Technology and the Right to Privacy: The Convergence of Surveillance and Information Privacy Concerns

While the privacy concerns raised by advances in surveillance and information technologies are widely recognized, recent developments have led to a convergence of these technologies in many situations, presenting new challenges to the right to privacy. This Note examines this convergence of surveillance and information technologies and its potential impact on individual privacy interests. The Note first discusses the right to privacy, personal information, and surveillance technology separately, noting ways that new technologies create privacy concerns. The Note then describes the merging of surveillance and information technologies and the resulting convergence of two formerly distinct privacy issues. Finally, the Note examines existing protections for privacy, considers why they are insufficient, and proposes measures to enhance the constitutional protection of privacy interests to address these new technologies

Cost-effectiveness of superficial femoral artery endovascular interventions in the UK and Germany: a modelling study

Objectives: To assess the lifetime costs and cost-effectiveness of 5 endovascular interventions to treat superficial femoral arterial disease. Design: A model-based health economic evaluation. An existing decision analytical model was used, with updated effectiveness data taken from the literature, and updated costs based on purchasing prices. Setting: UK and German healthcare perspectives were considered. Participants: Patients with intermittent claudication of the femoropopliteal arteries eligible for endovascular treatment. Methods: UK and German healthcare perspectives were considered, as were different strategies for re-intervention. Interventions: Percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA) with bail-out bare metal stenting (assumed to represent the existing standard of care, and 4 alternatives: primary bare metal stents, drug-eluting stents, drug-eluting balloons (DEBs) and biomimetic stents). Primary outcome measures: The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio between 2 treatments, defined as the incremental costs divided by the incremental quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). Results: Use of a biomimetic stent, BioMimics 3D, was always estimated to dominate the other interventions, having lower lifetime costs and greater effectiveness, as measured by QALYs. Of the remaining interventions, DEBs were always the most effective, and PTA the least effective. There was uncertainty in the cost-effectiveness results, with key drivers being the costs and effectiveness of the biomimetic stent along with the costs of DEBs. Conclusions: All 4 of the alternatives to PTA were more effective, with the biomimetic stent being the most cost-effective. As there was uncertainty in the results, and all of the interventions have different mechanisms of action, all 4 may be considered to be alternatives to PTA

Religious Thought and Reform in late tenth-century England: The Evidence of the Blickling and Vercelli Books

This thesis is a sustained historical analysis of religious thought in late tenth-century England focusing on two collections of vernacular religious literature: the Blickling Book (Princeton, Scheide Library, MS 71) and the Vercelli Book (Biblioteca Capitolare di Vercelli MS CXVII). The dominance of reformist views in the evidence makes the late tenth century a complicated time in Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical history. The dominance of these voices has led to a one-sided view of the period founded upon caricatures of those who were reformed along the strict lines associated with Winchester. This thesis has two aims. The first is to discern from the Blickling and Vercelli books a sense of the ideas and worldview of these ecclesiastics not reformed along Winchester lines. The second is to offer an analysis of late tenth-century ecclesiastical reform which interprets the evidence in light of the Blickling and Vercelli books, rather than the more usual approach of evaluating the books in light of the evidence produced by reformers. To achieve these goals this thesis first engages with ongoing debates over the origins and audiences of the books. After addressing these, it proceeds to consider the issues most often discussed by the Blickling and Vercelli authors: ideals of the priesthood; the main penitential practices of prayer, vigils, fasting, and almsgiving; and the authors’ underlying theology. The main benefit of viewing the period through the lens of Blickling and Vercelli is that it offers a more nuanced view of the relationship between reformers and the non-reformed. It emerges that the late tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Church was characterised by significant continuity in ideas, attitudes, and practices. The late tenth-century Church had a strong pastoral tradition that was common to all; it also had monastic traditions that similarly transcended boundaries set by reformist rhetoric. Yet this reforming rhetoric does not accurately reflect the realities of the late tenth-century Church

A Simple Method for Measuring Deep Convection

The glass-pipe technology used for RAFOS floats is applied to the monitoring of convection in deep mixed layers. The velocity of a vertical current is estimated from the relationship between the drag force exerted on a float by the vertical current and the buoyancy force induced by the float\u27s resultant displacement from hydrostatic equilibrium. Tests conducted in the winters of 1990 and 1991 in the 18°C waters of the northwestern Sargasso Sea reveal definite convective events. Vertical velocities of both upwelling and downwelling plumes are estimated to approach maxima nearing 0.05 m s−1, with durations of up to 2 h. One float that crossed the Gulf Stream and entered the Newfoundland Basin showed evidence of very active vertical currents in the near-surface waters with maximum velocities greater than 0.09 m s−1

