Accidents are the leading cause of death and injury among children in the United States, far surpassing diseases as a health threat. We examine the effects of child care regulation on rates of accidental injury using both micro data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, and Vital Statistics mortality records. Estimates from both data sources suggest that requiring day care center dire...

The recent social unrest across the Middle East and North Africa has deposed dictators who had ruled for decades. While the events have been hailed as an “Arab Spring” by those who hope that repressive autocracies will be replaced by democracies, what sort of regimes will eventually emerge from the crisis remains far from certain. Here we provide a complex systems framework, validated by histor...

A dynamic population system is often modelled by a deterministic difference equation model to obtain average estimates. However, there is a risk of the results being distorted because unexplained (random) variations are left out and because entities in the population are described by continuous quantities of an infinitely divisible population so that irregularly occurring events are described b...

DESCRIPTION An 8-year-old girl had been experiencing a progressive impairment in stance and gait since the age of 20 months and a diagnosis of ataxic cerebral palsy was given accordingly. She had recurrent upper respiratory tract infections over the past few years. Her mother noted that the patient’s eyes were red and her paediatrician told her that this is a chronic allergy (figure 1). The gir...

A builder’s “All Risk” insurance policy is the traditional way that the construction industry insures against damage to the work in progress during construction. Despite its common namesake, “All Risk” does not literally mean that all risks of loss or damage are insured. Critical and subtle differences in the forms of all-risk insurance policies can determine whether there is, or is not, insura...