Altria means tobacco: Philip Morris's identity crisis.
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Philip Morris Companies, the world's largest and most profitable tobacco seller, has changed its corporate name to The Altria Group. The company has also embarked on a plan to improve its corporate image. Examination of internal company documents reveals that these changes have been planned for over a decade and that the company expects to reap specific and substantial rewards from them. Tobacco control advocates should be alert to the threat Philip Morris's plans pose to industry focused tobacco control campaigns. Company documents also suggest what the vulnerabilities of those plans are and how advocates might best exploit them. (+info)
Spatial coding of semantic information: knowledge of country and city names depends on their geographical proximity.
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We report the case of a patient, A.Z., with a refractory disorder of semantic processing. Using a number of spoken word-written word matching paradigms, her comprehension of the broad proper nouns category of place names was investigated. In addition to being sensitive to temporal factors, A.Z.'s ability to identify country or city names accurately was significantly worse when selecting a target from an array of geographically close rather than distant places. The influence of geographical proximity and location was observed even when identifying proximal and distal English towns, but not with less well-known American states. These close and distant effects are attributed to the build-up of refractoriness in representations with shared neural circuitry. Our findings reveal a previously undocumented level of fine-grain organization in this domain of semantic space. It is argued that information about geographical proximity cannot be encoded in purely verbal or visual terms. Consequently, we propose the existence of a separate module of spatially encoded information within conceptual knowledge. (+info)
Estimating the sensitivity and specificity of matching name-based with non-name-based case registries.
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Because non-name-based case registries have recently been used for reporting human immunodeficiency virus infection, this study attempted to define the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of case registry matches using non-name-based registries. The AIDS, sexually transmitted disease (STD), and tuberculosis (TB) case registries were matched using all available information to establish the standard. The registries were then matched again using five increasingly less specific criteria to compare sensitivity, specificity and accuracy. The registries were then also transformed into non-name-based codes as if they were the HIV registry and matched again. With name-based registries, sensitivities increased as the matching criteria became less exacting, while the accuracy declined slightly. Specificities remained close to 100% due to the relatively small number of matched cases. Results from matches of non-name-based registry matches were similar to those of the name-based registry matches. Non-name reporting can be used for data matching with acceptable accuracy. (+info)
Drift as a mechanism for cultural change: an example from baby names.
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In the social sciences, there is currently no consensus on the mechanism by which cultural elements come and go in human society. For elements that are value-neutral, an appropriate null model may be one of random copying between individuals in the population. We show that the frequency distributions of baby names used in the United States in each decade of the twentieth century, for both males and females, obey a power law that is maintained over 100 years even though the population is growing, names are being introduced and lost every decade and large changes in the frequencies of specific names are common. We show that these distributions are satisfactorily explained by a simple process in which individuals randomly copy names from each other, a process that is analogous to the infinite-allele model of population genetics with random genetic drift. By its simplicity, this model provides a powerful null hypothesis for cultural change. It further explains why a few elements inevitably become highly popular, even if they have no intrinsic superiority over alternatives. Random copying could potentially explain power law distributions in other cultural realms, including the links on the World Wide Web. (+info)
From surnames to the history of Y chromosomes: the Sardinian population as a paradigm.
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A total of 202 Sardinian male subjects were examined for 13 biallelic stable markers, the complex 49a,f/TaqI system and three microsatellites of the Y chromosome in order to investigate, through surname analysis, on a possible territorial heterogeneity inside the island. The study of geographical distribution and linguistic derivation of Sardinian surnames allow us to discover their 'probable place of origin' and reconstruct ancient genetic isolates which borders are, today, no more recognizable. The molecular analysis revealed that about 90% of the Sardinian Y chromosomes fell into haplogroups E-M35, G-M201, I-M26, J-12f2 and R-M269. In contrast with the territorial homogeneity of these haplogroups, when the individuals were distributed according to their birthplace, a significant difference between the three historically and culturally distinct geographical areas into which Sardinia can be subdivided was observed when the individuals were distributed according to the ancestral location of surnames. In particular, the major contribution to this heterogeneity is due to the 'Sardinian-specific' haplogroup I-M26 (almost completely associated with the 49a,f-Ht12/12f2-10Kb/YCAIIa-21/YCAIIb-11 compound haplotype), which shows both a significantly higher incidence in the central-eastern (archaic) area and a significantly lower frequency in the northern area. The results of this study agree with the hypothesis that the ancestral homeland of this specific subset of haplogroup I is the mountainous central-eastern area of Sardinia, where the population underwent a long history of isolation since ancient times, and highlight the informative power of the surname analysis. (+info)
A probabilistic similarity metric for Medline records: a model for author name disambiguation.
