A Real Reaction Anyway

What is a Hotspot Anyway?

AbstractThe importance of spatial clusters, or "hotspots," in infectious disease epidemiology has been increasingly recognized, and targeting hotspots is often seen as an important component of disease-control strategies. However, the precise meaning of "hotspot" varies widely in current research and policy documents. Hotspots have been variously described as areas of elevated incidence or prev...

What’s in a name, anyway?

We have used names, particularly surnames, to identify people who are related. However, this has been done in various ways in different societies. While in many western countries we use a given (first) name and a surname (family name) to identify a person, in Arab countries, there are in fact no surnames; people use their given name followed by their father’s given name. For example, while my n...

Quantitative Real-time Polymerase Chain Reaction (qRT-PCR). Fatemeh Mehrpooyan*

What's Good Software, Anyway?

A colleague heading a research group recently contacted me. The group had a piece of software that it was about to license out to a company. The software encapsulated the results of several years of work: some fancy algorithms for data manipulation. The company would take over the source code to maintain and evolve it. My colleague wanted to know what sort of “objectively testable guarantees” h...

Run Once, Write Anyway

Scheme is one of only a few languages with a concise specification and formal semantics. With such a foundation it should be easy to write portable code that, without modification, runs correctly on different Scheme implementations. Yet this goal has proved elusive – there are more than fifty Schemes and writing programs that are portable between even just a few of these implementations is tedi...