Open access gastroscopy--3 year experience of a new service

We have audited the first 3 yr of a new open access gastroscopy service in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast to assess service demands, patient demography and diagnostic trends. Over 3 yr there were 1872 referrals (800 from fundholding general practitioners), 8.8 per cent were non attenders and 5.4 per cent cancelled appointments. Endoscopic diagnostic categories showed no significant change over the 3 yr, 39 per cent non ulcer dyspepsia, 35 per cent gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD), 17 per cent peptic ulcer disease (PUD), 6 per cent GORD and PUD, 1 per cent gastric erosions and 0.8 per cent carcinoma.

How (In)Consistent is the Court of Justice in the Application of the Market Access Test?”

Invited panel speaker at a Jean Monnet Chair funded research workshop organised by the Europa Institute, School of Law, University of Edinburgh (9 December 2011), http://www.pol.ed.ac.uk/research_themes/index/jean_monnet_centre_of_excellence/principles_of_market_access_workshop

Use of the impedance cardiogram in public access defibrillators as an indicator of cardiopulmonary resuscitation effectiveness

An algorithm has been developed for a Public Access Defibrillator which utilizes distinctive features from the impedance cardiogram (ICG) recorded via defibrillator pads to advise both lay users and minimally trained bystanders to ensure CPR effectiveness. Following ethical approval, data were collected and marked. CPR was administered by trained personnel. 211 cases were gathered and the training set included 106 cases. A retrospective analysis was carried out of simultaneously recorded ECG and ICG. The speed of compressions was calculated by counting the outstanding waves in the ICG during CPR. Also if the base-to-peak amplitude of the ICG is greater than a minimum threshold, the corresponding compressions were classified as being applied with adequate force. For the validation set, adequate speed was detected with 91.45% sensitivity and 96.27% specificity (79826s) and adequate force with 99.94% sensitivity and 97.91% specificity (91973s). © 2011 CCAL.

BAILII, Legal Education and Open Access to Law

The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) entered the online legal information landscape in 2001 with charitable status as a provider of UK and European judgments, and has over the past decade or so moved from a system quickly put together with any materials which could be found, to a system which provides a core resource to professionals in law. In this article we provide an overview for the law teacher of the system’s first years and we then look at whether usage in law schools has matched that of the professional, how the JISC funded Open Law project enabled development for law students, and where we might go in the future as part of the Legal Information Institute collective which operates under the ‘Free Access to Law’ banner.
As members of the Open Law team who sought funding, carried out the research and implemented the project, it seems to us that the project was generally successful. Our indications were that prior to Open Law the use of BAILII by students was low – it was not readily found or discussed by lecturers, was difficult to use, and generally less user friendly than it could have been. The changes implemented by Open Law appear to have changed that position considerably. However, our findings also indicate that there is much work to do to re-energise digital legal information as a legal education research field.

Design and Analysis of an Independent, Layer 2, Open-Access WiFi Monitoring Infrastructure in the Wild

While WiFi monitoring networks have been deployed in previous research, to date none have assessed live network data from an open access, public environment. In this paper we describe the construction of a replicable, independent WLAN monitoring system and address some of the challenges in analysing the resultant traffic. Analysis of traffic from the system demonstrates that basic traffic information from open-access networks varies over time (temporal inconsistency). The results also show that arbitrary selection of Request-Reply intervals can have a significant effect on Probe and Association frame exchange calculations, which can impact on the ability to detect flooding attacks.

Access to medical records for research purposes:Varying perceptions across research ethics boards

Introduction: Variation across research ethics boards (REBs) in conditions placed on access to medical records for research purposes raises concerns around negative impacts on research quality and on human subject protection, including privacy. Aim: To study variation in REB consent requirements for retrospective chart review and who may have access to the medical record for data abstraction. Methods: Thirty 90-min face-to-face interviews were conducted with REB chairs and administrators affiliated with faculties of medicine in Canadian universities, using structured questions around a case study with open-ended responses. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded manually. Results: Fourteen sites (47%) required individual patient consent for the study to proceed as proposed. Three (10%) indicated that their response would depend on how potentially identifying variables would be managed. Eleven sites (38%) did not require consent. Two (7%) suggested a notification and opt-out process. Most stated that consent would be required if identifiable information was being abstracted from the record. Among those not requiring consent, there was substantial variation in recognising that the abstracted information could potentially indirectly re-identify individuals. Concern over access to medical records by an outside individual was also associated with requirement for consent. Eighteen sites (60%) required full committee review. Sixteen (53%) allowed an external research assistant to abstract information from the health record. Conclusions: Large variation was found across sites in the requirement for consent for research involving access to medical records. REBs need training in best practices for protecting privacy and confidentiality in health research. A forum for REB chairs to confidentially share concerns and decisions about specific studies could also reduce variation in decisions.

Structured data access annotations for massively parallel computations

We describe an approach aimed at addressing the issue of joint exploitation of control (stream) and data parallelism in a skeleton based parallel programming environment, based on annotations and refactoring. Annotations drive efficient implementation of a parallel computation. Refactoring is used to transform the associated skeleton tree into a more efficient, functionally equivalent skeleton tree. In most cases, cost models are used to drive the refactoring process. We show how sample use case applications/kernels may be optimized and discuss preliminary experiments with FastFlow assessing the theoretical results. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.