Patient Safety Should Include Patient Privacy: The Shortcomings Of The FDA\u27s Recent Draft Guidance Regarding Cybersecurity Of Medical Devices

Right now, a healthcare provider somewhere in the United States is being hacked or suffering the repercussions of a successful hack. Those healthcare providers that have not been attacked successfully likely have an individual attempting to penetrate the healthcare provider’s network

Quasi-Messianism and the disenchantment of politics

The study of political religion has focused on how religious structure and substance came to permeate grand political ideologies such as fascism and communism. The relevance of various relatively veiled forms of religion in modern day-to-day democratic politics has been undervalued and we therefore fail to appreciate to what extent, and how religious structure and substance have also penetrated conventional democratic politics. As a result, we do not comprehend that it is the progressive abolition of "quasi-messianism" in politics that is currently causing the existential problem of democracy, namely massive political disaffection. Quasi-messianism concerned the visionary anticipation of a better world that is attainable, here and in the distant, yet foreseeable future. This promise accorded politics an enchanting quality. Quite down-to-earth political ventures got charged with an inspiring and imaginative sense of purpose, direction, and meaning, but equally with this-worldly catalysts, which, in contrast to the political-religious grand utopias, were operational and practical. In this quality, some mass political projects or elite missions developed a capacity to enchant the political elite and the public alike. Hence the thesis that it is the disenchantment of politics, which lies at the heart of the contemporary phenomenon of waning political allegiance. Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2009

Visual attention to alcohol cues and responsible drinking statements within alcohol advertisements and public health campaigns: Relationships with drinking intentions and alcohol consumption in the laboratory.

Both alcohol advertising and public health campaigns increase alcohol consumption in the short term, and this may be attributable to attentional capture by alcohol-related cues in both types of media. The present studies investigated the association between (a) visual attention to alcohol cues and responsible drinking statements in alcohol advertising and public health campaigns, and (b) next-week drinking intentions (Study 1) and drinking behavior in the lab (Study 2). In Study 1, 90 male participants viewed 1 of 3 TV alcohol adverts (conventional advert; advert that emphasized responsible drinking; or public health campaign; between-subjects manipulation) while their visual attention to alcohol cues and responsible drinking statements was recorded, before reporting their drinking intentions. Study 2 used a within-subjects design in which 62 participants (27% male) viewed alcohol and soda advertisements while their attention to alcohol/soda cues and responsible drinking statements was recorded, before completing a bogus taste test with different alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks. In both studies, alcohol cues attracted more attention than responsible drinking statements, except when viewing a public health TV campaign. Attention to responsible drinking statements was not associated with intentions to drink alcohol over the next week (Study 1) or alcohol consumption in the lab (Study 2). However, attention to alcohol portrayal cues within alcohol advertisements was associated with ad lib alcohol consumption in Study 2, although attention to other types of alcohol cues (brand logos, glassware, and packaging) was not associated. Future studies should investigate how responsible drinking statements might be improved to attract more attention

Learnings from a Retail Recommendation System on Billions of Interactions at bol.com

Recommender systems are ubiquitous in the modern internet, where they help users find items they might like. We discuss the design of a large-scale recommender system handling billions of interactions on a European e-commerce platform.We present two studies on enhancing the predictive performance of this system with both algorithmic and systems-related approaches. First, we evaluate neural network-based approaches on proprietary data from our e-commerce platform, and confirm recent results outlining that the benefits of these methods with respect to predictive performance are limited, while they exhibit severe scalability bottlenecks. Next, we investigate the impact of a reduction of the response latency of our serving system, and conduct an A/B test on the live platform with more than 19 million user sessions, which confirms that the latency reduction of the recommender system correlates with a significant increase in business-relevant metrics. We discuss the implications of our findings with respect to real world recommendation systems and future research on scalable session-based recommendation