Appendicitis is a common disorder which requires careful diagnosis to avoid complications. Ultrasound is being increasingly used for diagnosis because of its ease and simplicity. In this series, a range of abnormal findings are presented, as well as useful teaching points on technique and pitfalls.

In February 2010, former Director of the National Security Agency Mike McConnell wrote, “We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to m...

—In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin observed “curious parallels” between the processes of biological and linguistic evolution. These parallels mean that evolutionary biologists and historical linguists seek answers to similar questions and face similar problems. As a result, the theory and methodology of the two disciplines have evolved in remarkably similar ways. In addition to Darwin’s curi...

The term rhombencephalitis refers to inflammatory diseases affecting the hindbrain (brainstem and cerebellum). Rhombencephalitis has a wide variety of etiologies, including infections, autoimmune diseases, and paraneoplastic syndromes. Infection with bacteria of the genus Listeria is the most common cause of rhombencephalitis. Primary rhombencephalitis caused by infection with Listeria spp. occ...

I declare that this essay is work done as part of the Part III Examination. I have read and understood the Statement on Plagiarism for Part III and Graduate Courses issued by the Faculty of Mathematics, and have abided by it. This essay is the result of my own work, and except where explicitly stated otherwise, only includes material undertaken since the publication of the list of essay titles,...

Educators are interested in essay evaluation systems that include feedback about writing features that can facilitate the essay revision process. For instance, if the thesis statement of a student’s essay could be automatically identified, the student could then use this information to reflect on the thesis statement with regard to its quality, and its relationship to other discourse elements i...

This paper presents Apex, a system that can automatically assess a student essay based on its content. It relies on Latent Semantic Analysis, a tool which is used to represent the meaning of words as vectors in a high-dimensional space. By comparing an essay and the text of a given course on a semantic basis, our system can measure how well the essay matches the text. Various assessments are pr...

Pleural ultrasonography (US) represents nowadays a useful diagnostic tool in the management of pleural diseases. Detection and evaluation of pleural effusions, pneumothorax and pleural-based lesions can be performed with US, which has the advantages of wide availability, low cost, absence of radiation exposure, and portability. It is the best method for guiding interventional procedures in the ...

With the invention of the stereoscope, Charles Wheatstone transformed not only our vision of pictures, but also our understanding of some intricacies of spatial perception. In his obituary notice in Nature, the following comments were made by Signor Volpicelli of the Academia dei Lincei: ``Our countryman, Leonardo da Vinci, in 1500, or thereabouts, conceived and was the first to affirm, that fr...

Using machine learning to assess human writing is both an interesting challenge and can potentially make quality education more accessable. Using a dataset of essays written for standardized tests, we trained different models using word features, per-essay statistics, and metrics of similarity and coherence between essays and documents. Within a single prompt, the models are able to make predic...