For a long-term randomized clinical trial, it has become a well-accepted practice to include interim analyses in trial protocols. In addition to design an efficacy monitoring plan, investigators often develop a futility monitoring plan as well to prevent continuing a trial that has little chance to demonstrate treatment efficacy. Conditional power is the probability that the final analysis will...

One definition of futility is any treatment that merely preserves permanent unconsciousness or fails to end total dependence of a patient on intensive medical care [1] . However, no agreement has ever been reached on what the exact definition of futility is, as it is not only based on temporary values but also evolves into different subtypes, making it harder to define [2] . The difficulty in d...

BACKGROUND Empirical surveys about medical futility are scarce relative to its theoretical assumptions. We aimed to evaluate the difference of attitudes between laypeople and physicians towards the issue. METHODS A questionnaire survey was designed. Japanese laypeople (via Internet) and physicians with various specialties (via paper-and-pencil questionnaire) were asked about whether they woul...

OBJECTIVES Medical futility at the end of life is a growing challenge to medicine. The goals of the authors were to elucidate how clinicians define futility, when they perceive life-sustaining treatment (LST) to be futile, how they communicate this situation and why LST is sometimes continued despite being recognised as futile. METHODS The authors reviewed ethics case consultation protocols a...

Review of Neil Vallelly, Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production Uselessness. Futility as both dominant structure feeling fulcrum for political action in twilight neoliberalism.

The lack of data authentication and integrity guarantees in the Domain Name System (DNS) facilitates a wide variety of malicious activity on the Internet today. DNSSec, a set of cryptographic extensions to DNS, has been proposed to address these threats. While DNSSec does provide certain security guarantees, here we argue that it does not provide what users really need, namely end-to-end authen...

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