This article reviews mainstream scientific publications on near-death experiences (NDEs). We searched near-death experience in titles, key words, and abstracts at the Web of Knowledge database published between 1945 and 2013. We identified 266 relevant documents, the oldest from 1977. There was a strong predominance of opinion articles (book reviews, commentaries, and editorials), review articl...

A part of the broad research domains Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval deals only with Data Mining in texts: Text Mining. In general, Text Mining tries to obtain knowledge by identifying patterns in textual data. One of its most important areas is Opinion Mining, which is the main topic of this thesis. Opinion Mining is a far-reaching research area, because it is potentially interes...

BACKGROUND AND AIM: Evidence-based dentistry (EBD), including orthodontics, needs the availability and use of the high-quality studies. The aim of this study was to identify the level of evidence (LOE) of Iranian articles on orthodontics published in PubMed.METHODS: All the articles on orthodontics published from 2000 to 2015 in PubMed with Iran affiliations were extracted by typing orthodontic...

OBJECTIVE To assess the print media coverage of California's smokefree bar law in the state of California. DESIGN Content analysis of newspaper, trade journal, and magazine items. SUBJECTS Items regarding the smokefree bar law published seven months before and one year following the implementation of the smokefree bar law (June 1997 to December 1998). Items consisted of news articles (n = 4...

Quotes are used in news articles as evidence of a person’s opinion, and thus are a useful target for opinion mining. However, labelling each quote with a polarity score directed at a textually-anchored target can ignore the broader issue that the speaker is commenting on. We address this by instead labelling quotes as supporting or opposing a clear expression of a point of view on a topic, call...

BACKGROUND Medical advice columns in newspapers can provide a valuable service by educating the general public about important health-related issues. However, these columns may be harmful if the advice or information given in them is incomplete, inappropriate or misleading. The objective of this study was to assess the safety and appropriateness of advice given to elderly readers of newspapers ...

BACKGROUND The media play an important role at the interface of science and policy by communicating scientific information to the public and policy makers. In issues of theoretical risk, in which there is scientific uncertainty, the media's role as disseminators of information is particularly important due to the potential to influence public perception of the severity of the risk. In this arti...

A common notion of vision, consistent with this excerpt from the first paragraph of David Marr’s seminal book [1], is gained by considering the predicament of a person with a searchlight placed in a pitch-dark room full of unfamiliar furniture. One would hope that, by swinging the beam around, the observer will be able to recognize the objects present in the room (a cat here, an aquarium there,...

The results of the public opinion poll performed in January 2015, just after the terrorist attack on the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket in Paris, when 17 people were killed, showed that a significant number of French citizens held conspiratorial beliefs about it (17%). This gave reason to an alternative analysis of public opinion, presented in this pap...

Mentoring is deeply rooted in medical practice. More than just a role model, a mentor is invested in the development of the mentee, providing personal and professional support, guidance, and the means for advancement. Mentoring is vital at all levels of medical training and plays an important role in the development of academicians. Increasing clinical demands, the competitive research environm...