The Philosopher"s Garden: Scepticism within (and from without) Wittgenstein

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that"s a tree�, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: "This fellow isn"t insane. We are only doing philosophy.� On Certainty § 467 If philosophy is disease, the sceptic must surely have a terminal case. There seems to be no relief for one so ill. However, in On Certainty Wittgenstein offers us a new way to examine the problem, a new treatment, as it were. As Wittgenstein"s methodology is so uniquely multi-faceted, so too is his attack on the sceptic, and as it has been said before, Wittgenstein has a marvelous capacity, not for solving problems, but dissolving them. We should not therefore be surprised that the die-hard sceptic remains unconvinced by Wittgenstein"s attack; it is not the sort of maneuver the sceptic is used to. Indeed, at times it does not seem like an attack at all. The sceptic must beware however; behind Wittgenstein"s oblique style there lies an assault of such subtlety and caliber that only a master of could deliver it. But really, for all his mastery, for all his philosophical poignancy, how effective is Wittgenstein"s criticism? It is certainly of a very different order than those we have seen in the past, but can Wittgenstein ultimately avoid the charge of "question begging� that have plagued so many before him? The question is somewhat complicated in the case of Wittgenstein, not only by his philosophical position, but also by his methodology

Using philosophy to improve the coherence and interoperability of applications ontologies: A field report on the collaboration of IFOMIS and L&C

The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software ap-plication purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of phi-losophical insight and methodology into application domains yields a variety of improvements. L&C’s LinKBase® is one of the world’s largest medical domain ontologies. Its current primary use pertains to natural language processing ap-plications, but it also supports intelligent navigation through a range of struc-tured medical and bioinformatics information resources, such as SNOMED-CT, Swiss-Prot, and the Gene Ontology (GO). In this report we discuss how and why philosophical methods improve both the internal coherence of LinKBase®, and its capacity to serve as a translation hub, improving the interoperability of the ontologies through which it navigates

Influenza epidemiology and vaccine effectiveness following the 2009 pandemic

Influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 was identified in April 2009 and spread rapidly around the globe. The public health response in Victoria was undertaken in accordance with the Australian Health Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza (AHMPPI) and included intensive case follow up, school closure, antiviral distribution and a vaccination program. However, evidence soon emerged that most cases were relatively mild compared to previous pandemics. This thesis sought to assess how the epidemiology of influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 differed from expectations in pandemic planning and how the control measures of school closure and antiviral distribution within the AHMPPI were applied and performed, and to investigate the role of infection severity in driving the initial spread of influenza A(H1N1)pdm09. It also sought to examine how the epidemiology of seasonal influenza in Victoria changed following the emergence of influenza A(H1N1)pdm09, and measure the effectiveness of influenza vaccine in prevention of laboratory confirmed influenza infection prior to, during and following the emergence of influenza A(H1N1)pdm09. Investigation of these questions utilised a variety of methodological approaches, including: analysis of influenza-like illness (ILI) and laboratory confirmed influenza surveillance datasets in general practice, locum service, hospital, notifiable disease and reference laboratory settings; systematic review of the literature on influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 viral shedding; deterministic mathematical modelling; and application of sentinel surveillance influenza laboratory testing data to a novel variant of the traditional case control study design to measure vaccine effectiveness. Although it spread rapidly and primarily affected younger age groups, influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 morbidity and mortality were mild compared with previous pandemics. However, the intensity of the public health response was not commensurate with the severity and magnitude of the disease. Transmission of influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 was largely driven by those effectively invisible to the health system and the virus was therefore well-established by the time it was detected. The delay in detection and high proportion of relatively mild infections meant that school closures and antiviral distribution to notified cases and their contacts were ineffective. Pandemic plans need to be revised to accommodate such a scenario and ensure trust from public and professionals in future pandemic responses. Influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 replaced the previously circulating seasonal A(H1N1) and remained dominant in Victoria in 2010. Higher proportions of A(H3N2) and type B influenza were observed in 2011 before dominance of A(H3N2) in 2012, accompanied by an increase in severe infections in older people especially. Whilst ILI surveillance suggested influenza seasons of moderate magnitude from 2010-2012, notifiable disease surveillance indicated a considerable increase in influenza testing by medical practitioners. Influenza vaccine effectiveness (VE) in Victoria varied considerably in the years preceding, during and following the 2009 pandemic. With the exceptions of high influenza A(H1N1)pdm09-specific seasonal VE in 2010 and 2011, and no protective effect of seasonal vaccine against influenza A(H1N1)pdm09 in 2009, type and subtype-specific VE were inconsistent across seasons, and had little correlation with the percentage match between circulating and vaccine strains. Further investigation of the role of previous immunity and antigenic similarity by phylogenetic analysis is needed to better understand the determinants of influenza VE

Ontological theory for ontological engineering: Biomedical systems information integration