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We present a model for automatically generating training sets and estimating the probability that a pair of Medline records sharing a last and first name initial are authored by the same individual, based on shared title words, journal name, co-authors, medical subject headings, language, and affiliation, as well as distinctive features of the name itself (i.e., presence of middle initial, suffix, and prevalence in Medline). (+info)
Evaluation of a deidentification (De-Id) software engine to share pathology reports and clinical documents for research.
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We evaluated a comprehensive deidentification engine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), Pittsburgh, PA, that uses a complex set of rules, dictionaries, pattern-matching algorithms, and the Unified Medical Language System to identify and replace identifying text in clinical reports while preserving medical information for sharing in research. In our initial data set of 967 surgical pathology reports, the software did not suppress outside (103), UPMC (47), and non-UPMC (56) accession numbers; dates (7); names (9) or initials (25) of case pathologists; or hospital or laboratory names (46). In 150 reports, some clinical information was suppressed inadvertently (overmarking). The engine retained eponymic patient names, eg, Barrett and Gleason. In the second evaluation (1,000 reports), the software did not suppress outside (90) or UPMC (6) accession numbers or names (4) or initials (2) of case pathologists. In the third evaluation, the software removed names of patients, hospitals (297/300), pathologists (297/300), transcriptionists, residents and physicians, dates of procedures, and accession numbers (298/300). By the end of the evaluation, the system was reliably and specifically removing safe-harbor identifiers and producing highly readable deidentified text without removing important clinical information. Collaboration between pathology domain experts and system developers and continuous quality assurance are needed to optimize ongoing deidentification processes. (+info)
Knowledge of famous faces and names in semantic dementia.
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Semantic dementia is a focal clinical syndrome, resulting from degeneration of the temporal lobes and characterized by progressive loss of conceptual knowledge about the world. Because of the highly circumscribed nature of the disorder it is a natural model for improving understanding of how semantic information is cerebrally represented. There is currently a lack of consensus. One view proposes the existence of modality specific meaning systems, in which visual and verbal information are stored separately. An opposing view assumes that information is represented by a unitary, amodal semantic system. The present study explores these alternatives in an examination of famous face and name knowledge in 15 patients with semantic dementia. The study of face recognition in patients with an established semantic disorder also permits an examination of the relationship between semantic dementia and the focal clinical syndrome of progressive prosopagnosia. The semantic dementia patients were profoundly impaired on both face and name identification and familiarity judgement tasks compared with amnesic patients with Alzheimer's disease and healthy controls. However, whereas the two reference groups performed better for names than faces, the semantic group showed the opposite pattern. This overall profile masked individual differences: semantic dementia patients with predominant left temporal lobe atrophy showed better recognition of names than faces, whereas patients with right temporal predominance showed the reverse pattern. Relative superiority for names or faces was mirrored by corresponding superiority for words or pictures on a standard semantic test. We interpret the findings as inconsistent with a unitary, amodal model of semantic memory. However, the data are not wholly compatible with a strict multiple system account. The data favour a model of semantic memory comprising a single interconnected network, with dedicated brain regions representing modality specific information. The data emphasize the importance of the anterior, inferolateral parts of the left temporal lobe for the representation of names and the corresponding parts of the right temporal lobe for faces. Dissociations between face and name knowledge provide a challenge for existing models of face processing. Moreover, they lead us to argue that the focal syndrome of progressive prosopagnosia is one of the clinical presentations of semantic dementia and not a separate clinical entity. (+info)