Are you a researcher as well as a medical illustrator?

When we list the areas of practice for medical illustrators we always include research, but how involved in research are we? The aim of this activity is to encourage your professional development not just as a medical illustrator but your involvement with research whether that is undertaking your own research, undertaking evidence based practice (1) , working as part of a research team, advising researchers on the value of medical illustration or supporting a student undertaking a research project for their degree or post-graduate qualification

Initial Experiences of Building Secure Access to Patient Confidential Data via the Internet

A project to enable health care professionals (GPs, practice nurses and diabetes nurse specialists) to access, via the Internet, confidential patient data held on a secondary care (hospital) diabetes information system, has been implemented. We describe the application that we chose to distribute (a diabetes register); the security mechanisms we used to protect the data (a public key infrastructure with strong encryption and digitally signed messages, plus a firewall); the reasons for the implementation decisions we made; the validation testing that we performed and the preliminary results of the pilot implementation

Relic Radio Bubbles and Cluster Cooling Flows

Recent suggestions that buoyant radio emitting cavities in the intracluster medium can cause significant reheating of cooling flows are re-examined when the effects of the intracluster magnetic field are included. Expansion of the cavity creates a tangential magnetic field in the ICM around the radio source, and this field can suppress instabilities that mix the ICM and the radio source. The onset of instability can be delayed for ~100 million years, and calculation of the actual reheating time shows that this may not occur until about 1Gy after creation of the cavity. These results may explain why the relic radio bubbles are still intact at such late times, and it may imply that the role of radio sources in reheating the ICM should be re-examined. In addition, the existence of relic radio cavities may also imply that the particle content of radio source lobes is primarily electrons and protons rather than electrons and positrons.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, to be published in MNRA

mixtools: An R Package for Analyzing Mixture Models

The mixtools package for R provides a set of functions for analyzing a variety of finite mixture models. These functions include both traditional methods, such as EM algorithms for univariate and multivariate normal mixtures, and newer methods that reflect some recent research in finite mixture models. In the latter category, mixtools provides algorithms for estimating parameters in a wide range of different mixture-of-regression contexts, in multinomial mixtures such as those arising from discretizing continuous multivariate data, in nonparametric situations where the multivariate component densities are completely unspecified, and in semiparametric situations such as a univariate location mixture of symmetric but otherwise unspecified densities. Many of the algorithms of the mixtools package are EM algorithms or are based on EM-like ideas, so this article includes an overview of EM algorithms for finite mixture models.

The Czechoslovak Privatization Auction: An Empirical Investigation

The 1992 Czechoslovak mass-privatization program resembled a multiround Walrasian auction with tatonnement in which participants, endowed with points, bid simultaneously for non-uniform products, i.e., shares. The creation of this artificial primary market provides economists with a unique opportunity to investigate empirically (1) the role and aims of the auctioneer in a politically-motivated giveaway scheme, (2) the price-setting mechanism, and (3) the bidding strategies and rationality of the auction's participants. Unlike more conventional auctions, price discovery was only a secondary motive to the auctioneer. The principal aim was to transfer the shares quickly to the investing public in a politically acceptable manner. We show that the price-updating rules adopted alter each bidding round did achieve the auctioneer's principal aim, but they also served to inject noise. The results suggest an inherent tradeoff between socially acceptable outcomes in such auctions and efficient price discovery

The clinical relevance and newsworthiness of NIHR HTA-funded research: a cohort study

ObjectiveTo assess the clinical relevance and newsworthiness of the UK National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme funded reports.Study designRetrospective cohort study.SettingThe cohort included 311 NIHR HTA Programme funded reports publishing in HTA in the period 1 January 2007–31 December 2012. The McMaster Online Rating of Evidence (MORE) system independently identified the clinical relevance and newsworthiness of NIHR HTA publications and non-NIHR HTA publications. The MORE system involves over 4000 physicians rating publications on a scale of relevance (the extent to which articles are relevant to practice) and a scale of newsworthiness (the extent to which articles contain news or something clinicians are unlikely to know).Main outcome measuresThe proportion of reports published in HTA meeting MORE inclusion criteria and mean average relevance and newsworthiness ratings were calculated and compared with publications from the same studies publishing outside HTA and non-NIHR HTA funded publications.Results286/311 (92.0%) of NIHR HTA reports were assessed by MORE, of which 192 (67.1%) passed MORE criteria. The average clinical relevance rating for NIHR HTA reports was 5.48, statistically higher than the 5.32 rating for non-NIHR HTA publications (mean difference=0.16, 95% CI 0.04 to 0.29, p=0.01). Average newsworthiness ratings were similar between NIHR HTA reports and non-NIHR HTA publications (4.75 and 4.70, respectively; mean difference=0.05, 95% CI ?0.18 to 0.07, p=0.402). NIHR HTA-funded original research reports were statistically higher for newsworthiness than reviews (5.05 compared with 4.64) (mean difference=0.41, 95% CI 0.18 to 0.64, p=0.001).ConclusionsFunding research of clinical relevance is important in maximising the value of research investment. The NIHR HTA Programme is successful in funding projects that generate outputs of clinical relevance

Phthalic Acid Derivatives, Constitution and Color, Xv. 1 3,4,6-Triiodophthaloxime and Some of Its Derivatives.

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