We thank all the contributors for their wide-ranging and provocative discussion. Our reply is organised according to a number of recurring themes, but space constraints mean it is impossible to address all the points raised. Echoing S. Brooks’ opening remarks, our hope is that discussants and readers will be sufficiently inspired to pursue the ideas proposed in this paper and address some of th...

This demonstration presents AttitudeMiner, a system for mining attitude from online discussions. AttitudeMiner uses linguistic techniques to analyze the text exchanged between participants of online discussion threads at different levels of granularity: the word level, the sentence level, the post level, and the thread level. The goal of this analysis is to identify the polarity of the attitude...

W e thank the 3 discussants for their contributions. The Women’ Health Initiative (WHI) investigators found a greater CHD risk in the estrogen plus progestin (ie, combined hormone) therapy arm than in the placebo arm of the trial (hazard ratio HR : 1.24, 95% confidence interval CI : 1.00–1.54). In contrast, the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) investigators found a lower CHD risk in current users of ...

The conference papers, along with the discussants' remarks and an introductory essay by Robert Haveman, have now appeared in A Decade of Federal Antipoverty Programs: Achievements, Failures, add Lessons-a volume edited by Haveman, Director of the lnstitute at the time of the Wingspread conference. This is the second volume in the Institute's Poverty Policy Analysis Series of books written for r...

Recently, a series of physicians have appeared on national news programs, reassuring the public that psychiatric disorders have been confirmed as “real”diseases of the brain. Perhaps the context of these announcements–a heated exchange between two Hollywood celebrities who have clashed over the medicalization and treatment of postpartum depression –has prevented the media from noticing serious ...

We sincerely thank all the discussants Kjell Doksum and Joan Fujimura (DF); Jianqing Fan (Fan); Peihua Qiu, Kai Yang, and Lu You (QYY); and Yanming Li, Hyokyoung Grace Hong, and Yi Li (LHL) for the thought-provoking and insightful discussions on our paper. We would also like to thank the Editor Fabrizio Ruggeri for processing and organizing the discussion. Ahmed would like to specially thank hi...

INTRODUCTION The perception of People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHAs) on how the public feels about them could influence their willingness to seek medical care, interaction with the society and their coping strategies. MATERIAL AND METHODS This study assessed the perception and behavior of PLWHAs towards societal stigma and discrimination in Lagos, Nigeria. This was a qualitative, descriptive c...

We are grateful to our four discussants for their agreement with and contributions to the central points in our article (Imai et al., 2009b). As Zhang and Small (2009) write, “[our article] present[s] convincing evidence that the matched pair design, when accompanied with good inference methods, is more powerful than the unmatched pair design and should be used routinely.” And, as they put it, ...