Lumpy Information May Lead to Better Science

Handheld Technologies May Lead to Better Detection of Atrial Fibrillation.

Circulation. 2017;135:108–109. DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.116.026458 108 Approximately 10% of people 70 years of age have atrial fibrillation, and the incidence dramatically increases with age. At least one third of these experience no symptoms. The condition confers a 4to 5-fold higher risk of ischemic stroke, and in 10% of all ischemic strokes, atrial fibrillation is first detected at the ti...

Better Science, Better Science Reporting

Does Better Information Lead to Better Choices? Evidence from Energy-Efficiency Labels

Information provision is a key element of government energy-efficiency policy, but the information that is provided is often too coarse to allow consumers to make efficient decisions. An important example is the ubiquitous yellow “EnergyGuide” label, which is required by law to be displayed on all major appliances sold in the United States. These labels report energy cost information based on a...

Seizing an Opportunity: Broader Definitions of Epilepsy May Lead to Better Treatments

There is not just one type of epilepsy. While some forms of the disease are characterized by convulsive seizures, others involve seizures that are barely noticeable. Seizures can occur for many reasons: they can be caused by genetic mutations, injury, or infection early in life. In addition, events in daily life, such as stress, or normal variations in hormones, such as estrogen and testosteron...

Better Evaluation Metrics Lead to Better Machine Translation

Many machine translation evaluation metrics have been proposed after the seminal BLEU metric, and many among them have been found to consistently outperform BLEU, demonstrated by their better correlations with human judgment. It has long been the hope that by tuning machine translation systems against these new generation metrics, advances in automatic machine translation evaluation can lead di...