Meetings are an integral part of modern life, regardless of whether they’re formally established at the workplace or casual agreements made over the phone. Many factors affect meeting scheduling, some of which are explicit (What existing meetings do I have?), implicit (I prefer to avoid meetings before 10:00 am), or cultural (social events should be scheduled for Friday evenings and weekends, b...

In several recent conferences, the principal questions have been whether xenotransplantation technology should be encouraged and, if so, how it should be regulated. Because the prospect of successful transplantation of animal organs into humans is still remote, the rush to achieve consensus about clinical application would be inexplicable were it not for two ostensibly unrelated issues. The fir...

1122 CMAJ, October 20, 2015, 187(15) ©2015 8872147 Canada Inc. or its licensors Dr. Gordon Dickinson, who was handed the editorial reins at CMAJ in 1965 when he was only 33 years old, died suddenly at his Toronto home Aug. 4, 2015. He was 82. Dickinson graduated from McGill in 1958 and was appointed editor of CMAJ in December 1965, becoming the youngest physician to hold the post since the jour...

M ost of the terms used for computer viruses arc metaphors: they have a largely medical origin, and are seductive if not literally sexy. The very real worries WC have about AIDS, for example, no doubt colour the way we talk about computer viruses. At the extreme, abstractly viruses arc clearly just algorithms, and like any other algorithm they arc good for some things and not good for others. T...

OBJECTIVES To determine the outcomes after first-ever stroke, including mortality, dependence, and recurrence. DESIGN Retrospective study on a prospectively collected cohort. SETTING Regional hospital, Hong Kong. PATIENTS A cohort of 755 patients presented to our hospital from 1996 to 1998 with their first-ever stroke. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Mortality and stroke recurrence rate at 30 day...

The aging population increases the demand of intensive care unit (ICU) treatments. However, the availability of ICU beds is limited. Thus, ICU admission of octogenarians is considered controversial. The population above 80 years is a very heterogeneous group though, and age alone might not be the best predictor. Aim of this study was to analyze resource consumption and outcome of octogenarians ...

Those of us who are deeply concerned about population and the environment — "econuts," we're called, — are accused of seeing herbicides in trees, pollution in running brooks, radiation in rocks, and overpopulation everywhere. There is merit in the accusation. I was in Calcutta when the cyclone struck East Bengal in November 1970. Early dispatches spoke of 15,000 dead, but the estimates rapidly ...

reproduce my paper criticised therein which appeared in the Ophthalmic Review, Vol. XXII, April, 1903. In the Ophthalmoscope for December 1904, in a brief notice of Major Smith's paper I came across the following paragraph, but though objecting to its inferences I decided to take 110 notice of it. "Smith is, therefore, of opinion (despite the views recently expressed by Power, Maynard and other...

In recent years, sequence-specific gene silencing has been an area of increasing focus, both because of its interesting biology and because of its power as an experimental tool. A growing understanding of one such phenomenon, RNA interference (RNAi), has provided clues that many homology-dependent gene-silencing mechanisms share a common trigger, double-stranded RNA. Recent findings that RNAi a...