Looking after your invention

How to look after your patients by looking after yourself.

I t is sometimes said that the vocation of being a doctor would be simply marvellous if it wasn’t for the patients—who seem to get in the way of doing one’s job properly. Repeatedly the literature suggests that a major cause of burnout in professions that involve much dealing with the public is the emotional demands of such encounters. Yet despite the new emphasis on patient communication in va...

Professionalism: looking for your blind spots.

Looking back on your statistical tool

provided the original work is properly cited. CC In this issue, we bring attention to two specific articles. Each exhibit strong rhetoric, which is rare in the world of scientific journals, in which storytelling is generally considered to be trivial. In the first article, Park et al. [1] stated that some previously reported confidence intervals for 95% thresholds estimated with the up-and-down ...

Looking after your partner: sentinel behaviour in a socially monogamous bird

Natural selection favours those individuals with effective anti-predator defences. The presence of sentinels is known to be an effective form of defence amongst stable groups of individuals within cooperative and polygynous breeding systems. However, the presence of sentinels in the more prevalent socially monogamous breeding systems remains overlooked as an important benefit of such partnershi...

Zero-Knowledge twenty years after its invention

Zero-knowledge proofs are proofs that are both convincing and yet yield nothing beyond the validity of the assertion being proven. Since their introduction about twenty years ago, zero-knowledge proofs have attracted a lot of attention and have, in turn, contributed to the development of other areas of cryptography and complexity theory. We survey the main deenitions and results regarding zero-...