BEDAQUILINE: A long but much fruitful wait since seventies

The Seventies

I arrived in Pisa at the beginning of 1968, after getting my degree from the Politecnico of Milan. At that time Antonio Grasselli was moving from the Politecnico of Milan to organize the new curriculum in Computer Science at the University of Pisa, and wanted to create a research group there. The group was established at the Istituto di Elaborazione dell’Informazione (IEI) of the National Resea...

The Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension Treatment Trial: A Long-Time Coming but Worth the Wait.

R andomized clinical trials have served as the foundation for much of the knowledge that we have gained in the last 50 years with regard to efficacy and safety of treatments of various medical conditions. In neuro-ophthalmology, there have been 3 major randomized trials funded by the National Eye Institute. From the Optic Neuritis Treatment Trial (ONTT), we learned about the role of corticoster...

Citations and wait-lists: much ado about nothing?

T seemingly disparate papers published in this issue raise some interesting points and require wider discussion. The first paper is about our favourite subject in Canadian surgical practice: wait-lists. To some degree, wait-lists have become the canary in the cage for the success or otherwise of the provision of nonurgent health care surgical and other procedures for the Canadian population. Th...

How not to wait long

This report is mainly based on the paper [DEFM17], which proposes an algorithm to "speed up" cryptocurrency transactions. The authors call their protocol PERUN for reasonsthat are described in their paper. As a proof of concept the authors of the paper have implemented their protocol as a smart contract in Ethereum, however in principal it might be also possible in other cryptocurrencies. As Bi...

Much has changed, but much remains the same.