Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

Efficient k-Anonymization Using Clustering Techniques

k-anonymization techniques have been the focus of intense research in the last few years. An important requirement for such techniques is to ensure anonymization of data while at the same time minimizing the information loss resulting from data modifications. In this paper we propose an approach that uses the idea of clustering to minimize information loss and thus ensure good data quality. The key observation here is that data records that are naturally similar to each other should be part of the same equivalence class. We thus formulate a specific clustering problem, referred to as k-member clustering problem. We prove that this problem is NP-hard and present a greedy heuristic, the complexity of which is in O(n 2). As part of our approach we develop a suitable metric to estimate the information loss introduced by generalizations, which works for both numeric and categorical data

kACTUS 2: Privacy Preserving in Classification Tasks Using k-Anonymity

Abstract. k-anonymity is the method used for masking sensitive data which successfully solves the problem of re-linking of data with an external source and makes it difficult to re-identify the individual. Thus k-anonymity works on a set of quasi-identifiers (public sensitive attributes), whose possible availability and linking is anticipated from external dataset, and demands that the released dataset will contain at least k records for every possible quasi-identifier value. Another aspect of k is its capability of maintaining the truthfulness of the released data (unlike other existing methods). This is achieved by generalization, aprimary technique in k-anonymity. Generalization consists of generalizing attribute values and substituting them with semantically consistent but less precise values. When the substituted value doesn’t preserve semantic validity the technique is called suppression which is a private case of generalization. We present a hybrid approach called compensation which is based on suppression and swapping for achieving privacy. Since swapping decreases the truthfulness of attribute values there is a tradeoff between level of swapping (information truthfulness) and suppression (information loss) incorporated in our algorithm. We use k-anonymity to explore the issue of anonymity preservation. Since we do not use generalization, we do not need a priori knowledge of attribute semantics. We investigate data anonymization in the context of classification and use tree properties to satisfy k-anonymization. Our work improves previous approaches by increasing classification accuracy

Women'S Liberation And The Moral Individualism Of Ru

May Fourth Movement is often credited with women's liberation. Yet before the word "liberation" is overused, it is necessary to talk about what is behind this fabulous word. Chapter one will mainly discuss whether women needed such liberation and whether the May Fourth Movement really helped women to be liberated. The conclusion tries to argue that the May Fourth Movement did not liberate anyone. It simply changed people's way of living; women were the focus. After May Fourth Movement, Confucianism, ru as translated here, has experienced ups and downs, and reenters Chinese people's life, as both an ancient thought and a remodeled imported study. Chapter two tries to argue that ru cannot be taken as a pure religion, or mixed up with Marxism. Moral individualism within Confucianism is a practical philosophy. To better understand moral individualism within Confucianism, the best way is to go back to Confucian classics