Besides being a distribution medium for up-to-date information, the Internet provides professional communities of users with an infrastructure for collaborative work. An important problem, however, is that groups working over the Internet often fail to accomplish their goals. In this paper our focus is on one category of professional communities, namely research networks. These are networks of ...

The enormous health benefits of stopping smoking are now well established. Doctors have a vital role in motivating smokers and initiating quit attempts. The mainstay of National Health Service smoking cessation strategy should be the routine provision of brief opportunistic intervention in primary care, backed up by referral to a specialist smoking cessation service. There is an urgent need to ...

Diagnostic errors are common and are a leading cause of patient dissatisfaction and malpractice suits. Because of its traditional heavy reliance on memory and lack of standardization, the diagnostic process is particularly error prone. A study by Zwaan and colleagues on diagnostic failures in treating dyspneic patients makes several important contributions: examining the process behind the diag...

More than 150 million women become pregnant in developing countries each year, and an estimated 650 000 of them die of pregnancy-related causes. This death rate is roughly equivalent to 4 jumbo jets each carrying 450 passengers crashing every day — a terrible loss. The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared this year’s World Health Day, Tuesday, Apr. 7, 1998, as “Safe Motherhood Day” to b...

Considering the importance of public speaking skills, a system that can predict where audiences might laugh during a talk can be helpful to a person preparing for a presentation. We investigated the possibility that a state-of-the-art humor recognition system could be used to detect sentences that induce laughters. In this study, we used TED talks and audience laughters during those talks as da...