The authors of the preceding articles1 raise legitimate questions about patient and staff rights and the unintended consequences of allowing ABC News to film inside teaching hospitals. We explain why we regard their fears as baseless and not supported by what we heard from individuals portrayed in the filming, our decade-long experience making medical documentaries, and the full un-aired context of the scenes shown in the broadcast. The authors don’t and can’t know what conversations we had, what documents we reviewed, (...) and what protections we put in place in each televised scene. Finally, we hope to correct several misleading examples cited by the authors as well as their offhand mischaracterization of our program as a “reality” show. (shrink)

Following the cart meeting of June 13, in which it was agreed that McCarthy would buy the cart project a TV transmitter if I could demonstrate my ability to do work on vision by writing a program which extracted three dimensional information from a motion stereo sequence of pictures, I began work on this task. So that there would be no doubt as to who had done the work, and because I operate most comfortably and effectively in a programming environment (...) made to my own tastes, the first order of business was the writing of a set of graphics and picture utility routines. The resulting package provides more flexibility than Quam's III buffer based routines, and is more cohesive than Baumgart's set, which is spread out among several programs. Currently the package accesses Data Disc displays only, in future it will be extended to provide output to the XGP and maybe the III's. As an example of increased capabilities, it allows display of filled in polygons, and permits displays to be shrunk or expanded arbitrarily merely by changing the declared dimensions of the screen or the requested sizes of the individual parts. Also, selected areas of the display may be erased or complemented, as well as added to. The programs described below use no previously existing software other than the FAIL and SAIL compilers and the operating system. (shrink)