Public Articles
Leighton-Linslade and the new energy landscape
What are the green credentials of South Bedfordshire? I’ve been spurred into researching this question and to compare how that fits with national requirements, because of a new wind turbine application happening near Leighton-Linslade. The town has been formed and built its personality about substantial national infrastructure - Watling St; the Grand Union Canal; the West Coast Main Line Railway. Personally I see that we have an opportunity to help tackle the next infrastructure change and to lead on the realisation of Britain’s future energy landscape.
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Ieee Transactions On Wireless Communications Template
A comment on the value of screening1
Everybody’s talking about screening again, with good reason. Research seems to suggest that screening for breast cancer, using mammography, is not effective (let alone cost-effective)\cite{Miller_2014}. Here I present a view on the value of screening; the validity of which I am yet to fully convince myself.
Review: Thrive (Richard Layard, David Clark)
Mental illness reduces national income by about 4%, and yet we only spend about 13% of our health budget and about 5% of our medical research funds on tackling the problem.
As an economist who writes a fair bit on mental health, I regularly trot out statements like this about how costly mental health problems are to society and how the under-provision of services is grossly inefficient. To some the point may now seem obvious and trite. As evidence grows ever more compelling, government policy slowly shifts in response. One success story is the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative, which has greatly improved the availability of evidence-based treatment for some of the most prevalent mental health problems in the UK. Yet in many cases we still await adequate action from the government and decision-makers. Two key players in getting IAPT into government policy were Richard Layard - an economist - and David Clark - a psychologist. In their new book Thrive: The Power of Evidence-Based Psychological Therapies, Layard and Clark demonstrate the need for wider provision of cost-effective mental health care in the UK.\cite{layard2014thrive}
The book starts with a gentle introduction to mental illness; what it is, who suffers, the nature of treatment. This will give any reader a way in, with an engaging set-up for what follows (though with one third of families including someone with a mental illness, most people will find the topic relatable). The opening chapters go on to dig deeper into these questions; do these people get help, how does it affect their lives and what are the societal impacts? These chapters serve as a crash course in mental health and though the style is conversational and easily followed, on reflection you’ll realise that you’ve absorbed a great deal of information about mental health. More importantly, you’ll have a deeper understanding. This isn’t simply because of the number of statistics that have been thrown at you, but because of the personal stories and illustrations that accompany the numbers. This forms the first half of the book - ‘The Problem’ - which encourages the reader to start questioning why more isn’t being done. Economists may at times balk at the broad brush strokes in considering the societal ‘costs’ of mental health problems, but the figures are nevertheless startling.
From there the book continues to build. In the second half - ‘What Can Be Done?’ - the authors go on to explain that actually there’s a ton of effective therapies available. We know what they are and who they work for, but they aren’t available. There’s no doubt that the view of the evidence presented is an optimistic one, but it isn’t designed to mislead; where evidence is lacking, the authors say so. The book seems to be written with the sceptical academic in mind; no sooner can you start to question a claim than you are thrown another baffling statistic to chew on. Various therapies are explored, though the focus is undeniably on depression and anxiety and on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Readers with CBT bugbears may feel alienated by this, but should consider it within the broader scope of the book.
Readers would do well to stop after chapter 14. Things go sharply downhill from this point and could, for some readers, undermine what goes before. This would be a great shame. In all seriousness, chapters 15 and 16 would be better off read at a later date, once the rest of the book has been absorbed, understood and - possibly - acted upon. In the final chapters Layard and Clark make distinctly political proposals about how society should be organised. The happiness agenda takes centre stage. In places, mental illness is presented as simply the opposite of happiness. This is an unfortunate and unnecessary tangent. I have some sympathies with the happiness agenda, but for many I expect these chapters would ruin the book. The less said about them the better.
It is a scandal that so many people with mental health problems do not have access to the cost-effective treatments that exist. Layard and Clark demonstrate convincingly that the issue is of public interest. Thrive has the potential to instill in people the right amounts of sympathy, anger and understanding to bring about change. Many will disagree with their prescriptions, but this should not detract from the central message of the book.
Sofosbuvir: a fork in the road for NICE?
NICE recently completed their appraisal of the hepatitis C drug sofosbuvir\cite{National_Institute_for_Health_and_Care_Excellence2015-cp}. However, as has been reported in the media, NHS England will not be complying with the guidance within the normal time period\cite{Boseley2015-zg}.
The cost of a 24 week course of sofosbuvir is almost £70,000. Around 160,000 people are chronically infected with the hepatitis C virus in England\cite{Public_Health_England2014-in}, so that adds up to a fair chunk of the NHS budget. Yet the drug does appear to be cost-effective. ICERs differ for different patient groups, but for most scenarios the ICER is below £30,000 per QALY. In the NICE documentation, a number of reasons are listed for NHS England’s decision. But what they ultimately boil down to — it seems — is affordability.
The problem is that NICE doesn’t account for affordability in its guidance. One need only consider that the threshold has remained unchanged for over a decade to see that this is true. How to solve this problem really depends on what we believe the job of NICE should be. Should it be NICE’s job to consider what should and shouldn’t be purchased within the existing health budget? Or, rather, should it be NICE’s job simply to figure out what is ‘worth it’ to society, regardless of affordability? This isn’t the first time that an NHS organisation has appealed against a NICE decision in some way\cite{Wells_2007}. Surely, it won’t be the last. These instances represent a failure in the system, not least on grounds of accountability for reasonableness\cite{Daniels_2000}. Here I’d like to suggest that NICE has 3 options for dealing with this problem; one easy, one hard and one harder.
