Nobody Likes Dichotomies (But Sometimes You Need Them)

Sometimes You Need a Little Intelligence, Sometimes You Need a Lot

Over the last fifteen years, we have built over a dozen different applications in many domains where the user can define behaviors by demonstration. In some of these, the system uses sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms so that complex behavior can be inferred from a few examples. In other systems, the user must provide the full specification, and the examples are primarily use...

Speed Reading: You Can't Always Get What You Want, but Can You Sometimes Get What You Need?

You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes (with two tests--TST and IGRA--for tuberculosis) you get what you need.

There is little disagreement that screening for latent tuberculosis (TB) infection (LTBI) prior to biologic therapy is necessary. Unfortunately, there is much less agreement with regard to how best to accomplish this task. A decade ago, we had just one screening tool, the tuberculin skin test (TST), and screening algorithms for such patients were presumably straightforward. With the recent intr...

Infectious Agents and Autophagy: Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose

You Can Pick Your Friends, But You Need to Watch Them: Loan Screening And Enforcement in a Referrals Field Experiment

We examine a randomized trial that allows separate identification of peer screening and enforcement of credit contracts. A South African microlender offered half its clients a bonus for referring a friend who repaid a loan. For the remaining clients, the bonus was conditional on loan approval. After approval, the repayment incentive was removed from half the referrers in the first group and add...