UTI and Faulty Gold Standards

The diagnosis of UTI: liquid gold and the problem of gold standards.

For .50 years, the gold standard for the diagnosis of urinary tract infections (UTIs) has been a positive culture result without regard for urinalysis findings. Both the definition of “positive” and the role of urinalysis stem from a publication in 1956. Edward Kass applied quantitative culture methods to urine specimens obtained from adults by catheterization to determine a dividing line betwe...

Gold Standards?: State Standards Reform and Student Achievement∗

Proponents of the recent and widely adopted Common Core State Standards argue that high quality curricular standards are critical to students’ educational success. Little clear evidence exists, however, linking the quality of such standards to student achievement. I remedy this by connecting data on state-level student achievement from 1994-2011 with measures of the quality of states’ curricula...

"Gold standards" for vision testing.

Guidelines: minimum standards, gold standards, or ideals for practice?

I have a spectrum of reactions to guidelines. Most impress me with the sheer volume of material that has been reviewed. Some show great thoughtfulness & practicality, such as the “Guidelines for Management of Valvular Heart Disease” [1]. Others contain recommendations without basis in trial data, such as the recent PCI guideline suggestion that post-PCI CK-MB elevations might require additional...

Bayesian integration of networks without gold standards

MOTIVATION Biological experiments give insight into networks of processes inside a cell, but are subject to error and uncertainty. However, due to the overlap between the large number of experiments reported in public databases it is possible to assess the chances of individual observations being correct. In order to do so, existing methods rely on high-quality 'gold standard' reference network...