Ethical approval must be obtained before medical research can start. We describe the differences in EA for an pseudonymous, non-interventional, observational European study. Sixteen European national coordinators of the international study on very old intensive care patients answered an online questionnaire concerning their experience getting EA. N = 8/16 of the NCs could apply at one single national ethical committee, while the others had to apply to various regional ECs and/or individual hospital institutional research boards. The time between applying for (...) EA and the first decision varied between 7 days and 300 days. In 9/16 informed consent from the patient was not deemed necessary; in 7/16 informed consent was required from the patient or relatives. The upload of coded data to a central database required additional information in 14/16. In 4/16 the NCs had to ask separate approval to keep a subject identification code list to de-pseudonymize the patients if questions would occur. Only 2/16 of the NCs agreed that informed consent was necessary for this observational study. Overall, 6/16 of the NCs were satisfied with the entire process and 8/16 were unsatisfied. 11/16 would welcome a European central EC that would judge observational studies for all European countries. Variations in the process and prolonged time needed to get EA for observational studies hampers inclusion of patients in some European countries. This might have a negative influence on the external validity. Further harmonization of ethical approval process across Europe is welcomed for low-risk observational studies. Getting ethical approval for low-risk, non-interventional, observational studies varies enormously across European countries. (shrink)

The Turing Test is of limited use for entities differing substantially from human performance levels. We suggest an extension of Turing’s idea to a more differentiated measure - the "Turing Ratio" - which provides a framework for comparing human and algorithmic task performance, up to and beyond human performance levels. Games and talent levels derived from pairwise comparisons provide examples of the concept. We also discuss the related notions of intelligence amplification and task breadth. Intelligence amplification measures total computational efficiency (...) (the computational benefit gained relative to investment, including programmer time, hardware, and so on); we argue that evolutionary computation is a key amplifier of human intelligence. Task breadth is an attempt to weight Turing Ratios by the frequency and importance of the task they measure - doing well at a broad range of tasks is an empirical definition of “intelligence”. Measuring Turing Ratios and considering task breadth, prior knowledge, and time series of the measures may yield long-term insight into both open-ended computational approaches and the underlying task domains being measured. (shrink)