Recently Martins (Martins 2005) published an article in this journal analyzing the opinion dynamics of a neutral observer deciding between two competing scientific theories (Theory A and Theory B). The observer could not perform any experiments to verify either theory, but instead had to form its opinion solely by reading published articles reporting the experimental results of others. The obse...

tions that, up until that time, had only received an episodic focus. One drawback of the book is that the authors cover a wide gamut of topics. Consequently, disease-specifi c topics are presented without adequately providing the necessary background on the disease entity to the reader. Not all readers may fully understand the necessary disease-specifi c background that would make the discussio...

Lithium is an efficacious agent for the treatment of bipolar disorder, but it is unclear to what extent its long-term use may result in neuroprotective or toxic consequences. Medline was searched with the combination of the word 'Lithium' plus key words that referred to every possible effect on the central nervous system. The papers were further classified into those supporting a neuroprotectiv...

We present and evaluate the first method known to us that can create rich nonextract-based opinion summaries from general text (e.g. newspaper articles). We first describe two possible representations for opinion summaries and then present our system OASIS, which identifies, and optionally aggregates, fine-grained opinions from the same source on the same topic. We propose new evaluation measur...

Patients choose to seek a second opinion in matters related to their health for a variety of reasons, and the total cost associated with these second opinion visits is estimated to be billions of dollars annually. Understanding the reasons behind second opinion self-referrals is key to improving patient satisfaction and reducing redundancy in delivered health care. This study represents a retro...