Mentorship for operational research capacity building: hands-on or hands-off?

Hands off or Hands on for Painful Chronic Pancreatitis: Current Indications for Surgery in Chronic Pancreatitis

There is a lack of consensus regarding the best treatment for chronic pancreatitis (CP). The condition usually presents with pain and, as very little can be done to change the natural history of the disease process, our efforts are directed at improving the quality of life of the patients. The most common associated etiological factor is alcohol addiction or abuse. The personality type of many ...

The management of keloids: hands-on versus hands-off.

Keloids are benign fibrous growths that appear in scar tissue. The lesions can be severely disfiguring and early recognition of genetic lesions is crucial. This case report outlines and reviews the important management strategies for these lesions and the requirement for extensive counseling for the patient and their family. Many potential medical and surgical interventions exist. Unfortunately...

Managing the Radio Spectrum: Hands-On or Back-Off?

Hands-Off Spreadsheets

The wealth of functionality in the Excel software package means it can go beyond use as a static evaluator of predefined cell formulae, to be used actively in manipulating and transforming data. Due to human error it’s impossible to ensure a process like this is always error free, and frequently the sequence of actions is recorded only in the operator’s head. If done regularly by highly paid st...

Adaptive, Hands-Off Stream Mining

Sensor devices and embedded processors are becoming ubiquitous, especially in measurement and monitoring applications. Automatic discovery of patterns and trends in the large volumes of such data is of paramount importance. The combination of relatively limited resources (CPU, memory and/or communication bandwidth and power) poses some interesting challenges. We need both powerful and concise “...