Bibliographic record
Abstract
It seems now that Furby, a stuffed toy with a computer chip inside, which was vilified for interfering with medical equipment, does not affect medical machinery after all. An investigation by Health Canada (the government's health ministry), published recently in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (1999; 161:971), revealed that the electric and magnetic fields given off by the ear wiggling, eye blinking, fuzzy creature are about 70 times weaker than those emitted by a digital telephone and are “very unlikely” to affect the performance of medical devices, say the study's authors. The furry furor started last January, when Canadian media outlets jumped on reports that the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow, Scotland, had apparently banned the toy from its intensive care unit. No Canadian hospitals barred visitors bearing the creature. In response to media coverage and calls from biomedical engineers, researchers in Health Canada's Medical Devices Bureau measured the effect of Furby on 10 devices made before 1993 and known to be vulnerable to interference from cellular phones. These included incubators, automatic external defibrillators, syringe pumps, infusion pumps, electrocardiogram monitors, ventilators, renal dialysis machines, and pacemakers. Three other machines (the Holter monitor, an anesthetic system, and an ultrasound system) produced before 1996 were also studied because of concerns about possible susceptibility to electrical interference. Furby was given a clean bill of electromagnetic health, as it did not adversely affect the functioning of any of the devices tested at any distance. While the chattering creature did generate electric and magnetic fields in its active mode (it awakens from hibernation in response to sound and light), these were too weak to pose any threat to hospital equipment. Dr Kok-Swang Tan of Health Canada admits that during the testing he did get some “strange looks from colleagues who wondered why I was playing with a Furby in front of medical devices.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.053 | 0.029 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".