ECTOPIC THE OVERRATED DANGER

Is the brain overrated?

Lipaemia: an overrated interference?

Reagent method sheets for analysis of common serum analytes often highlight the possibility of interference from lipaemia but the information given is often brief and may not be instrument-specific. Thus study assesses the degree of interference from lipaemia in a range of common serum analytes on the Bayer Opera (with a serum blank) using a commercial polymer, LipoClear, as a lipid-clearing ag...

Ratings are Overrated!

Are ratings of any use in human–computer interaction and user studies at large? If ratings are of limited use, is there a better alternative for quantitative subjective assessment? Beyond the intrinsic shortcomings of human reporting, there are a number of supplementary limitations and fundamental methodological flaws associated with rating-based questionnaires – i.e., questionnaires that ask p...

Determinism Is Overrated

Our accelerating computational demand and the rise of multicore hardware have made parallel programs, especially shared-memory multithreaded programs, increasingly pervasive and critical. Yet, these programs remain extremely difficult to write, test, analyze, debug, and verify. Conventional wisdom has attributed these difficulties to nondeterminism, and researchers have recently dedicated much ...

The Overrated Importance of Statistics in Research

By way of introduction, let me say that I have been teaching statistics at the graduate and undergraduate levels for more than 25 years (my, how time flies!). That experience has helped me realize that while statistical training seems to arouse the most anxiety of any specific course of study related to research, it appears to me that the value of statistics as it is taught today is far overrat...