Only Through Men

Abstract “Only Through Men” details the influences and contributions that Aspasia of Miletus made to the rhetorical tradition. Aspasia was one of the first female rhetoricians in Athens during the 5th century B.C. Because of her gender, she has been marginalized throughout history almost to the point of disappearance. The paper examines the different ways in which Aspasia was able to escape the realm of silence that she was forced into simply because she was a female. Her influence was aided by her close relationships with influential men who, ironically, worked to give her a voice. These men, who were directly a part of the patriarchal society that silenced her, helped to keep her legacy alive by mentioning her in their many famous works. The paper specifically explores her connections with Pericles, Socrates, and Aristotle—each of whom praises her intelligence and mastery with words. Primary documents that mention Aspasia were examined and excerpts are given throughout the paper. Secondary research conducted by experts in the field is also paired with the primary evidence, giving a more global view of who Aspasia was and what she was able to accomplish during her lifetime and beyond

The sentence continues: Breaking silences and becoming authors through The Semicolon Project

Through its many digital platforms, The Semicolon Project, a suicide and self-harm prevention initiative, offers its users a creative means of using writing to heal. As its name suggests, the semicolon is an essential mark for this group—grammatically a semicolon represents a place in the sentence that an author could have ended and for the members of this prevention initiative, the semicolon acts in a similar way. By tattooing or drawing a semicolon on the body, the semicolon bearer embody a sense of authorial agency, positioning herself as author and using the semicolon as a representation of her dedication to continue the sentence that is her life. In this small though significant way, the tattoo bearer engages in a form of narrative therapy that enables healing to take place, thus enabling the individual to move away from self-injurious behavior and find more positive means of coping with moments of emotional distress. Though these negative coping mechanisms plague individuals all over the world, the lack of societal discourse surrounding these issues prevents many from seeking the help needed to overcome these struggles. Even today, many of those battling mental illness or self-injurious behavior remain voiceless—silenced by stigma and fear of societal backlash, rejection, even shame. The Semicolon Project aims to provide one outlet for these voices—a safe space that encourages candid sharing and employs writing as a means of healing. Using two separate theories, this project analyzes the writing left on The Semicolon Project’s Facebook page. The first uses theories of material rhetoric to shed light on the rhetorical significance of the semicolon tattoo, both as a performance and as a material product. The second approach applies narrative therapy to the tattoo bearers’ verbal and visual Facebook posts, analyzing how these images and reflective comments enable tattoo bearers to heal from personal trauma. Analyzing the users’ writing practices in this space can help to determine why this initiative is successful and how these successes might be replicated in future organizations

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Ampullary Cancers Harbor ELF3 Tumor Suppressor Gene Mutations and Exhibit Frequent WNT Dysregulation

The ampulla of Vater is a complex cellular environment from which adenocarcinomas arise to form a group of histopathologically heterogenous tumors. To evaluate the molecular features of these tumors, 98 ampullary adenocarcinomas were evaluated and compared to 44 distal bile duct and 18 duodenal adenocarcinomas. Genomic analyses revealed mutations in the WNT signaling pathway among half of the patients and in all three adenocarcinomas irrespective of their origin and histological morphology. These tumors were characterized by a high frequency of inactivating mutations of ELF3, a high rate of microsatellite instability, and common focal deletions and amplifications, suggesting common attributes in the molecular pathogenesis are at play in these tumors. The high frequency of WNT pathway activating mutation, coupled with small-molecule inhibitors of β-catenin in clinical trials, suggests future treatment decisions for these patients may be guided by genomic analysis.</p

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press