A Study on Agreement in PICO Span Annotations

In evidence-based medicine, relevance of medical literature is determined by predefined relevance conditions. The conditions are defined based on PICO elements, namely, Patient, Intervention, Comparator, and Outcome. Hence, PICO annotations in medical literature are essential for automatic relevant document filtering. However, defining boundaries of text spans for PICO elements is not straightforward. In this paper, we study the agreement of PICO annotations made by multiple human annotators, including both experts and non-experts. Agreements are estimated by a standard span agreement (i.e., matching both labels and boundaries of text spans), and two types of relaxed span agreement (i.e., matching labels without guaranteeing matching boundaries of spans). Based on the analysis, we report two observations: (i) Boundaries of PICO span annotations by individual human annotators are very diverse. (ii) Despite the disagreement in span boundaries, general areas of the span annotations are broadly agreed by annotators. Our results suggest that applying a standard agreement alone may undermine the agreement of PICO spans, and adopting both a standard and a relaxed agreements is more suitable for PICO span evaluation.Comment: Accepted in SIGIR 2019 (Short paper

Pico della Mirandola and the Presocratics

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) decided to study all the ancient and medieval schools of philosophy, including the Pre-Socratics, in order to broaden his scope. Pico showed interest in ancient monists. He commented that only Xenophanes’ One is the One simply, while Parmenides’ One is not the absolute One, but the oneness of Being. Melissus’ One is in extreme correspondence to that of Xenophanes. As for Xenophanes, Pico seems to have fallen victim of ancient sources, who referred to Xenophanes and Parmenides as members of the Eleatic “tribe”. In the case of Parmenides Pico draws mainly on the Platonic dialogues Parmenides and Sophist and not on intermediaries such as the Neoplatonists and other commentators. Despite of Pico’s knowledge of Empedocles’ philosophy, it is worth noticing that Pico was also strongly influenced by the medieval kabbalistic literature and the pseudo Empedocles. While Neoplatonists, such as Proclus, commented Empedocles and interpreted him according to the Neoplatonic spectrum, Pico’s appreciation of the philosophy of Empedocles was mediated through Arab and Jewish mysticism. Pico counted among his sources the Pre-Socratics, but the way he read them was not always direct and consistent. He intentionally chose to interpret them through the spectrum of intermediaries such as the ancient Commentators, the Neoplatonists, the Arabs and Jews mystics

Emerging Trends of Nanotechnology towards Picotechnology: Energy and Biomolecules

In nature, metal oxide particles display their existence at the level of picomolecules in solution state and bioactive states in the body. We present evidence of picomolar behavior of molecules different than nanomolar behavior of particles. These particles can be encapsulated in polymers and can be functionalized with protein, nucleotides, and drugs to develop as smart intracellular targeting pico-devices. The preparation technique and physiological conditions decide the size and functionality of these pico-carrier devices. Their usable success rate, feasibility and potentials are yet to be proven or we do not know. The major difference between nanodevices and pico-devices is their intermolecular and intramolecular thermodynamics in medium and their molecular conformational interaction with molecular assembly in cytoarchitecture of the neurofilament, actin-myosin, microtubule proteins. Pico-carrier devices can be presumed as potential spears without interacting with host signal transduction and immunoprotection. In conclusion, the ultrafine size of newer picotechnology products may be better suited and easier to functionalize for design of particle based picodrugs, picochemicals, and pico-targeting molecules

PICO-LON Project for WIMPs search

Highly segmented inorganic crystal has been shown to have good performance for dark matter search. The energy resolution of ultra thin and large area NaI(Tl) scintillator has been developed. The estimated sensitivity for spin-dependent excitation of 127I was discussed. The recent status of low background measurement at Oto Cosmo Observatory is reportedComment: 3 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of TAUP200

WikiPathways: Community Curation of Biological Pathways

Assembling biological pathways from information in scientific literature and biological databases is a challenging task. Building a pathway requires domain knowledge from specialists in various biological research areas. Furthermore, research is generating new biological knowledge continuously, making pathway curation an ongoing and dynamic process. To facilitate this process we developed "WikiPathways":http://www.wikipathways.org/index.php/WikiPathways ^1^, a wiki where users can curate pathways, using an easy to use pathway drawing tool. WikiPathways currently has over 1200 registered users and contains more than 1300 pathways for various organisms, spanning human, mouse, zebrafish, fruit fly, worm, yeast, plants and bacteria. WikiPathways is entering a phase of rapid growth, incorporating new pathway resources and engaging diverse communities with unique pathway needs.

In this presentation we will provide an overview of the background, current state, and future of WikiPathways. We will highlight several approaches we take to improve community-based curation with WikiPathways. And we will provide context for this project within the larger shifts toward data sharing, data curation and new models for publication.
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Job-search Incentives From Labour Market Programs - an Empirical Analysis

In this paper we examine whether the prospect of compulsory programme participation motivates individuals to leave the unemployment insurance (UI) system prior to participation. We analyze data from the Danish labour market. Here a series of reforms have enforced program participation and gradually restricted the duration of unemployment before individuals must enroll into programmes. However, there is substantial heterogeneity in enrollment probabilities. If individuals want to avoid participation and observe the heterogeneity in participation, this will also affect their search behaviour. We estimate a model for anticipatory effects of participation, allowing for heterogeneity, on search behaviour and find large significant effects from anticipation of enrollment on the exit probability out of unemployment.active labour market measures; hazard rates; unobserved heterogeneity