Beyond the Black Box

Beyond the black box

As developers of SageMath, we show how open software facilitates corrections. “Commercial computer algebra systems are black boxes, and their algorithms are opaque to the users,” complained a trio ofmathematicianswhose “misfortunes” are detailed in a recent Notices article [2]. “We reported the bug on October 7, 2013...By June 2014, nothing had changed ...All we could do was wait.”

Beyond the Black Box Approach to Ethics!; Comment on “Expanded HTA: Enhancing Fairness and Legitimacy”

In the editorial published in this journal, Daniels and colleagues argue that his and Sabin’s accountability for reasonableness (A4R) framework should be used to handle ethical issues in the health technology assessment (HTA)-process, especially concerning fairness. In contrast to this suggestion, it is argued that such an approach risks suffering from the irrrelevance or insufficiency they war...

Beyond the Black Box: Interactive Global Docking of Protein Complexes

How to Go Beyond the Black-Box Simulation Barrier

The simulation paradigm is central to cryptography. A simulator is an algorithm that tries to simulate the interaction of the adversary with an honest party, without knowing the private input of this honest party. Almost all known simulators use the adversary’s algorithm as a black-box. We present the first constructions of non-black-box simulators. Using these new non-black-box techniques we o...

Beyond the black box: drug- and device-associated hypersensitivity events

BACKGROUND Drug- and device-associated hypersensitivity reactions are serious toxicities that can result in respiratory failure or acute cardiac ischemic events, or even severe hypersensitivity syndromes such as Stevens-Johnson syndrome. These toxicities are usually poorly described in the "black box" warnings section of the product labels. METHODS Adverse event reports contained in databases...