From psychiatric patient to citizen revisited

Closing the loop - From citizen sensing to citizen actuation

“Human-in-the-loop” sensing or citizen sensing as a method for collecting, analysing, and mining information about events is becoming more mainstream. In this work, we aim to utilise the concept of citizen sensors but also introduce the theory of citizen actuation. Citizen sensors observe, report, and collect data – we propose by supporting these citizen sensors with methods to affect their sur...

Book Review: Psychiatric Diagnosis Revisited: From DSM to Clinical Case Formulation

Citizen Science for Citizen Access to Law

Over 2014, the Cornell University Legal Information Institute and the Australian National University worked with users of the Cornell LII site in a citizen science project to collect over 43,000 crowdsourced assessments of the readability of legal and other sentences. Readers (“citizen scientists”) on legislative pages of the LII site were asked to rate passages from the United States Code and ...

Not your father's lobotomy: psychiatric surgery revisited.

Over the past few years, interest in neurosurgery for psychiatric disorders has surged, largely owing to the success of neuromodulation devices such as Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for movement disorder surgery. With DBS now considered the gold standard of surgical treatment for advanced cases of Parkinson’s disease (PD), psychiatric surgery has become the new “cutting edge” of functional and r...

Editorial: Patient safety revisited

Once again a recent article in The New York Times(1) has caused angst in the medical physics community because of what appeared to have been incorrect delivery of radiation. Following reporting of the incident, many email messages appeared on list servers written by medical physicists responding to this incident. One of the most vocal of these individuals has been Howard I. Amols, PhD, Chief, C...