Each year, in an attempt to stimulate journalism students' interest in medical writing, CMAJ sponsors the Amy Chouinard Memorial Essay Prize. The $750 award is in memory of Amy Chouinard, a longtime and valued contributor to CMAJ and the Canadian Journal of Surgery. Students from any recognized journalism program at a Canadian college or university are eligible to enter, and the deadline for 19...

The case report, which has a long history in medicine, has seen its fortune wax and wane with time. We discuss the challenges facing the continued survival of the case report, including the inability of journals to cope with the increased load and increased cost of publication, ethical issues, the impact factor and the rise of evidence-based medicine. We highlight the important role that the ca...

Competitive behavior has often been presented as the ultimate engine of economic, technological, and scientific progress. Since all such progress is likely to imply some measure of social benefit, competition has been widely praised in modern western culture. However, competition can have very negative effects on social wellbeing. An early example is known as the "tragedy of the commons." The c...

Authors of articles published in medical journals are often busy researchers who cannot afford time devoted to writing. Though they are experts in their own therapeutic area, more often than not, researchers find it difficult to actually write and publish their research. Professional medical writers with their expertise in writing clear, concise, comprehensible, and coherent content are often a...

Patterns in nature result from dynamic relationships of forces and constraints. What is analogous for patterns in art? Art is created by human hands motivated by inspiration and thought. It is the product of creativity and skill. Creativity is constrained by cognitive processes and skill by the limits of technology. Based upon the author’s studies of Oriental carpets, this paper suggests that p...

Introduction Measures of farm diversification Data and model specification Econometric results Discussion Summary and conclusions Acknowledgements References Appendix Abstract. Farm planning often focuses on optimal diversification with respect to risk, where the riskmanagement strategies combine production, marketing, financial and environmental aspects of the farmfirm. In this study an empiri...

Incomplete Nature is about an important and difficult subject: how life and mind evolved from a world of inanimate matter. It is also about what are the right concepts to use in understanding the nature and workings of life and mind. We need to be able to conceive them in such a way that it becomes intelligible that they could have arisen naturally from the kinds of inanimate processes describe...

Recently, wikis have been claimed to facilitate collaborative-writing projects and bring positive impact on student learning. While most previous exploratory studies conducted in L2 classrooms focused on students’ perceptions and their collaborative process, students’ produced texts have seldom been carefully examined from linguistic perspectives. To aim towards a more comprehensive understandi...

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students’ textbased writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students’ mastery of analytic textbased writing. Textbased writing tasks (N = 149) were collected from 27 fifthgrade teachers ...

A novel method is proposed to retrieve image sequences with the goal of forecasting complex and timevarying natural patterns. To that end, we introduce a framework called Memory-Based Forecasting; it provides forecast information based on the temporal development of past retrieved sequences. This paper targets the radar echo patterns in weather radar images, and aims to realize an image retriev...