Many real-world analytics problems involve two significant challenges: prediction and optimization. Because of the typically complex nature each challenge, standard paradigm is predict-then-optimize. By large, machine learning tools are intended to minimize error do not account for how predictions will be used in downstream optimization problem. In contrast, we propose a new very general framew...

Halfway through the 20th century, views on pain in labour encompassed almost everything from women's self-blame to blaming nurses, midwives, doctors or partners for 'bad experiences'. Soon after that, giving birth came to be seen - in some settings and by some caregivers - as a 'natural' and thus benign event which women could 'master'. In their recent systematic review of women's expectations ...

developed midwifery, that the U.S.A. had developed nursing, but that Britain had managed to combine them in the way that was needed. Accordingly, she and her nurses took midwifery training in London. But she was also convinced that the nurse-midwife could and should combine sick nursing and preventive work, something that many Britons, then and now, see as far from ideal. We could do worse than...

As very small ion chambers become commercially available, medical physicists may be inclined to use them during the linear accelerator commissioning process to better characterize the beam in steep dose gradient areas. For this work, a total of eight different ion chambers (volumes from 0.007 cc to 0.6 cc) and four different scanning systems were used to scan PDDs at both +300V and -300V biases...