A fairer deal from RAWP.

A fairer deal for pneumococcal vaccination.

To the Editor: All doctors in private practice should be well aware that the National Health Insurance (NHI) scheme is a clear and inevitable danger. To judge from the comments of ANC luminaries, the government will probably do its usual bull-in-a-china-shop act by ramming the bill through parliament without much regard for the opinions of other stakeholders. And if the government's past form i...

A Regression Approach to Fairer Grading

In this paper, we consider an issue of great interest to all students: fairness in grading. Specifically, we represent each grade as a student’s intrinsic (overall) aptitude minus a correction representing the course’s inherent difficulty plus a statistical error. We consider two statistical methods for assigning an aptitude to each student and, simultaneously, a measure of difficulty to each c...

Fairer citation-based metrics

I describe a simple modification which can be applied to any citation count-based index (e.g. Hirsch’s h-index) quantifying a researcher’s publication output. The key idea behind the proposed approach is that the merit for the citations of a paper should be distributed amongst its authors according to their relative contributions. In addition to producing inherently fairer metrics I show that t...

A Fairer Face, a Fairer Tomorrow? A Review of Skin Lighteners

From light-skinned deities depicted in ancient religious tableaux, pearl-swallowing practices in China, turmeric ceremonies in India to clay application in Africa, history has been coloured by our questionable aversion to the darker shades. Complexion has assumed psychological, economic and political currency with continued growth in the desire for skin lighteners sweeping the boundaries of cou...

Big Deal - good deal? Or is there a better deal?