President's page: Striving for effective communication

Multi-society Presidents' page: The value of membership in your sub-specialty society.

Striving for correctness

ion layers, conceptually illustrated in Table 1. The security engineer must understand that the device designer, circuit designer, and operating system architect have different viewpoints. Each specialist assumes that the interface provided to him or her by the underlying layer is primitive and trustworthy. This trust is a consequence of specialization. Engineers working at one technological le...

Striving for Perfection

Among the powerful barriers to making progress in patient safety is an attitude of complacency induced by the rarity of serious events and the general human bias toward assuming that things will work as they are supposed to. Although the overall incidence figures for accidental injuries and deaths in healthcare are horrendous—more than 1 million preventable injuries and 44 000–98 000 preventabl...

Clear messages for effective communication.

urgent, instant, up-to-the minute news and messages (think CNN, the Internet, BlackBerries, iPhones). Many statistics detail the costs of information overload to businesses. But what about the costs to the public? The average person receives hundreds—if not thousands—of bits of information every day. In 1997, a Reuters report stated that “In the last 30 years mankind has produced more informa­ ...

Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Death: Closing the Constitution's Succession Gap