Safeguarding Structural Data Repositories against Bad Apples

Safeguarding against heat hazards.

Heat stress occurs when the body cannot release heat and cool itself. When the air temperature is as warm as or warmer than a person's skin, blood brought to the skin's surface cannot efficiently release heat. Working hard in high heat impedes the body's ability to cool itself because the muscles need extra blood, thus decreasing the amount of blood available to circulate to the skin and intern...

Identifying inference attacks against healthcare data repositories

Health care data repositories play an important role in driving progress in medical research. Finding new pathways to discovery requires having adequate data and relevant analysis. However, it is critical to ensure the privacy and security of the stored data. In this paper, we identify a dangerous inference attack against naive suppression based approaches that are used to protect sensitive inf...

Medication errors: not just a few "bad apples"

Objective: The purpose of this study is to describe the distribution of medication errors among physicians.Design: Data on a cohort of internal medicine physicians were gathered prospectively over a seven-month period.Setting: The study was conducted in four adult primary care practices.Participants: Twenty-four physicians from Boston, MA participated in this study. A total of 661 patients agre...

Safeguarding patients against stem cell tourism.

Bad Apples, Goody Two Shoes and Average Joes:

The potential influence of peers and social networks on individual outcomes is important to a variety of educational policy debates including school vouchers, special education, middle school grade configurations and tracking. Researchers usually address the identification problems associated with credibly estimating peer effects in these settings but often do not account for ad-hoc definitions...