Scientific openness faces reality check

Reality check for checklists.

Catheter-related blood stream infections in the intensive care unit (ICU) are common, costly, and potentially lethal. The Dec 28, 2006, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine reported that an evidence-based intervention in 103 intensive care units in the Michigan Keystone ICU programme had resulted in a large sustained reduction in rates of these infections. The study was widely reported ...

Reality check for American dream.

Server Security: A Reality Check

Server security is paramount to any organization. All too often, network defenses focus entirely on the perimeter, leaving networks looking like pieces of candy—having a hard outer shell and a soft gooey inside. In today's threat landscape, defenders must operate under the presumption of compromise. Attacks involving spearphishing, social engineering, weak bring your own device (BYOD) security,...

Power Optimization – a Reality Check

A flurry of recent work has examined the interaction between system design and power optimization, with the promise of energy savings. We find that the power consumed by current commodity hardware can be well-approximated by a model with two components: a large always-present constant power and a linear power-performance tradeoff. As a result, many proposed optimizations currently have limited ...

Year 2000: A Reality Check

This paper examines the risks, cost, size, implications, and likely outcomes of the Year 2000 or "Y2K" Problem, as well as the lessons learned, opportunities, and silver linings of Y2K projects. The MIS academic community has largely missed a unique opportunity to be relevant to practitioners as well as our communities. Fortunately, it is not too late since knowledgeable and rational voices are...