Volume 19, Issue 12, December 2019, Page 57-60.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised a host of ethical challenges, but key among these has been the possibility that health care systems might need to ration scarce critical care resources. Rationing p...

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 77-80.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's competitive career development award selects awardees annually. This paper describes changes DDCF made to its grants making process to improve gender representation in its applicant and awardee pools.

Sentence boundary detection (SBD) represents an important first step in natural language processing since accurately identifying sentence boundaries significantly impacts downstream applications. Nevertheless, detecting sentence boundaries within legal texts poses a unique and challenging problem due to their distinct structural and linguistic features. Our approach utilizes deep learning models to leverage delimiter and surrounding context information as input, enabling precise detection of sentence boundaries in English legal texts. We evaluate various deep learning models, including domain-specific transformer models like LegalBERT and (...) CaseLawBERT. To assess the efficacy of our deep learning models, we compare them with a state-of-the-art domain-specific statistical conditional random field (CRF) model. After considering model size, F1-score, and inference time, we identify the Convolutional Neural Network Model (CNN) as the top-performing deep learning model. To further enhance performance, we integrate the features of the CNN model into the subsequent CRF model, creating a hybrid architecture that combines the strengths of both models. Our experiments demonstrate that the hybrid model outperforms the baseline model, achieving a 4% improvement in the F1-score. Additional experiments showcase the superiority of the hybrid model over SBD open-source libraries when confronted with an out-of-domain test set. These findings underscore the importance of efficient SBD in legal texts and emphasize the advantages of employing deep learning models and hybrid architectures to achieve optimal performance. (shrink)

The NIH-Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccine’s steep price increase raises concerns that this will be the new anchor for continued price hikes and underscores the need for upstream government intervention to enable greater accountability and stewardship of public biomedical research investment.

Transnational articulation programmes are one way China is attempting to advance its higher education system. We report a study of twelve Chinese students’ experiences in two China-Australia 2...

Although more women continue to enter the medical profession, disparities between the sexes in academic medicine persist. This “gender gap” has implications for academic advancement. In 2006, Jagsi and colleagues reported that, although the proportion of women among first and last authors in the United States had significantly increased since 1970, women still represented a minority of the authors of original research and guest editorials in six prominent medical journals.1 In a related 2008 study, Jagsi and colleagues found (...) a substantial increase in women’s representation on editorial boards and as editors-in-chief of several prominent journals.2 We collected more recent data about the gender distribution of authors, members of editorial boards, and peer reviewers for prominent medical journals. Using data from 2010-2011, we determined the proportion of women who were authors of original research or guest editorials, members of editorial boards, or reviewers at six major general medical journals: the Annals of Internal Medicine (Ann Intern Med), the British Medical Journal (BMJ), JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). (shrink)