Disobedient Things

Schistosomiasis—A Disobedient Ureter, a Disobedient Diagnosis

Background: Schistosomiasis is rare in western countries, but remains a potentially serious disease. It is known to result in severe urogenital complications; prompt diagnosis can therefore significantly affect outcomes. Case Presentation: We report the case of a 41-year-old male with pleuritic chest pain and visible hematuria who had emigrated from Zimbabwe to the United Kingdom 20 years previ...

Covering Things with Things

An abstract NP-hard covering problem is presented and xed-parameter tractable algorithms for this problem are described. The running times of the algorithms are expressed in terms of three parameters: n, the number of elements to be covered, k, the number of sets allowed in the covering, and d, the combinatorial dimension of the problem. The rst algorithm is deterministic and has running time O...

From little things big things grow: . . .

Curing the disobedient patient: medication adherence programs as pharmaceutical marketing tools.

Pharmaceutical companies have long focused their marketing strategies on getting doctors to write more prescriptions. But they lose billions in potential sales when patients do not take their prescribed drugs. Getting patients to "adhere" to drug therapies that have unpleasant side effects and questionable efficacy requires more than mere ad campaigns urging patients to talk to their doctors. I...

Talking Things

Have you ever wished to know and actually feel what your friends feel so you could help them better? Or maybe you have wondered how it is to be one of those celebrities you admire? And how about to become an apple for example? To experience lazy days of hanging on a tree enjoying sunshine and being washed by rains? Or maybe it feels the opposite – a hard life of fighting against worms, decay, a...