Can We Trust the Conclusion “No Significant Difference” in Plastic Surgery Trials?

Can We Trust Trust?

In this concluding essay I shall try to reconstruct what seem to me the central questions about trust that the individual contributions presented in this volume raise and partly answer. In the first section, I briefly qualify the claim that there is a degree of rational cooperation that should but does not exist, and I shall give a preliminary indication of the importance of the beliefs we hold...

Can We Manage Trust?

The term trust management suggests that trust can be managed, for example by creating trust, by assessing trustworthiness, or by determining optimal decisions based on specific levels of trust. The problem to date is that trust management in online environments is a diverse and ill defined discipline. In fact, the term trust management is being used with very different meanings in different con...

Can We Trust Test Outcomes?

Software development is an on-going process. To ensure that the changes made do not break previous functionality, a regression test suite is maintained along with the source code. The correctness and the side effects of code changes are judged based on the output of the tests. However, are these tests’ outcomes always correct? Does a test failure imply a bug and do all tests passing imply a bug...

Can we trust your data?

Markov Chain Monte Carlo: Can We Trust the Third Significant Figure?

Current reporting of results based on Markov chain Monte Carlo computations could be improved. In particular, a measure of the accuracy of the resulting estimates is rarely reported. Thus we have little ability to objectively assess the quality of the reported estimates. We address this issue in that we discuss why Monte Carlo standard errors are important, how they can be easily calculated in ...