356 research outputs found
Blood, heat and + dust: Operation Telic and the British medical deployment to the Gulf 2003-2009
No full textThis is the second edition of the e-book Blood Heat and Dust, which describes British Military Medical Operations in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, in the wider context of the military campaign and the transformation of complex trauma care. The Author is Southampton Consultant General Surgeon Colonel David Rew QVRM MChir FRCS, late of the Royal Army Medical Corps and of the UK Defence Medical Services Reserve. The book is Illustrated with original paintings by Squadron Leader Gora Pathak RAF and oil paintings by David Rowlands ([email protected]) and with several hundred original photographs. The Foreword to the second edition is written by former Surgeon General, Lt General Louis P. Lillywhite CB MBE.This e-book is made freely available to download, thanks to the Trustees of the Royal Army Medical Corps Charity, who provided a generous grant for pre-production preparation and typesetting.The Creative Commons CC-BY license permits re-use of content, subject to reference to the source using the citation provided on this page
The Clinical Informatics Revolution
No full textThis latest IIPP booklet on The Clinical Informatics Revolution represents a foray into subject matter which will profoundly influence the shape of professional practice throughout the NHS in years to come, and with which many members and readers may presently be relatively unfamiliar. This issue follows naturally from our recent survey of workplace attitudes among surgeons to the call by the Secretary of State to move to a Paperless NHS by 2018, published recently as an IIPP. We are grateful to the author for teasing out someof the principles and complexities in this national policy objective, and in pointing us to some possible solutions as we engage with a rapidly changing digital health economy
Curating the world's peer-reviewed literature
No full textNew technologies are transforming academic publishing, including surgical research. The author considers a variety of the new systems, platforms and search engines that are fuelling this information revolution, as well as the bibliometrics and citation analysis necessary for filtering quality material for the increasingly inundated researcher.</p
Trust, quality assurance and the classification of academic publishers
No full textThe behaviour of publishers is central to the sustainability of trust in the academic world. The internet and the open access publishing movement have transformed the modern academic publishing industry through the inherent ease of setting up an academic publishing operation by any institution, professional association or commercial body.In consequence, a very large number of new and primarily online publishers have surged into the industry since the early 2000s from around the world. The ethics, governance, trustworthiness and vulnerability to malign exploitation of these publishers vary hugely. The scope of malign behaviours includes citation and authorship malpractice; paper mills which forge and market content for profit; false content, and bribery and corruption in the editorial process.These factors individually and collectively threaten to undermine the global ecosystem of trustworthy knowledge creation and research investment by nations with a flood of fakery. The recent explosive growth of artificial intelligence systems further empowers malevolent behaviour and threatens further harm to the industry.Modern bibliometric systems can closely analyse the performance of authors, institutions, journals and their publishers with a range of indices and data analytic tools. However, these analyses are demanding of human and technical resources and of scarce bibliometric expertise. There is as yet there no system for the validation and classification of publishers, of the transparency and ethical basis of their business practices, and of their defences against malpractice.The formal development of such a system is overdue. In this essay, the author sets out a range of issues of relevance to the quality assurance of academic publishers, so as to encourage debate on this complex and controversial subject, where there are many competing interests and a very strong profit motive with high margins for the successful participants.<br/
The complex universe of citation data for bibliometric systems
No full textCitation analysis has been the foundation of bibliometrics and of academic performance measurement for 70 years. Citations are based on the references and information networks which underpin academic writing. They are regarded as a proxy for the significance, importance or respect in which the cited article is held and of academic performance.Citations are an imperfect form of the measurement of the impact of ideas, of individuals and organisations, but they underpin a huge global investment in academic appraisal, performance evaluation and promotion systems. SCOPUS and the Web of Science (WoS) are commercial citation systems which support this information ecosystem with quality assurance processes. They process selected academic journals, books and other sources into core collections with detailed author, article and journal based bibliometric profiles. These core collections are regarded as primary sources for citation analysis. Beyond the core collections lie a large number of citation sources, which are identified from the primary sources but which are not curated by SCOPUS or WoS. There are known as secondary sources. Outwith the primary and secondary sources is a large volume of uncurated tertiary content whose size unknown and which is neither linked nor readily targetable for bibliometric analysis. These spheres of sources can be modelled as a “bibliometric universe of citation activity”, which I explore further in this essay. Citation based career recognition creates perverse incentives to game the citation system for personal or institutional gain. Many sophisticated schemes have been devised to create false and dishonestly enhanced citation scores. Efforts must therefore be made to educate the global academic community on the benefits and limitations of citation based evaluations; to maximise the trustworthiness of bibliometric data; and to develop methodologies which minimise the opportunities to game the system for fraudulent purposes.<br/