Authorea's New Editor and Design Principles
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Test header 1 | Test header 2 |
Test cell 2 | Test cell 4 |
Getting to know the new editor
The table works just fine if you use a LaTeXwriting block but it does not work as well if you were to use the Markdown formatted writing environment. For most intent and purposes, a LaTeXblock is probably the best option to work wth the ne new wedit d edt editor of Authorea. Excelent effort and now with integration with TheWinnower, looks really good!
ESPECIALIZACIÓN EN INGENIERÍA EN TELECOMUNICACIONES Proyecto del Seminario de Redes de Acceso Fijo
Cantidad de usuarios por Nodo = Cantidad de usuarios por Cluster / Cantidad de Nodos
Ejemplo: Usur/nodo (BsAs NORTE [BAN]) = 500 000 / 56 = 8929
Se verifica del diagrama del Cluster cual es el Nodo más alejado.
Nodo más alejado = nodo con mayor cantidad de puntos intermedios hasta el nodo Borde Gateway
Si consideramos 1 km de largo para cada nodo la distancia de FO = cantidad de nodos intermedios
Authorea Acquires Scientific Publisher The Winnower
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analyse crétique de sénario negawatt
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Creating a domino effect: what can we all do, however small, to make research more open and reproducible?
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What might peer review look like in 2030? Find out at SpotOn16.
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Social Media Essay Contest: Tinder
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Graduate school is notoriously lonely- so I’m on Tinder. And so is the rest of my lab. I’ve seen your profiles, guys! For those unfamiliar, Tinder is a dating app that allows you to very simply browse mates by viewing pictures. You swipe left if you don’t like what you see or right if you do. It’s a social networking site in that it allows you to sort through other people nearby and interact with only those that also swiped right on you. All people, not just grad students apparently, get lonely so Tinder represents a relatively diverse cross section of the population. I’ve met people on Tinder with professions from house painter to software developer to professional clown (swipe left, swipe left!).
Now as far as social media goes, it is generally well integrated into my professional life. My advisor is active on twitter, regularly posts on her blog, and encourages us to use online platforms for everything from notebooks to lab organization. We are a modern lab. But this social media communication that we typically practice, such as live tweeting conferences or posting on ResearchGate, ends up being almost exclusively scientist-to-scientist communication. While students should be sure to integrate this sort of communication into their work, most of the world is not populated by scientists. Most people are house painters, software developers, clowns, etc. and my time on Tinder has taught me how utterly incompetent we are at communicating our work with them.
As a bioengineer with an emphasis on genetic manipulation, I tend to get a pretty formulaic response from new people. “Oh wow, bioengineering. Miss smarty pants over here.” There’s a certain level of pedantic shock and surprise when you’re young, blonde, female and a PhD student in STEM. This is usually followed by some joke, always pertaining to possible nefarious activities that I might be undertaking in the lab. “What kind of super virus are you cooking up?” “Resurrect any dinosaurs lately?” When I first started talking to people on dating apps about my career, I was shocked by how many assumed I was getting a PhD in Evil. Most people go into my field with the intention of curing cancer, not causing vast global plagues. But our portrayal of scientists in pop culture as generally a little whacked in the head, and superstitious fears of GMOs explain a lot of this. Many people have no picture of what a scientist, bioengineer, or other STEM professional looks like outside of the general stereotype of an old white man with crazy hair. We have done a terrible job showing non-STEM folks that we can be women, people of color, queer, etc. And we have failed in communicating the motives behind our work to them.
Tinder has put me into contact with more diverse groups of people than any other social media platform. My list of Facebook friends and Twitter followers is full of scientists like me, but I swipe right on people from all walks of life. Over time, I’ve developed an elevator speech for my work that I can give to non-scientists. I’ve figured out ways to define complicated topics like horizontal gene transfer in metaphors that make sense to a broader audience, ie that bacteria swap genes like Pokemon cards. I’ve become able to talk about complex biological engineering with people who haven’t taken biology since the eighth grade. And these new skills from late night chats and many, many first dates, have improved my science communication skills vastly. I have translated them into speaking clearly with possible funding agencies, improving my K-12 outreach, and describing my work to broader media outlets. But I shouldn’t have had to learn this through Tinder. If we ever hope to see strong funding for science, public understanding, science-conscious policy making, and true diversity in science, we need to shift our communication style. We need to learn in the course of our studies how to communicate outside of our special little STEM club. There is a world of house painters, software developers, and clowns out there that is curious but hopelessly uninformed. We’re the experts and the onus is on us to be able to keep them in the loop by including them in our target audience for communication. We have the luxury of knowing how to find answers in databases, understand primary literature, and think critically about data. Joe from Tinder never learned this stuff. It’s our job to make sure that when we publish a paper, we blog about it in a way he can understand and that is still accurate. It’s on us to ensure that this makes it to media outlets that he uses. And it’s our job to make sure that when we match with him on Tinder, we know what to say.
Macalester POTW 1201: Problem 1201. What Goes Up Might Not Come Down
A random walk on the 2-dimensional integer lattice begins at the origin. At each step, the walker moves one unit either left, right, or up, each with probability $\frac13$. (No downward steps ever.) A walk is a success if it reaches the point (1, 1). What is the probability of success?
Note: One can vary the problem by varying the target point. Eg., use (1, 0) or (0, 1) instead. Perhaps there is a good method to resolve the general case of target (a, b).
Source: Bruce Torrence, Randolph-Macon College
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Using Disease Dynamics