Software application ontologies have the potential to become the keystone in state-of-the-art information management techniques. It is expected that these ontologies will support the sort of reasoning power required to navigate large and complex terminologies correctly and efficiently. Yet, there is one problem in particular that continues to stand in our way. As these terminological structures increase in size and complexity, and the drive to integrate them inevitably swells, it is clear that the level of consistency required for such navigation will become correspondingly difficult to maintain. While descriptive semantic representations are certainly a necessary component to any adequate ontology-based system, so long as ontology engineers rely solely on semantic information, without a sound ontological theory informing their modeling decisions, this goal will surely remain out of reach. In this paper we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), along with The Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Sciences (IFOMIS), are working towards developing and implementing just such a theory, combining the open software architecture of L&C’s LinkSuiteTM with the philosophical rigor of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology. In this way we aim to move beyond the more or less simple controlled vocabularies that have dominated the industry to date

Effectiveness of electronic reminders to improve medication adherence in tuberculosis patients: a cluster-randomised trial

An anonymised dataset of 4,292 TB patients who gave informed consent to participate in a pragmatic, cluster-randomised trial of 36 districts/counties (clusters) within the provinces of Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Hunan, and Chongqing, China between June 2011- March 2012. Dataset contains variables on stratified randomisation and cluster code, socio-demographic information, TB treatment outcomes, adherence outcomes, medication monitor problems, mobile phone problems, and the type of patient treatment management therapy initiated (if at all)

Ozbot and haptics : remote surveillance to physical presence

This paper reports on robotic and haptic technologies and capabilities developed for the law enforcement and defence community within Australia by the Centre for Intelligent Systems Research (CISR). The OzBot series of small and medium surveillance robots have been designed in Australia and evaluated by law enforcement and defence personnel to determine suitability and ruggedness in a variety of environments. Using custom developed digital electronics and featuring expandable data busses including RS485, I2C, RS232, video and Ethernet, the robots can be directly connected to many off the shelf payloads such as gas sensors, x-ray sources and camera systems including thermal and night vision. Differentiating the OzBot platform from its peers is its ability to be integrated directly with haptic technology or the \u27haptic bubble\u27 developed by CISR. Haptic interfaces allow an operator to physically \u27feel\u27 remote environments through position-force control and experience realistic force feedback. By adding the capability to remotely grasp an object, feel its weight, texture and other physical properties in real-time from the remote ground control unit, an operator\u27s situational awareness is greatly improved through Haptic augmentation in an environment where remote-system feedback is often limited. <br /

MaskDensity14: an R package for the density approximant of a univariate based on noise multiplied data

Lin (2014) developed a framework of the method of the sample-moment-based density approximant, for estimating the probability density function of microdata based on noise multiplied data. Theoretically, it provides a promising method for data users in generating the synthetic data of the original data without accessing the original data; however, technical issues can cause problems implementing the method. In this paper, we describe a software package called MaskDensity14, written in the R language, that uses a computational approach to solve the technical issues and makes the method of the sample-moment-based density approximant feasible. MaskDensity14 has applications in many areas, such as sharing clinical trial data and survey data without releasing the original data

The optimal design of stepped wedge trials with equal allocation to sequences and a comparison to other trial designs.

Background/Aims We sought to optimise the design of stepped wedge trials with an equal allocation of clusters to sequences and explored sample size comparisons with alternative trial designs. Methods We developed a new expression for the design effect for a stepped wedge trial, assuming that observations are equally correlated within clusters and an equal number of observations in each period between sequences switching to the intervention. We minimised the design effect with respect to (1) the fraction of observations before the first and after the final sequence switches (the periods with all clusters in the control or intervention condition, respectively) and (2) the number of sequences. We compared the design effect of this optimised stepped wedge trial to the design effects of a parallel cluster-randomised trial, a cluster-randomised trial with baseline observations, and a hybrid trial design (a mixture of cluster-randomised trial and stepped wedge trial) with the same total cluster size for all designs. Results We found that a stepped wedge trial with an equal allocation to sequences is optimised by obtaining all observations after the first sequence switches and before the final sequence switches to the intervention; this means that the first sequence remains in the control condition and the last sequence remains in the intervention condition for the duration of the trial. With this design, the optimal number of sequences is [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the cluster-mean correlation, [Formula: see text] is the intracluster correlation coefficient, and m is the total cluster size. The optimal number of sequences is small when the intracluster correlation coefficient and cluster size are small and large when the intracluster correlation coefficient or cluster size is large. A cluster-randomised trial remains more efficient than the optimised stepped wedge trial when the intracluster correlation coefficient or cluster size is small. A cluster-randomised trial with baseline observations always requires a larger sample size than the optimised stepped wedge trial. The hybrid design can always give an equally or more efficient design, but will be at most 5% more efficient. We provide a strategy for selecting a design if the optimal number of sequences is unfeasible. For a non-optimal number of sequences, the sample size may be reduced by allowing a proportion of observations before the first or after the final sequence has switched. Conclusion The standard stepped wedge trial is inefficient. To reduce sample sizes when a hybrid design is unfeasible, stepped wedge trial designs should have no observations before the first sequence switches or after the final sequence switches

Hepatitis B prevention in Victoria, Australia - the potential to protect

People with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) are a major source of incident hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection. The Department of Health in Victoria, Australia, recommends household contacts of CHB cases to be screened and funds hepatitis B vaccination for thos