In 1987, the threat of litigation led to the withdrawal of intrauterine devices (IUDs)from the American market where depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA)had already been banned. There were fears of repercussions that would have led to the limiting of contraceptive choice in Britain. HIV was also an emerging issue and a revival of interest in barrier contraception led to an emphasis on male ...

Three decades ago, a renaissance helped create the foundations of primary care as we know it today. In recent years, however, new challenges have confronted primary care. We believe that the current challenges can be overcome and may, in fact, present an opportunity for a new renaissance of primary care to address the needs of our population. In this paper, we suggest seven core principles and ...

In our review of the first volume in this series we introduced the medical scholar Dr. Plinio Prioreschi, the author of this marvelous narrative of the history of medicine, and listed the composition of this series of tomes for the benefit of the readers.[1] We do so again here for the same reason: • A History of Medicine — Volume I: Primitive and Ancient Medicine (2nd edition, 1995); 596 pages...

In this article we present beatings, a web application for the exploration of tuning and temperaments which pays particular attention to auditory phenomena resulting from the interaction of the spectral components of a sound, and in particular to the pitch fusion and the amplitude modulations occurring between the spectral peaks a critical bandwidth apart. By providing a simple, yet effective, ...

Historic architecture, whether strictly formal or vernacular in style, can be viewed as building expressed as art, the result of collective skills and knowledge of designers and various crafts engaged in its construction. Education and training in taste and judgment of a designer, combined with enlightened craftsman’s skills, contributes to the functional success and aesthetic appeal of a build...

Thomas Kuhn’s model of paradigm shift as an intra-systemic framework to account for changes within the scientific discourse has been adopted by scholars in different fields as diverse as sociology, theology, economy, and education, to name only a few. The present study argues that the same model can usefully be drawn upon to examine the relationship between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ with some re...

We introduce a concept of diversity of interests or versatility of a member of an open-collaboration environment such as Wikipedia and aim to study how versatility influences the work quality. We introduce versatility measure based on entropy. In preliminary experiments on Wikipedia data we indicate the positive role of editors’ versatility on the quality of the articles they co-edit.

Personalization of systems has been part of the renaissance of artificial intelligence in many domains. This paper investigates some emerging issues in the area of personalization as they impact systems from different perspectives. Particular attention is given to the relationship between explicitly and implicitly gathered information, information gathered from other personalization settings an...