Percent Change Was and Is An Embarrassing Mistake

Percent change was and is an embarrassing mistake.

Was Development Assistance a Mistake?

William Easterly (NYU) January 2007 “More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery... For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.” Harry S. Truman, Inaugural Address, 1949 “We have the opportunity in the coming decade to cut world poverty by half. Billions more people could enjoy the...

Was the institutional review board system a mistake?

To the Editor—The statement by the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) [1] is the keenest analysis of the institutional review board (IRB) system ever published in a medical journal. It describes a regulatory regime swamped with pointless paperwork (eg, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA]), multiple IRBs making irreconcilable decisions whose inconsistency r...

Percent Signal Change for fMRI

Quantitative scaling into percent signal change is helpful to detect and eliminate “bad” results with abnormal extreme values. While cognitive effects give signal changes on the order of 1% (and larger in the visual and auditory cortices), signal variations of over 10% may arise from motion and other artifacts in the data. Thus, a quantitative check on measured effect size can be used to screen...

Fano’s inequality is a mistake

for every i. One can remark that for the first time, these inequalities were indicated by Margherita Piazzola-Beloch in [1]. She was a pupil of G. Castelnuovo, her paper presents the text of her thesis , G. Castelnuovo was the adviser of the thesis. Thus all (including G. Fano ) the subsequent authors of the variants or generalizations of the Fano inequality are out of the historical responsibi...