Personal Medical Information: Privacy or Personal Data Protection?

Some of the existing literature concerning the privacy of health information seems to suggest that medical information has a particularly special nature; either through its oft-cited association with dignity or the need for its ‘‘unobstructed’’ use by health care practitioners for a variety of reasons. It is against such a backdrop that this paper will review and compare a number of legislative mechanisms that have been designed to meet the challenge of safeguarding the privacy of personal information without completely hindering the continued flow of information required by economic and health care systems. An attempt will be made to situate the Canadian legal environment in respect of privacy legislation within a suitable theoretical framework: Elizabeth Neill’s model of privacy. Aside from providing the necessary conceptual framework for the paper that will help delineate between privacy and personal data protection, Neill’s model will be adapted to develop a privacy–personal data protection continuum, on which the various legislative devices will be positioned. The analysis of the various statutory mechanisms will be limited to a descriptive discussion designed to conceptualize the degree to which contemporary legislation is more aptly construed as protective of privacy or personal data. Though some attention will be devoted to discussing the analytic advantages of Neill’s model in responding to such a query, a normative assessment of her model or the various acts is beyond the scope of this paper. The research questions driving this paper include the fol- lowing three: (i) Considering Neill’s ontology of privacy rights, are the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data and the European Union Directive on the Protection of Individuals with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of Such Data best characterized as protective of privacy or personal data? (ii) Do the various provincial health information protection Acts go beyond the Personal Information and Protection of Electronic Documents Act such that health information protection might better be considered more about privacy than personal data protection? (iii) Which are aligned with Neill’s model? In order to respond to these questions, the first part of the essay will be devoted to explicating Neill’s ontology of privacy. The paper will then consider the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data and the European Union Directive on the Protection of Individuals with Regard to the Processing of Personal Data and on the Free Movement of Such Data in order to assess whether they protect privacy or personal data. The next section will engage in a comparative examination of the Canadian federal Personal Information and Protection of Electronic Documents Act and the four provincial health information protection Acts (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario). Based upon this comparison, attention will then turn toward an assessment of whether the various statutes are concerned more with privacy or personal data protection, and where they fit in the privacy debate based on Neill’s model

CANADA’S BIOTECHNOLOGY STRATEGY: STRUGGLES ON THE KNOWLEDGE COMMONS

This research critically analyses a number of the social, economic, environmental, and informational questions that attach to biotechnology in the context of Canada’s Biotechnology Strategy. A neo-Marxist biopolitical framework that draws on a number of theoretical elements from autonomist Marxism informs the conceptual scheme. Much like Marx’s methodological orientation based on the perspective of the working class rooted in its own historical activity, contemporary efforts at understanding and situating the current conjuncture of capitalist social relations can be advanced through research into the genealogy of social and political opposition movements. By apprehending these emerging subjectivities we might begin developing a new social vision of our own era. It is precisely those struggles mobilised around biotechnology issues in Canada that this research seeks to elaborate. Drawing on documentary analysis and interviews, the research seeks to determine the role the Canadian Biotechnology Strategy has played in commodifying biotechnology and biotechnological information as part of the social factory, and to interrogate the counter struggles that have emerged to resist the enclosure of the biological and the knowledge commons, with emphasis on the information and knowledge issues encompassed by such struggles. A basic presupposition of this research is that the commodification of biotechnology, as a branch of science that has assumed a central role in production as a source of new knowledge, offers an exemplary case study of both the mobilisation of the social factory in contemporary society and the scope of counter struggles that, themselves, include a variety of information and knowledge issue

Probabilistic Clustering of Sequences: Inferring new bacterial regulons by comparative genomics

Genome wide comparisons between enteric bacteria yield large sets of conserved putative regulatory sites on a gene by gene basis that need to be clustered into regulons. Using the assumption that regulatory sites can be represented as samples from weight matrices we derive a unique probability distribution for assignments of sites into clusters. Our algorithm, 'PROCSE' (probabilistic clustering of sequences), uses Monte-Carlo sampling of this distribution to partition and align thousands of short DNA sequences into clusters. The algorithm internally determines the number of clusters from the data, and assigns significance to the resulting clusters. We place theoretical limits on the ability of any algorithm to correctly cluster sequences drawn from weight matrices (WMs) when these WMs are unknown. Our analysis suggests that the set of all putative sites for a single genome (e.g. E. coli) is largely inadequate for clustering. When sites from different genomes are combined and all the homologous sites from the various species are used as a block, clustering becomes feasible. We predict 50-100 new regulons as well as many new members of existing regulons, potentially doubling the number of known regulatory sites in E. coli.Comment: 27 pages including 9 figures and 3 table

How Library and Information Science Faculty Perceive and Engage with Open Access

This paper presents the inferential analysis of a systematic survey of North American Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty awareness of, attitudes toward, and experience with open-access scholarly publishing. The study reveals that engagement with open access is related to faculty rank and perceptions about tenure and promotion committee assessments of open-access publications. The perceived constraints of the tenure and promotion system within the academy impact LIS faculty engagement with open-access publishing in ways found in other academic disciplines. However, those who themselves engage with open access tend to assess publications in such venues more favourably than those without such publishing experience and are similarly more predisposed to believe that tenure and promotion committees would evaluate such publications favourably. Nonetheless, while in general it is clear that experience with open access reduces some of the concerns about the effects of this type of scholarly publishing on career opportunities, there remains a substantial amount of equivocacy among LIS faculty about open access

