Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, are experiencing rapid increases in the prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which may not be fully explained by urbanization and associated traditional risk factors such as tobacco smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, poor diet or physical inactivity. In this commentary, we draw attention to the c...

Breaking away from traditional attempts at coreference resolution from discourseonly inputs, we try to do the same by constructing rich verb semantics from perceptual data, viz. a 2-D video. Using a bottom-up dynamic attention model and relative-motion-features between agents in the video, transitive verbs, their argument ordering etc. are learned through association with co-occurring adult com...

There has been a growing recognition over the past 25 years that it is increasingly difficult for physicians to develop careers as physician-scientists. This commentary reviews the traditional culture of academic medicine, factors that are altering that culture, and several grassroots suggestions for revitalizing academic medicine in our departmental programs. It is based on a presentation, "Ba...

The TREC–9 filtering track measures the ability of systems to build persistent user profiles which successfully separate relevant and non-relevant documents. It consists of three major subtasks: adaptive filtering, batch filtering, and routing. In adaptive filtering, the system begins with only a topic statement and a small number of positive examples, and must learn a better profile from on-li...

Excessive polypharmacy is a common problem around the world, particularly in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. In mainland China use of out-of-date treatment strategies by psychiatric professionals is one of the reasons; others include unrealistically high expectations about the effectiveness of medications, the dominant role of the doctor in doctor-patient negotiations about treatment, t...

Experts’ views and commentary have been highly respected in every discipline. However, unlike traditional disciplines like medicine, mathematics and engineering, Information System (IS) expertise is difficult to define. Despite seeking expert advice and views is common in the areas of IS project management, system implementations and evaluations. This research-in-progress paper attempts to unde...

Experts’ views and commentary have been highly respected in every discipline. However, unlike traditional disciplines like medicine, mathematics and engineering, Information System (IS) expertise is difficult to define. This paper attempts to understand the characteristics of IS-expert through a comprehensive literature review of analogous disciplines and then derives a formative research model...

The articles in this issue eff ectively summarize three decades of Problem Based Learning (PBL) research. The meta-analysis (Walker & Leary) and meta-synthesis (Strobel & van Barneveld) articles review outcomes of studies conducted from 1976 to 2007 that compared a PBL curriculum to a traditional curriculum. The third article off ers a critique of assessments used in these studies. This comment...