In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d'Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility.
Though a formal stop to the fighting is still being negotiated, violence between the two sides has wound down to a de-facto ceasefire, according to local conflict-monitoring NGO CERAC.
Authors should report whether they or a data monitoring committee took multiple "looks" at the data and, if so, how many there were, what triggered them, the statistical methods used (including any formal stopping rule), and whether they were planned before the start of the trial, before the data monitoring committee saw any interim data by allocation, or some time thereafter.
A person subjected to a routine traffic stop on the other hand, has been seized, but is not "arrested" because traffic stops are a relatively brief encounter and are more analogous to a Terry stop than to a formal arrest.
The trial's lack of a data monitoring committee and formal stopping rules, however, is scientifically and ethically problematic.
The need for a data monitoring committee and formal stopping rules is well accepted for trials in which mortality or serious morbidity is likely.
The DSMB will review the data every 6 months, but there will only be one formal stopping rule for a given treatment due to adherence issues halfway through recruitment after approximately 12 months of recruitment.
In the absence of formal stopping rules, repeated checks of mortality data increase the probability of a false positive result, thereby undermining the credibility of the trial.
Whether we like it or not, we are going back to the pre-Bismarckian world, where work had no formal stopping point.
No formal stopping rules are in place.
