Costs and Benefits of Being Asked About Trauma History

Clinical Governance: Costs and Benefits

The costs and benefits of being a chimera.

Most multicellular organisms are uniclonal. This is hypothesized to be because uniclonal organisms function better than chimeras (non-clonal organisms), owing to reduced levels of internal genetic conflict. We tested this idea using the social amoeba or slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum. When starving, the normally solitary amoebae aggregate to form a differentiated multicellular slug that mi...

Evaluating the benefits and costs of regulatory reforms: what questions need to be asked?

In 1984, Portney argued that "[w]e should scrutinize proposed reforms of the rulemaking process every bit as carefully as the regulations that process produces." In the 23 years since then, the regulatory process on the federal level has been continuously reformed by statute, by executive order, and by directives from the OMB. Despite the extensive debate on the need for these reforms, there ha...

Frequently Asked Questions about Megafunds *

Since the publication of Fernandez, Stein, and Lo (2012) on using securitization techniques to raise funds from the private sector to support biomedical research, the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE) has received a number of stimulating comments and questions about these techniques. Rather than replying to each inquiry individually, we decided to respond via this “frequently asked...

Frequently Asked Questions about Decoherence

We give a short, critical review of the issue of decoherence. We establish the most general framework in which decoherence can be discussed, how it can be quantified and how it can be measured. We focus on environment induced decoherence and its degree of usefulness for the interpretation of quantum theory. We finally discuss the emergence of a classical world. An overall emphasis is given in p...