External validation of a colorectal cancer model against screening trial long term follow-up data

Objectives: The ScHARR Bowel Cancer Screening Model has been used to make decisions about screening strategies in England. The objective of this study was to perform external validation of the ScHARR model against long-term follow-up data about colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence and mortality reductions due to screening, from the Nottingham Trial of guaiac Faecal Occult Blood Testing for CRC, and the UK Flexible Sigmoidoscopy Screening Trial. Methods: The ScHARR model was adapted prior to validation to reflect the setting of each trial in terms of population characteristics, details of screening and surveillance programmes, uptake of screening and further investigations and study follow-up. The impact of using current versus historical CRC incidence and mortality data in the validation was also examined by carrying out a series of analyses in which historical data from different years was included in the model. Results: The ScHARR model was able to predict CRC incidence and mortality rate/hazard ratios from both trials to well within the 95% confidence intervals in the observed data. Whilst it was less accurate in predicting absolute incidence and mortality rates, modelling historical incidence and mortality data enabled these predictions to be improved considerably. Conclusions: The ScHARR model is able to replicate the long-term relative benefit from screening observed in two large-scale UK based screening trials and can therefore be considered to be an appropriate tool to facilitate decision making around the English bowel cancer screening programme

UW-BHI at MEDIQA 2019: An Analysis of Representation Methods for Medical Natural Language Inference

Recent advances in distributed language modeling have led to large performance increases on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, it is not well understood how these methods may be augmented by knowledge-based approaches. This paper compares the performance and internal representation of an Enhanced Sequential Inference Model (ESIM) between three experimental conditions based on the representation method: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), Embeddings of Semantic Predications (ESP), or Cui2Vec. The methods were evaluated on the Medical Natural Language Inference (MedNLI) subtask of the MEDIQA 2019 shared task. This task relied heavily on semantic understanding and thus served as a suitable evaluation set for the comparison of these representation methods

The restoration of ecological interactions: plant-pollinator networks on ancient and restored heathlands

1. Attempts to restore damaged ecosystems usually emphasize structural aspects of biodiversity, such as species richness and abundance. An alternative is to emphasize functional aspects, such as patterns of interaction between species. Pollination is a ubiquitous interaction between plants and animals. Patterns in plant-pollinator interactions can be analysed with a food web or complex-systems approach and comparing pollination webs between restored and reference sites can be used to test whether ecological restoration has taken place. 2. Using an ecological network approach, we compared plant-pollinator interactions on four pairs of restored and ancient heathlands 11 and 14 years following initiation of restoration management. We used the network data to test whether visitation by pollinators had been restored and we calculated pollinator importance indices for each insect species on the eight sites. Finally, we compared the robustness of the restored and ancient networks to species loss. 3. Plant and pollinator communities were established successfully on the restored sites. There was little evidence of movement of pollinators from ancient sites onto adjacent restored sites, although paired sites correlated in pollinator species richness in both years. There was little insect species overlap within each heathland between 2001 and 2004. 4. A few widespread insect species dominated the communities and were the main pollinators. The most important pollinators were typically honeybees (Apis mellifera), species of bumblebee (Bombus spp.) and one hoverfly species (Episyrphus balteatus). The interaction networks were significantly less complex on restored heathlands, in terms of connectance values, although in 2004 the low values might reflect the negative relationship between connectance and species richness. Finally, there was a trend of restored networks being more susceptible to perturbation than ancient networks, although this needs to be interpreted with caution. 5. Synthesis and applications. Ecological networks provide a powerful tool for assessing the outcome of restoration programmes. Our results indicate that heathland restoration does not have to occur immediately adjacent to ancient heathland for functional pollinator communities to be established. Moreover, in terms of restoring pollinator interactions, heathland managers need only be concerned with the most common insect species. Our focus on pollination demonstrates how a key ecological service can serve as a yardstick for judging restoration success

Correspondence with the U. S. Legislature, Smoot, and Sutherland

Papers involving a correspondence with the U.S. Legislature, Smoot, and Sutherland