Algorithms for assessing the probability of an Adverse Drug Reaction

AbstractAdverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are common and are associated with significant risk of morbidity, mortality and admission to hospital. Deciding if a clinical event is an Adverse Drug Reaction, or not, can be difficult. The decision is often based on clinical judgment alone, yet studies have shown that decisions based on clinical judgment often vary greatly between raters.Therefore a number of decision aids or Algorithms have been developed to try and improve this variability. Studies have shown that the use of algorithms does improve the between and within rater agreement significantly, and gives a semi-quantitative measure of the likelihood of causality. There are variations between these algorithms but none of them can in themselves prove or disprove causality. These algorithms, their benefits and their problems will be discussed in this article

Supporting security-oriented, collaborative nanoCMOS electronics research

Grid technologies support collaborative e-Research typified by multiple institutions and resources seamlessly shared to tackle common research problems. The rules for collaboration and resource sharing are commonly achieved through establishment and management of virtual organizations (VOs) where policies on access and usage of resources by collaborators are defined and enforced by sites involved in the collaboration. The expression and enforcement of these rules is made through access control systems where roles/privileges are defined and associated with individuals as digitally signed attribute certificates which collaborating sites then use to authorize access to resources. Key to this approach is that the roles are assigned to the right individuals in the VO; the attribute certificates are only presented to the appropriate resources in the VO; it is transparent to the end user researchers, and finally that it is manageable for resource providers and administrators in the collaboration. In this paper, we present a security model and implementation improving the overall usability and security of resources used in Grid-based e-Research collaborations through exploitation of the Internet2 Shibboleth technology. This is explored in the context of a major new security focused project at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow in the nanoCMOS electronics domain

Federated authentication and authorisation for e-science

The Grid and Web service community are defining a range of standards for a complete solution for security. The National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow is investigating how the various pre-integration components work together in a variety of e-Science projects. The EPSRC-funded nanoCMOS project aims to allow electronics designers and manufacturers to use e-Science technologies and expertise to solve problems of device variability and its impact on system design. To support the security requirements of nanoCMOS, two NeSC projects (VPMan and OMII-SP) are providing tools to allow easy configuration of security infrastructures, exploiting previous successful projects using Shibboleth and PERMIS. This paper presents the model in which these tools interoperate to provide secure and simple access to Grid resources for non-technical users

Acquisition of Demonstratives in English and Spanish

The present work re-evaluates the long-standing claim that demonstratives are among infants’ earliest and most common words. Although demonstratives are deictic words important for joint attention, deictic gestures and non-word vocalizations could serve this function in early language development; the role of demonstratives may have been overestimated. Using extensive data from the CHILDES corpora (Study 1, N = 66, 265 transcripts) and McArthur-Bates CDI database (Study 2, N = 950), the language production of 18- to 24-month-old Spanish- and English-speaking children was analyzed to determine the age and order of acquisition, and frequency of demonstratives. Results indicate that demonstratives do not typically appear before the 50th word and only become frequent from the two-word utterance stage. Corpus data show few differences between Spanish and English, whereas parental report data suggest much later acquisition for demonstratives in English. These findings expand our knowledge of the foundations of deictic communication, and of the methodological challenges of assessing early production of function words

Contrasting one's share of the shared life space:Comparing the roles of metacognition and inhibitory control in the development of theory of mind among Scottish and Japanese children

