Engineering in the climate emergency: doing less, better

Bronchiolitis: doing less and still getting better.

Infection with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is among the universal experiences of childhood. Worldwide, by 1 year of life, half of all children have been infected with RSV and by 2 years of age, virtually all children have been infected with RSV. Unlike many viral infections, it is the prevalence, as opposed to the severity, of infection that motivates our collective focus on the optimal t...

Doing the right thing for asymptomatic bacteriuria: knowing less leads to doing less.

Clinical practice guidelines are the preferred method among professional societies for defining safe and effective healthcare. Despite widespread dissemination by professional societies, the impact of guidelines on routine clinical practice remains suboptimal [1]. The Infectious Diseases Society of America guidelines for asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB) are a particularly salient example [2], wit...

Learning More by Doing Less

A principal must decide whether to implement each of two independent proposals (e.g., earmark requests, policy reforms, grant funding) of unknown quality. Each proposal is represented by an agent who advocates by producing evidence about quality. Although the principal prefers the most-informative evidence, agents strategically choose less-informative evidence to maximize the probability the pr...

Why aren't we doing better?

Doing Better for Children: The Way Forward

This chapter offers a range of policy recommendations for improving child well-being: invest early in children's lives; concentrate on improving the lot of vulnerable children; design interventions for children that reinforce positive development across their life cycle and across a range of well-being outcomes; create clear, achievable targets for child well-being outcomes and regularly collec...