Naive question from someone with a superficial understanding of Django- I thought the advantage of Django was to abstract away from SQL through Class/Model so you don't need to write these queries? I can't quite tell what the use case would be here
Yes that film was awful- they took an individual who was 'very warm and friendly'[1] and turned him into the prototypical savant nerd (Sheldon Cooper, Sherlock Holmes)
I learned Computer Science at A level (high school) on a new course specifically aimed to produce technically literate students to compete with the US and Japan. I enjoyed the course and I still use the skills I gained, but it really wasn't recognised at the time- many of my friends did the much easier IT A-Level which (more or less) involved knowing how to use MS Office products. They received the same recognition by universities and employers for much less effort.
This is a very strange article. No idea what City of London police has to do with this- there aren't even any universities in City of London (probably a few publishers though). Sci-hub doesn't have any logins barring captchas so why would that be an issue? You could make the same argument for YouTube being a security threat.
I think it's important to note why the 75 citations isn't just 75 dummies who also haven't heard of integration.
If you're writing a diabetes paper and want to use integration for your analysis (even if you are fully aware of its background), you'll be forced to justify your approach and defend it's applicability to diabetes. Far easier to say 'as per Tai et al...' and take it as given.
You see this a lot- 'we used [x] because Big Name Prof did as well [citation]'
I found this one really interesting. The study authors used clinical biomarkers and generated straightforward rules that doctors can interpret, but when this was tried elsewhere the reliability was much lower. We put together a summary discussing the paper and limitations here
Did they perform regular PCR testing on staff? No, and so they didn't detect any asymptomatic carriers. By comparison, all NHS staff are doing biweekly lateral flow tests, and hundreds of staff are detected prior to symptoms this way. This means that fewer staff are off sick/isolating, and more staff are available to care for patients.
The utility of the test decreases with reduced risk. A 99% specific test is good when there are high levels of disease going around (e.g. covid in a hospital). In the community, rates are much lower, so the positive predictive value of the test is much lower, even with 99% specificity.
My conclusion is that if you tried this in a community setting, the number of false positives would far outweigh the true positives, and lead to dismissal of alerts.
I can only comment on the study in front of me, and not the use cases that 'might have been'. In this case, they tested in a healthcare setting as there is a presumed higher risk of catching covid amongst participants. Would the same false positive rate be true in the community, where transmission is much lower? We don't know because that wasn't the experiment.
The study authors claim that this is useful in the healthcare setting- I'm saying that it's useless because there are better tools in the arsenal (lateral flow tests), and watches are an infection risk.
So some big limitations, speaking as a doctor. Firstly, I'm surprised that they allowed watches on the ward. They're a huge infection risk and most places are bare below the elbows (NHS), moreso for covid. Secondly, they only looked at symptomatic covid cases (1 day before symptoms started was their prediction as far as i can tell. This is completely useless as the 24hrs before symptoms start the patient is likely to already be highly infectious, and misses the asymptomatic carriers which have an indeterminate effect on spread as well. Far better to use the semi-proven (but equally controversial) lateral flow tests and avoid these risks. In the UK, hundreds of healthcare staff have been identified as covid+ >48hrs before symptoms in this way.
Hey thanks for this work, genuinely found it really useful! If you have any comments or feedback on our summary of it let me know- we've added thoughts and comments from authors on other papers
I work in a hospital. They have switched the default search engine to ecosia. All adverts are blocked, so it cant help plant trees, and because it's bing, the carbon footprint is then positive (rather than at least neutral with Google). So it's all virtue signalling.
Worst of all, we get worse results, all the time, and I think this will indirectly affect patient care.
Anecdotally, here's a lot more 'ancillary bloat' in academia now. You can't just buy a microscope, it has to go through a purchasing department. You can't buy your own conference tickets, there's a dedicated buyer. Money trickles down through multiple layers, each with their own beaurocracy. On top of your core science costs, you need to budget for public engagement etc. This has meant that there are more incremental studies being approved (that are closer to patient care), but fewer moonshots, which are harder to demonstrate outcomes.
Thanks for mentioning this, it's always difficult determining which levels of information to include, and which to leave out. I agree this is worth mentioning and I've now added this in to the article.
Thanks for the feedback. As a researcher I'm more interested in the methods of how they've achieved this performance and this was what I wanted to share. The top use cases are briefly listed here but frankly unlimited within and beyond pharma- as another commenter has said, if this is applied a Nobel is likely. Until then we'll need to wait for the full paper.
While the healthcare is centralised, the data is not, and often poorly federated between a multitude of organisations. Scotland has unified this much more and is far better placed to monitor for efficacy and side effects.
Unfortunately most liver cancer is metastases from elsewhere, and once its in the liver, its likely to have spread to other organs as well, so this will not affect prognosis as you say until the cancer itself is treated.
ECMO is an amazing technology that's often used in futile situations. I don't know who the ideal candidate is for it, but a young, fit, hypothermic cardiac arrest victim is pretty high up on the list
Its worth saying that some of the side effects of the newer immunotherapies are bizarre, idiosyncratic, and unpleasant, in a different way from chemotherapies. This is definitely good news, but patients undergoing treatment for melanoma are still extremely complex to manage.
Not to disagree with your experience, but to clarify. Postnatal checks by the doctor may be performed up to 72 hours after birth [1]. The reason that the doctor might not be available, is because they may be attending a neonatal arrest call, which can require prolonged ventilatory assistance for the newborn by the doctor. In that setting, hospitals might want to make empty beds to enable more mothers to safely give birth in the hospital of their choice. In an ideal world, there would be more beds.
Finally, sorry to hear about your experience of tongue tie. This is also mentioned in link [1], so it's definitely not something that the 'NHS doesn't believe in'.
No, it's because large parts of the hippocratic oath are outdated and involve refusal to teach medicine to those not in the fraternity, and refusing abortions.
In the UK, this has been replaced by Duties of a Doctor, which is much more progressive.
The funniest sight I've ever seen in the hospital was a fly in the operating theatre, being chased by half a dozen scrub nurses with disinfectant spray
Primary care is so much about forming a lifelong relationship between doctor and patient, finding a way for the patient to inject their own hopes, worries, dreams feels so important, and beyond the proscribed tick boxes.
As said previously, they used to use these, but having an induction loop means you can never have an MRI as this would superheat the coil. I'd rather have the option of an MRI should I need it, and a daycase procedure to change my batteries.