It was twenty years ago today

It was twenty years ago today: a celebration of two decades of optical sectioning.

"The breastplate of righteousness": twenty-five years after Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Trade: impersonal sex in public places.

Twenty-five years ago, in January 1970, Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Trade was published. It generated much controversy, yet went on to win the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Today, many remember and debate its methodology and ethical issues while often overlooking its important findings and its early contributions to the emerging field of gay studies. Humphre...

Kazakhstan gears up to launch social health insurance

Twenty years ago Yelzhan Birtanov was a physician working in one of Kazakhstan's hospitals, today he is helping to roll out universal coverage of health services in the Central Asian country. He talks to Vijay Shankar Balakrishnan.

Knowledge and Networks – Key Sources of Power in Global Health; Comment on “Knowledge, Moral Claims and the Exercise of Power in Global Health”

Shiffman rightly raises questions about who exercises power in global health, suggesting power is a complex concept, and the way it is exercised is often opaque. Power that is not based on financial strength but on knowledge or experience, is difficult to estimate, and yet it may provide the legitimacy to make moral claims on what is, or ought to be, on global health agendas. Twenty years ago p...

Success of Default

Ray Reiter's Logic for Default Reasoning was published almost twenty years ago, but it is widely used today by researchers in knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning and logic programming. This note is a collection of random comments on aspects of this success story. Someone deened success in science as writing a paper that is going to be referenced by colleagues for as long as ten year...

Another Look at Quality

Quality is a familiar term in industry. In the 1980’s it was the rallying cry for management struggling with quality control, particularly in manufacturing. Japanese companies then were making serious inroads in American markets because of their superior quality control. That playing field is level today, but it is worth looking again at quality through a different lens—that of design innovatio...