Fewer numbers, better science

Science-based Test Case Design - Better Coverage, Fewer Tests

This chapter describes an approach to test case design using a proven statistical method known as Design of Experiments. Benefits and costs quantified by a study comparing effectiveness of a manual test case design approach to effectiveness of DoE-based test case selection methods are described. In the interest of balance we discuss counter-arguments and limitations. We illustrate use of this m...

Better care, fewer suicides?

Would fewer port numbers in laparoscopy produce better cosmesis? Prospective study.

STUDY OBJECTIVE To determine whether fewer ports in laparoscopic adnexal surgery would lead to better cosmesis. DESIGN Prospective comparative study (Canadian Task Force classification II-2). SETTING University hospital. PATIENTS One hundred thirty consecutive patients with adnexal tumors. INTERVENTIONS Patients underwent laparoscopy using a single port (n = 75), 2 ports (n = 22), or 4 ...

Better Science, Better Science Reporting

Better Text Compression from Fewer Lexical n-Grams

Word-based context models for text compression have the capacity to outperform more simple character-based models, but are generally unattractive because of inherent problems with exponential model growth and corresponding data sparseness. These ill-effects can be mitigated in an adaptive lossless compression scheme by modeling syntactic and semantic lexical dependencies independently. If one d...