convulsions in brain connected to motor cortex is obvious. He was the first to use epilepsy as an ins...

reactions, e.g. anaphylaxis versus acute severe asthma. Serum tryptase cannot distinguish between an anaphylactic or anaphylactoid reaction, as tryptase levels are elevated regardless of the mechanism of mast cell activation. Tryptase was not measured in the patient because there was a clear causal relationship between TMP-SMX administration and the development of symptoms. The tryptase assay i...

(received ; accepted) PACS. 89.90+n { Other areas of general interest to physicists. Abstract. { We investigate the performance of error-correcting codes, where the code word comprises products of K bits selected from the original message and decoding is carried out utilizing a connectivity tensor with C connections per index. Shannon's bound for the channel capacity is recovered for large K an...

Human endogenous retroviruses in health and disease In his excellent and comprehensive review on human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs), Frank Ryan (December 2004, JRSM1) introduces a subject that could well become of central importance in 21st century medicine. To take one example, HERVs could provide the key to understanding how environmental changes associated with improved hygiene in the ind...

To the Editor: A study in Canada and New Zealand (Kearon et al.) suggested that fixed-dose unmonitored subcutaneous (SC) unfractionated heparin (UFH) is as effective and safe as low-molecular-weight heparin (LMWH) for the acute treatment of venous thrombo-embolism (VTE). While this trial has limitations, it provides evidence to support the use of SC UFH in a resource-constrained environment. Ho...

The affective meaning of words can be quantified statistically by the "semantic differential technique". We studied a total of 55 Chinese adults in two experiments: first, 210 nouns were rated by 32 subjects. Factor analysis on these data yielded three independent semantic dimensions. Semantically unique words were used in electrophysiological experiments in another group of 23 healthy right-ha...