Quantifying the Risks of Hospitalization—Is It Really as Safe as We Believe?

Intravenous contrast medium-induced nephrotoxicity: is the medical risk really as great as we have come to believe?

1 From the Department of Radiology, University of California-Davis Medical Center, 4860 Y St, Suite 3100, Sacramento, CA 95817 (R.W.K.); and Department of Radiology, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY (J.H.N.). Received October 30, 2009; revision requested December 8; revision received December 30; accepted January 12, 2010; fi nal version accepted January 18. Address corresponden...

Quantifying IT estimation risks

A statistical method is proposed for quantifying the impact of factors that influence the quality of the estimation of costs for IT-enabled business projects. We call these factors risk drivers as they influence the risk of the misestimation of project costs. The method can effortlessly be transposed for usage on other important IT key performance indicators (KPIs), such as schedule misestimati...

ABET Assessment : Is It Really as Difficult as It Seems ?

While EC2000 was developed with the laudable goals of ensuring "program improvement and quality assurance in higher education" [1], from the point of view of the ABET accreditation visitor and the programs being evaluated, the EC2000 criteria can be both more difficult to understand and more difficult to apply than the more specific and straightforward criteria which they replaced. In addition ...

Are we really in safe hands? How safe is safe?

Life as we know it

This paper presents a heuristic proof (and simulations of a primordial soup) suggesting that life-or biological self-organization-is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket. This conclusion is based on the following arguments: if the coupling among an ensemble of dynamical systems is mediated by short-range forces, then the st...