Medical Professionalism: Who Needs It?

Mentoring: who needs it?

It’s paradoxical that the time in your academic career when you most need support and advice — as a new faculty member — is also the first time at which there’s no-one else formally responsible for your welfare. As a graduate student you had an advisor. As a postdoc you were surrounded by your peers and probably overseen by the lab head. But now you’re on your own and, as you encounter the maze...

Verbal autopsy: who needs it?

Commentary Verbal autopsy has long been used to generate mortality data, often with the needs of specific programs, such as child and maternal mortality, in mind [1,2]. This led to a proliferation of instruments and the resulting data were rarely comparable across research sites or over time [3]. Demands for standardization led to the 2007 publication of the World Health Organization (WHO) verb...

Non-Interference: Who Needs It?

The concept of non-interference seeks to characterize the absence of information flows through a computer system. The intuition is startlingly simple. Suppose that we want to assert that no information may flow from user A to user B via the system S. We characterize this by asserting that B’s view of S is unchanged by any alteration in A’s behaviour. It is thus asserting that A can have no caus...

Intestinal manometry: who needs it?

The use of manometry, i.e. the recording of pressures within hollow viscera, after being successfully applied to the study of esophageal and anorectal motor dysfunctions, has also been used to investigate physiological and pathological conditions of the small bowel. By means of this technique, it has been possible to understand better the normal motor functions of the small intestine, and their...

Self-regulation: who needs it?