RESUMO
Gender inequality has exploded as a recent issue within mainstream media across US and UK cultural commentary. High-profile scandals of sexual harassment and gender pay differences have focused attention on the on-going disparity between sexes and political status. This paper presents a novel experiment in the application of so-called "big data" to analyse gender inequality. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in the form of Natural Language Processing, a web crawler is used to audit the whole.uk online domain, and to measure the United Kingdom's (UK's) online economic presence for gender representation in terms of: prominence, job roles, and leadership within and across economic sectors. The procedure scans over 200 million web pages, and harvests 157,032 organisations and over 2.3 million people. The results reveal material bias (60%+) towards the representation of men over the majority of economic sectors, and across representation of power and status within job roles and professional titles. The experiment highlights not only new levels of gender bias but also the use of the Internet as a valuable source of plentiful data for social and economic analysis.
RESUMO
Central vascular catheters (CVC) are used extensively in critical care for monitoring and therapy. They can become colonised with viable micro-organisms within 24 h of insertion, which can rapidly form biofilm. This colonisation is a precursor of catheter-related bloodstream infections (CR-BSI), which are associated with substantial morbidity, mortality, prolonged hospital stay and increased cost. Antimicrobials have been incorporated into the bulk material of CVC or applied to their surfaces as a coating in an attempt to reduce the incidence of CVC colonisation and infection. This study examines the effect of a silver zeolite-impregnated catheter on catheter-related colonisation and infection in adult critical care patients. The study was conducted in adult Intensive Care Units (ICU) at three acute hospitals over 14 months and involved 246 CVC insertions (122 silver-impregnated and 124 non-impregnated). CVC tip colonisation was detected by the Maki Roll culture and CR-BSI by differential time-to-positivity of blood cultures. Overall colonisation rate was significantly lower in the silver zeolite-impregnated CVC tips (58%) as compared with the control CVC tips (73%) (p<0.025). In addition, there was a lower rate (34%) of tip colonisation by coagulase negative staphylococci in the silver zeolite-impregnated CVC tips as compared with the control CVC tips (47%) (p<0.05). Four episodes of CR-BSI were detected in each arm by differential time-to-positivity in a subset of patients. This study indicates that the silver zeolite-impregnated catheter is superior to non-impregnated catheter in reducing the rate of CVC colonisation but it showed no difference in the rates of CR-BSI in the two arms. Larger prospective randomised control studies are required to evaluate its role in the prevention of CR-BSI.