Feasibility and Safety of Bilateral Hybrid EEG/EOG Brain/Neural–Machine Interaction

Cervical spinal cord injuries (SCIs) often lead to loss of motor function in both hands and legs, limiting autonomy and quality of life. While it was shown that unilateral hand function can be restored after SCI using a hybrid electroencephalography/electrooculography (EEG/EOG) brain/neural hand exoskeleton (B/NHE), it remained unclear whether such hybrid paradigm also could be used for operating two hand exoskeletons, e.g., in the context of bimanual tasks such as eating with fork and knife. To test whether EEG/EOG signals allow for fluent and reliable as well as safe and user-friendly bilateral B/NHE control, eight healthy participants (six females, mean age 24.1 +/- 3.2 years) as well as four chronic tetraplegics (four males, mean age 51.8 +/- 15.2 years) performed a complex sequence of EEG-controlled bilateral grasping and EOG-controlled releasing motions of two exoskeletons visually presented on a screen. A novel EOG command performed by prolonged horizontal eye movements (>1 s) to the left or right was introduced as a reliable switch to activate either the left or right exoskeleton. Fluent EEG control was defined as average "time to initialize" (TTI) grasping motions below 3 s. Reliable EEG control was assumed when classification accuracy exceeded 80%. Safety was defined as "time to stop" (TTS) all unintended grasping motions within 2 s. After the experiment, tetraplegics were asked to rate the user-friendliness of bilateral B/NHE control using Likert scales. Average TTI and accuracy of EEG-controlled operations ranged at 2.14 +/- 0.66 s and 85.89 +/- 15.81% across healthy participants and at 1.90 +/- 0.97 s and 81.25 +/- 16.99% across tetraplegics. Except for one tetraplegic, all participants met the safety requirements. With 88 +/- 11% of the maximum achievable score, tetraplegics rated the control paradigm as user-friendly and reliable. These results suggest that hybrid EEG/EOG B/NHE control of two assistive devices is feasible and safe, paving the way to test this paradigm in larger clinical trials performing bimanual tasks in everyday life environments

The rhodanese RhdA helps Azotobacter vinelandii in maintaining cellular redox balance

The tandem domain rhodanese-homology protein RhdA of Azotobacter vinelandii shows an active-site loop structure that confers structural peculiarity in the environment of its catalytic cysteine residue. The in vivo effects of the lack of RhdA were investigated using an A. vinelandii mutant strain (MV474) in which the rhdA gene was disrupted by deletion. Here, by combining analytical measurements and transcript profiles, we show that deletion of the rhdA gene generates an oxidative stress condition to which A. vinelandii responds by activating defensive mechanisms. In conditions of growth in the presence of the superoxide generator phenazine methosulfate, a stressor-dependent induction of rhdA gene expression was observed, thus highlighting that RhdA is important for A. vinelandii to sustain oxidative stress. The potential of RhdA to buffer general levels of oxidants in A. vinelandii cells via redox reactions involving its cysteine thiol is discussed.Vigoni project/081517

An Examination of Library and Information Studies Faculty Experience with and Attitudes toward Open Access Scholarly Publishing

Open access (OA) scholarly publishing has grown steadily in academia for the past few decades as an alternative to traditional subscription-based journal publishing, particularly as concerns mount over the affordability of periodicals. This poster presents an initial analysis of a systematic survey of North American Library and Information Science (LIS) faculty attitudes towards and experiences with OA publishing. This work demonstrates that a majority of LIS faculty do agree that major changes need to be made to the current state of scholarly communication, and that a majority of LIS faculty see OA journals as comparable to traditional, subscription based peer-reviewed journals. However, OA publication behaviors are not equal across faculty rank, and tenure track faculty are not publishing in OA journals at the same rate as their tenured colleagues. Tenure-track faculty also have higher rates of indicating they believe promotion/tenure committees will evaluate OA journal publications as less favorable than traditional, subscription based peer-reviewed journals. The findings from this study raise important questions about overcoming barriers to OA participation.ye

Systematic phenome analysis of Escherichia coli multiple-knockout mutants reveals hidden reactions in central carbon metabolism

Central carbon metabolism is a basic and exhaustively analyzed pathway. However, the intrinsic robustness of the pathway might still conceal uncharacterized reactions. To test this hypothesis, we constructed systematic multiple-knockout mutants involved in central carbon catabolism in Escherichia coli and tested their growth under 12 different nutrient conditions. Differences between in silico predictions and experimental growth indicated that unreported reactions existed within this extensively analyzed metabolic network. These putative reactions were then confirmed by metabolome analysis and in vitro enzymatic assays. Novel reactions regarding the breakdown of sedoheptulose-7-phosphate to erythrose-4-phosphate and dihydroxyacetone phosphate were observed in transaldolase-deficient mutants, without any noticeable changes in gene expression. These reactions, triggered by an accumulation of sedoheptulose-7-phosphate, were catalyzed by the universally conserved glycolytic enzymes ATP-dependent phosphofructokinase and aldolase. The emergence of an alternative pathway not requiring any changes in gene expression, but rather relying on the accumulation of an intermediate metabolite may be a novel mechanism mediating the robustness of these metabolic networks