Concordia University

Dr Sampalis is founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Scientific Officer of JSS Medical Research Inc, founded in 1997. He is a tenured professor of Surgery and Epidemiology & Biostatistics of McGill University, the University of Montreal and University of Laval. Recognized as a leading clinical epidemiologist and one of the top trauma researchers in Canada, he possesses extensive expertise in health services research, clinical trials, and offers services as a Research and Epidemiological Consultant for numerous pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and government organizations and agencies...

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The seventh in the series of ETP Symposia (see Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 2012, 26, 1515-1518 for a description and report on the 6(th) Symposium) was held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Toronto, Canada, on 30 April to 1 May, 2013, and was chaired by Professor Daniel Figeys, Ottawa Institute for Systems Biology, University of Ottawa. The purpose of these symposia is to convene meetings of scientists and engineers from universities, government laboratories, industry and manufacturers of scientific instrumentation, to discuss novel technologies and methodologies applicable to research in molecular biology...

Editor's note: In this engaging talk given last February on a particularly cold and blustery day at Texas Tech University, Professor Gad Saad of Concordia University discusses his work in the area of evolutionary consumption. In making the case for understanding consumerism from a Darwinian perspective, Saad addresses several key tenets from his books The Consuming Instinct (1) and The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption. (2) In particular, Saad argues that: (1) many consumption acts can be mapped onto four key Darwinian modules (survival, mating, kin selection, and reciprocal altruism); and, (2) cultural products such as song lyrics and movie plotlines are fossils of the human mind that highlight a shared, biologically based human nature...

The new guidelines put forth by the ACS for approved chemistry degrees provide departments with greater flexibility in designing their ACS majors. Under these guidelines, students receive foundational and in-depth chemistry training while allowing individual departments to use their creativity in developing a curriculum that best meets the needs of their students and plays to the strength of the department. The chemistry department at Concordia College has developed an ACS Neurochemistry track and shares how the program arose, some of the practical matters in developing it, and how it can be made to work well within a liberal arts college...

This study examined the factor structure of the English version of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (IUS; French version: M. H. Freeston, J. Rhéaume, H. Letarte, M. J. Dugas, & R. Ladouceur, 1994; English version: K. Buhr & M. J. Dugas, 2002) using a substantially larger sample than has been used in previous studies. Nonclinical undergraduate students and adults from the community (M age = 23.74 years, SD = 6.36; 73.0% female and 27.0% male) who participated in 16 studies in the Anxiety Disorders Laboratory at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada were randomly assigned to 2 datasets...

We propose a new type of recurrent neural-network architecture, in which each output unit is connected to itself and is also fully connected to other output units and all hidden units. The proposed recurrent neural network differs from Jordan's and Elman's recurrent neural networks with respect to function and architecture, because it has been originally extended from being a mere multilayer feedforward neural network, to improve discrimination and generalization powers. We also prove the convergence properties of the learning algorithm in the proposed recurrent neural network, and analyze the performance of the proposed recurrent neural network by performing recognition experiments with the totally unconstrained handwritten numeric database of Concordia University, Montreal, Canada...

Artificial neural networks have been recognized as a powerful tool for pattern classification problems, but a number of researchers have also suggested that straightforward neural-network approaches to pattern recognition are largely inadequate for difficult problems such as handwritten numeral recognition. In this paper, we present three sophisticated neural-network classifiers to solve complex pattern recognition problems: multiple multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier, hidden Markov model (HMM)/MLP hybrid classifier, and structure-adaptive self-organizing map (SOM) classifier...

Hospitals enjoyed a surge in profits last year, reporting an aggregate profit margin of 6%. Executives at financially strong systems credit long-term efforts to improve performance for the results. Elizabeth Concordia, left, of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center system, says its efforts stressed ongoing consolidation and integration to wipe out waste and errors.

This study investigated the psychometric properties of the Cognitive Avoidance Questionnaire (CAQ; Gosselin, P., Langlois, F., Freeston, M. H., Ladouceur, R., Dugas, M. J., & Pelletier, O. (2002). Le Questionnaire d'évitement cognitif (QEC): Développement et validation auprès d'adultes et d'adolescents [The Cognitive Avoidance Questionnaire (CAQ): Development and validation among adult and adolescent samples]. Journal de Thérapie Comportementale et Cognitive, 12, 24-37) English translation. Questionnaires were administered to a sample of 456 (65...

BACKGROUND: Rural residents, rural community leaders, rural planners, rural health authorities and community organizations seek to understand the health, quality of life and sustainability of their communities. The aim of this article is to follow the cooperative community-based process of developing and testing a workbook to be used to assess and foster rural communities' health, quality of life and ultimately their sustainability. ISSUE: In a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded, 3 phase project, entitled Determinants of Health of Rural Populations and Communities, researchers at Brandon University, University of Manitoba and Concordia University, Canada, partnered various stakeholder groups in an visionary effort to build a framework and indicators for the purpose of assisting rural communities to assess not only their health and wellbeing, but also their sustainability...

Earlier studies have suggested that catalase activity (CA) may represent a biological marker of alcohol intake in animals and in humans. An initial study was designed to rule out the possibility that CA is induced as a function of acute alcohol intake. Subjects (n = 80) were presented with either an alcohol (0.5 g/kg of body weight) or control solution, and asked to provide four 100-microliters blood samples at 0.0, 0.5, 2.0, and 24.0 hr. Results showed no differences in CA between individuals who had received alcohol, and controls, even when the effects of previous drinking history were covaried out...

Bergdoll, Merlin S. (University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill.), Concordia R. Borja, and Remedios M. Avena. Identification of a new enterotoxin as enterotoxin C. J. Bacteriol. 90:1481-1485. 1965.-Identification of a new enterotoxin was accomplished by purification of the enterotoxins produced by staphylococcal strains 137 and 361 and by the preparation of specific antitoxin to the enterotoxin. Toxicity of the preparations was determined in rhesus monkeys, and specificity of the enterotoxin-antitoxin reaction was determined in gel-diffusion plates...