Physiological data must remain confidential

Data Management of Confidential Data

Social science researchers increasingly make use of data that is confidential because it contains linkages to the identities of people, corporations, etc. The value of this data lies in the ability to join the identifiable entities with external data, such as genome data, geospatial information, and the like. However, the confidentiality of this data is a barrier to its utility and curation, ma...

Must Tool Building Remain a Craft? (Position Paper)

The building of tools is an important part of many research efforts, especially in the reverse engineering domain. However, despite the fact that many researchers build tools, it is still done in an ad hoc fashion, resembling a craft rather than professional engineering. In this paper, we give examples of why we believe that tool building is pursued in an ad hoc manner. We argue that in order t...

Must Cosmological Perturbations Remain Non-Adiabatic After Multi-Field Inflation?

Even if non-adiabatic perturbations are generated in multi-field inflation, the perturbations will become adiabatic if the universe after inflation enters an era of local thermal equilibrium, with no non-zero conserved quantities, and will remain adiabatic as long as the wavelength is outside the horizon, even when local thermal equilibrium no longer applies. Small initial non-adiabatic perturb...

Why Pakistani Medical Graduates Must Remain Free to Emigrate

Student Forum T he current debate about the brain drain of health professionals from low-income countries such as Pakistan to the rich world often demonizes medical graduates who choose to leave their countries. Such graduates are sometimes considered to be insensitive to the plight of their country's struggling health sector. But what is forgotten in this debate is that some doctors who emigra...

Informed consent--must it remain a fairy tale?