Severe respiratory syndromes: Travel history matters

History matters

Many years ago, two British humorists wrote (facetiously, but not altogether inaccurately) that " History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself " [1]. It is a dilemma that all of us—librarians, archivists, informationists, whatever—have all faced: what do we need to remember, and for how long. When does today become " History, " with a capital H?...

Case fatality rate of severe acute respiratory syndromes in Beijing.

OBJECTIVE To describe the case fatality rate of SARS in Beijing. METHODS Data of SARS cases notified from Beijing Center for Disease Control and Prevention (BCDC) and supplemented by other channels were collected. The data were analyzed by rate calculation. RESULTS The case fatality rate of SARS in Beijing was 7.66%, and had an ascending trend while the age of cases was getting older, and a...

History Matters: Setting the Scene

WhyRespect for History and Historical Error Matters

This paper addersses Lawson’s puzzlement about the absence of prediction in William Harvey’s and Marcello Malpighi’s views on capillaries. In addressing the context of that enquiry, it also addresses historiographic versus philosophical models of science, contexts of discovery versus justification, normative versus descriptive interpretations of the nature of science, and the role of simple dic...

Why Do Financial Systems Differ? History Matters

We describe a dynamic model of financial intermediation in which fundamental characteristics of the economy imply a unique equilibrium path of bank and financial market lending. Yet we also show that economies whose fundamental characteristics have converged may continue to have very different financial structures. Because setting up financial markets is costly in our model, economies that emph...