Implementing MUST – not as easy as it should be

Common Sense in Environmental Impact Assessment It is not as Common as it Should Be

Reviews of environmental impact assessment (EIA) practice, particularly by industrial proponents, have highlighted common shortfalls. EIA would benefit from more ‘common sense’, which is not very common. For example, issue scoping usually includes too many inconsequential factors, and issues not directly affecting project decisions. Consideration of significance is often vague, misleading or in...

Faculty scheduling: it should be easy.

In this issue, you will find a thought-provoking, somewhat formal, mathematical article about scheduling of radiologists’ time (1). It is very well done, and brings up many of the issues that those of us involved in Clinical Operations and rulesbased, expert-system, automated approaches to scheduling have struggled with over the years, as well as one that I never thought of. I often have stated...

Measuring hearing aid outcomes--not as easy as it seems.

Outcomes measurement in audiology has received much attention because of the need to demonstrate efficacy of treatment, provide evidence for third-party payment, carry out cost-benefit analyses, and justify resource allocation. Outcomes measurement shows the benefits obtained from a hearing aid and determines the costs of obtaining those benefits. In this article, we discuss why the seemingly s...

Cause-of-death certification--not as easy as it seems.

Pattern from process : it is not as easy as it looks

In this paper, we present a model to investigate the possibility that the large-scale (of the order of 100 ms) spatial patterns of the adult bivalve Macomona liliana Iredale observed on an apparently homogeneous sandflat were the result of local biological dynamics rather than being driven by external factors. The model is age-structured, stochastic and spatially distributed on a 20 3 20 grid. ...