As stakeholders struggle to reconcile calls for accountability and pressures for increased patient safety, criminal prosecution of surgeons and other health-care workers for medical error seems to be on the rise. This paper examines whether legal systems can meaningfully draw a line between acceptable performance and negligence. By questioning essentialist assumptions behind 'crime' or 'neglige...

OBJECTIVE There has been little research on the prevalence of defensive practice within hospital settings. The aim of this report was to examine the extent of defensiveness among psychiatrists and to examine the relationship between defensiveness and seniority, as well as the effect of previous experiences on the level of defensiveness. DESIGN A postal questionnaire survey on defensive practi...

Benzylisoquinoline alkaloids (BIAs) are a diverse group of biologically active specialized metabolites produced mainly in four plant families. BIA metabolism is likely of monophyletic origin and involves multiple enzymes yielding structurally diverse compounds. Several BIAs possess defensive properties against pathogenic microorganisms and herbivores. Opium poppy (Papaver somniferum: Papaverace...

A defensive alliance in a graph is a set $S$ of vertices with the property that every vertex in $S$ has at most one moreneighbor outside of $S$ than it has inside of $S$. A defensive alliance $S$ is called global if it forms a dominating set. The global defensive alliance number of a graph $G$ is the minimum cardinality of a global defensive alliance in $G$. In this article we study the global ...

The activation of oxylipin-based chemical defense in the diatom Thalassiosira rotula is initiated by phospholipases that act immediately after cell damage. This lipase activity is responsible for the preferential release of free mono- and polyunsaturated fatty acids. Among these, eicosatetraenoic- and eicosapentaenoic acid are further converted by lipoxygenases to reactive defensive metabolites...

The complex biofilm architecture composed of extracellular polymeric structures (EPS) provides a protective shield to physiologically diverse bacterial cells immersed in its structure. evolutionary interplay between bacteria and their viruses (phages) forced the latter ones develop specific strategies overcome defensive barriers kill sessile cells. Phages are equipped with wide panel enzyme-deg...

This paper compares two methods of prediction with expert advice, the Aggregating Algorithm and the Defensive Forecasting, in two different settings. The first setting is traditional, with a countable number of experts and a finite number of outcomes. Surprisingly, these two methods of fundamentally different origin lead to identical procedures. In the second setting the experts can give advice...

The performance of 326 collegiate football players attending the 2000 National Football League combine was studied to determine whether draft status could be predicted from performance measurements. The combine measured height and weight along with 9 performance tests: 225-lb bench press test, 10-yd dash, 20-yd dash, 40-yd dash, 20-yd proagility shuttle, 60-yd shuttle, 3-cone drill, broad jump,...

Interviews with 1st-year university students selected as high or low in either self-handicapping or defensive pessimism identified (a) personal perspectives on the nature of self-handicapping and defensive pessimism, (b) the perceived reasons why they engage in these strategies and the perceived advantages that follow from them, and (c) the extent to which ego goals and task goals mark their ap...

We present an "affirmation as perspective" model of how self-affirmations alleviate threat and defensiveness. Self-threats dominate the working self-concept, leading to a constricted self disproportionately influenced by the threat. Self-affirmations expand the size of the working self-concept, offering a broader perspective in which the threat appears more narrow and self-worth realigns with b...