Cultural comparisons suggest that an understanding of other minds may develop sooner in independent versus interdependent settings, and vice versa for inhibitory control. From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in western samples. In independent cultures, an emphasis on one's own mind offers a clear route to ‘simulate’ other minds, and inhibitory control may be required to set aside one's own perspective to represent the perspective of others. However, in interdependent cultures, social norms are considered the key catalyst for behaviour, and metacognitive reflection and/or suppression of one's own perspective may not be necessary. The cross-cultural generalizability of the western developmental route to ToM is therefore questionable. The current study used an age-matched cross-sectional sample to contrast 56 Japanese and 56 Scottish 3–6-year-old's metacognition, ToM and inhibitory control skills. We replicated the expected cultural patterns for ToM (Scotland > Japan) and inhibitory control (Japan > Scotland). Supporting western developmental enrichment theories, we find that inhibitory control and metacognition predict theory of mind competence in Scotland. However, these variables cannot be used to predict Japanese ToM. This confirms that individualistic mechanisms do not capture the developmental mechanism underlying ToM in Japan, highlighting a bias in our understanding of ToM development. Research Highlights: We replicate an independent cultural advantage for theory of mind (Scotland > Japan) and interdependent advantage for inhibitory control (Japan > Scotland). From a western lens, this pattern might be considered paradoxical, since there is a robust positive relationship between theory of mind and inhibitory control. Supporting western developmental enrichment theories, we find that the development of inhibitory control mediates the link between metacognition and theory of mind in Scotland. However, this model does not predict Japanese theory of mind, highlighting an individualistic bias in our mechanistic understanding of theory of mind development

Integrating security solutions to support nanoCMOS electronics research

The UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded Meeting the Design Challenges of nanoCMOS Electronics (nanoCMOS) is developing a research infrastructure for collaborative electronics research across multiple institutions in the UK with especially strong industrial and commercial involvement. Unlike other domains, the electronics industry is driven by the necessity of protecting the intellectual property of the data, designs and software associated with next generation electronics devices and therefore requires fine-grained security. Similarly, the project also demands seamless access to large scale high performance compute resources for atomic scale device simulations and the capability to manage the hundreds of thousands of files and the metadata associated with these simulations. Within this context, the project has explored a wide range of authentication and authorization infrastructures facilitating compute resource access and providing fine-grained security over numerous distributed file stores and files. We conclude that no single security solution meets the needs of the project. This paper describes the experiences of applying X.509-based certificates and public key infrastructures, VOMS, PERMIS, Kerberos and the Internet2 Shibboleth technologies for nanoCMOS security. We outline how we are integrating these solutions to provide a complete end-end security framework meeting the demands of the nanoCMOS electronics domain

General Practitioner Autism Training and Mandatory Medical Training: A Cross-Sectional Study of GPs’ Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices

Numerous physical conditions appear with increased frequency in autistic individuals in comparison to their non-autistic peers. These co-existing conditions are known to lead to higher morbidity, lower quality of life, and lower life expectancy in autisticadults. There is substantial evidence in the literature that many, if not most, General Practitioners (GPs) in the United Kingdom do not have the necessary understanding of autism to enable them to offer the same standard of service to their autistic patients that their non-autistic patients receive. This research project was set up, inter alia, to explore the attitudes of GPs to the introduction of autism training and the contentious issue of making GP training on any subject mandatory rather than voluntary. We wanted to better understand how autism training for GPs might be developed to maximise "take-up" and “buy-in” given that the demands on their time, including training demands, are such that autism is only one of many conditions vying for training time and mandatory training is anathema to many GPs. Key findings were that nearly three quarters of our respondents strongly agreed that training in autism is important for GPs, the same percentage of our participants had received little or no formal autismtraining, and there was a general dislike of any training being made mandatory. Training should be focused on barriers faced by autistic people in accessing healthcare as well as on autism as a medical condition. No respondent had received a significant level of training in autism although 40% of participants who had received training had been trained by an autistic individual

Understanding of spatial correspondence does not contribute to representational understanding: Evidence from the Model Room and False Belief tasks

We examine the longstanding claim that understanding relational correspondence is a general component of representational understanding (Perner, 1991). Two experiments with 175 preschool children located in Norwich, UK examined use of a scale model (DeLoache, 1987) comparing performances on a ‘Copy’ task, measuring abstract spatial arrangement ability, and the False Belief task. Consistent with previous studies, younger children performed well in scale model trials when objects were unique (e.g., one cupboard) but poorly at distinguishing objects using spatial layout (one of three identical chairs). Performance was specifically associated with Copy task but not False Belief performance. Emphasizing the representational relation between model and room was ineffective. We find no evidence for understanding relational correspondence as a general component of representational understanding