In the last decade, prediction markets became popular forecasting tools in areas ranging from election results to movie revenues and Oscar nominations. One of the features that make prediction markets particularly attractive for decision support applications is that they can be used to answer “what if” questions and estimate probabilities of complex events. Traditional approach to answering suc...

Numerical simulations are playing an increasingly important role in solving complex engineering problems, and have the potential to revolutionize medical decision making and treatment design. Musculoskeletal conditions cost the United States economy more than $849 billion per year (7.7% of the USA’s GDP) and place great demands on the healthcare system [1]. Simulations enable engineers and clin...

The Byzantine agreement problem requires a set of n processes to agree on a value sent by a transmitter, despite a subset of b processes behaving in an arbitrary, i.e. Byzantine, manner and sending corrupted messages to all processes in the system. It is well known that the problem has a solution in a (an eventually) synchronous message passing distributed system iff the number of processes in ...

The primary focus of Monte Carlo simulation is to identify and quantify risk related to uncertainty and variability in spreadsheet model inputs. The stress of Monte Carlo simulation often reveals logical errors in the underlying spreadsheet that might be overlooked during day-to-day use or traditional “what if” testing. This secondary benefit of simulation requires a trained eye to recognize wa...

Biomedical ethicists often assume that common morality constitutes a largely consistent normative system. This premise is not taken for granted in general normative ethics. This paper entertains the possibility of inconsistency within common morality and explores methodological implications. Assuming common morality to be inconsistent casts new light on the debate between principlists and descr...

Decision Support Systems (DSS) that operate within a spatial or spatial–temporal context represent special forms of more general decision support systems. Their intent is to permit planners and policy makers to: (1) integrate large quantities of existing space–time data, (2) use these data as inputs to sophisticated forecasting models for predicting the results of alternative policy choices, an...

Although many researches have been carried out to analyze laboratory test errors during the last decade, it still lacks a systemic view of study, especially to trace errors during test process and evaluate potential interventions. This study implements system dynamics modeling into laboratory errors to trace the laboratory error flows and to simulate the system behaviors while changing internal...

The aim of this article is to review issues related to the incorporation of scarce natural resources in the theory of economic growth and development. More specifically, we shall concentrate on the role of non-renewable resources. A nonrenewable resource is a natural resource the amount of which on earth is finite and which has no natural regeneration process (at least not within a relevant tim...

The pigeonhole principle is a basic counting technique. It is illustrated in its simplest form as follows: We have n + 1 pigeons and n holes. We put all the pigeons in holes (in any way we want). The principle tells us that there must be at least one hole with at least two pigeons in it. Why is that true? Try to visualize the example of n = 2; therefore, we have 3 pigeons and 2 holes. Let’s try...