Clinical outcomes in the Google era: The PB Desai Oration, ASICON 2013
No full textThis article is based upon the PB Desai Oration which was given by the author in Ahmedabad on 28th December 2013 at the National Congress of the Association of Surgeons of India at the invitation of the Executive Board of the Indian Association for Surgical Oncology.</p
The Impact of an Independent Sector Treatment Centre on Basic Surgical Training
No full textThe reorganisation of postgraduate medical training in the UK as a result of Calman reforms, the New Deal and the implementation of the European workingTime regulations (EwTr) has led to a substantial reduction in working hours and a fall in operative experience for surgical trainees. The move of large volumes of minor and intermediate NHS surgical caseload into independently run hospitals and specialist centres (of which the Southampton NHS Treatment Centre, an independent sector treatment centre (ISTC) is a well-established example) has also radically altered the basic surgical training environment. The Southampton ISTC is run on contract by Care UK and is medically staffed by a mix of full-time Care UK employees from the UK and abroad as well as by visiting consultants from University Hospital Southampton NHS foundationTrust (UHSFT
The challenges of machine translation of academic publications
No full textClear translation remains a major challenge to better communication and understanding of the international academic literature, despite advances in Machine Translation (MT). Automatic translation systems which captured the detail and the sense of any manuscript in any language for a reader from any other linguistic background would find global applications.In this article, we discuss the current opportunities and constraints to the wider use of machine translation and computer-assisted human translation (CAT). At the present stage of technology development, these instruments offer a number of advantages to specialists working with scientific texts. These include the facility to skim and scan large amounts of information in foreign languages, and to act as digital dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopedias. Word-to-word and phrase-to-phrase translation between many languages and scripts is now well advanced. The availability of modern machine translation has therefore changed the work of specialist scientific translators, placing greater emphasis on more advanced text and sense editing skills. However, machine translation is still challenged by the nuances of language and culture from one society to another, particularlyin the freestyle literature of the arts and humanities. Scientific papers are generally much more structured, but the quality of machine translation still largely depends on the quality of the source text. This varies considerably between different scientific disciplines and from one author to another. The most advanced translation systems are making steady progress. It is timely to revisit traditional training programmes in the field of written translation to focus on the development of higher-level research competencies, such as terminology search, and so to make best use of evolving machine translation technologies. More widely, we consider that there is a challenge across the higher education systems in all countries to develop a simple, clear and consistent “international” writing style to assist fast, reliable and low-cost machine translation and hence to advance mutual understanding across the global scientific literature
Rainfall-runoff modelling in a catchment with a complex groundwater flow system: Application of the representative ElementaryWatershed (REW) approach
No full textBased on the Representative Elementary Watershed (REW) approach, the modelling tool REWASH (Representative Elementary WAterShed Hydrology) has been developed and applied to the Geer river basin. REWASH is deterministic, semi-distributed, physically based and can be directly applied to the watershed scale. In applying REWASH, the river basin is divided into a number of sub-watersheds, so called REWs, according to the Strahler order of the river network. REWASH describes the dominant hydrological processes, i.e. subsurface flow in the unsaturated and saturated domains, and overland flow by the saturation-excess and infiltration-excess mechanisms. The coupling of surface and subsurface flow processes in the numerical model is realised by simultaneous computation of flux exchanges between surface and subsurface domains for each REW. REWASH is a parsimonious tool for modelling watershed hydrological response. However, it can be modified to include more components to simulate specific processes when applied to a specific river basin where such processes are observed or considered to be dominant. In this study, we have added a new component to simulate interception using a simple parametric approach. Interception plays an important role in the water balance of a watershed although it is often disregarded. In addition, a refinement for the transpiration in the unsaturated zone has been made. Finally, an improved approach for simulating saturation overland flow by relating the variable source area to both the topography and the groundwater level is presented. The model has been calibrated and verified using a 4-year data set, which has been split into two for calibration and validation. The model performance has been assessed by multi-criteria evaluation. This work represents a complete application of the REW approach to watershed rainfall-runoff modelling in a real watershed. The results demonstrate that the REW approach provides an alternative blueprint for physically based hydrological modelling
Input shaper design using impulse-time perturbation method
No full textIn this paper, symmetric perturbation-based extra-insensitive input shaper (SPEI-IS) is newly proposed based on the impulse-time perturbation method. The proposed input shaper is devised by multiplying two input shapers in Laplace domain, of which the impulse-times are slightly perturbed from the ZV shaper, which results in a hump in its sensitivity curve. Different from the PEI-IS introduced by the same author, the SPEI-IS has symmetric notch points to enhance the robustness especially in low frequency range. For its usability, an explicit solution will be presented using Taylor approximation
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