Fiddling while Rome burns?

If Rome is burning, why are we fiddling?

Following Nero: fiddle while Rome burns, or is there a better way?

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines ‘exacerbation’ as ‘an increase in the severity of a disease’dwhich does not imply reversibility or otherwise. However, we wonder how many chest physicians define exacerbation as ‘an acute and temporary deterioration in either symptoms or signs (and for the sophisticated, biomarkers)’ of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or whatever. We kn...

Whilst Rome burns: the epidemic of contact allergy to methylisothiazolinone.

Preservatives, essential in our daily life, can sensitize and elicit allergic contact dermatitis (ACD). Before introduction in the market their sensitizing risk is assessed based on in vivo studies. However, normal exposures to preservative-containing products in the real world can cause ACD. During recent decades we recall several ‘epidemic’ outbreaks of ACD from newly introduced preservatives...

Fiddling with PageRank

This paper deals with the various changes that can be made to the basic PageRank model. We document the recent findings and add a few new contributions. These contributions concern (1) the sensitivity of the PageRank vector, (2) another method of forcing the Markov chain to be irreducible, and (3) a proof of the full spectrum of the PageRank matrix.

Accidental scrotal burns from paraquat while handling a patient.

The main risk of paraquat poisoning is from deliberate ingestion. Serious accidental or occupational poisoning is comparatively rare. We report two patients who had accidental exposure to paraquat, resulting in scrotal burns in both and systemic poisoning in one, while attending to a patient who had ingested paraquat for deliberate self harm.