Everyone’s going to make a mistake, but how can we make things better?

Commentary: how can we make diagnosis safer?.

Diagnostic errors are common and are a leading cause of patient dissatisfaction and malpractice suits. Because of its traditional heavy reliance on memory and lack of standardization, the diagnostic process is particularly error prone. A study by Zwaan and colleagues on diagnostic failures in treating dyspneic patients makes several important contributions: examining the process behind the diag...

How to be sure to make a mistake

Consensus sequences are widely used in molecular biology but they have many flaws. As a result, binding sites of proteins and other molecules are missed during studies of genetic sequences and important biological effects cannot be seen. Information theory provides a mathematically robust way to avoid consensus sequences. Instead of using consensus sequences, sequence conservation can be quanti...

How can we make them work ?

How fast can we make interpreted Python?

Python is a popular dynamic language with a large part of its appeal coming from powerful libraries and extension modules. These augment the language and make it a productive environment for a wide variety of tasks, ranging from web development (Django) to numerical analysis (NumPy). Unfortunately, Python’s performance is quite poor when compared to modern implementations of languages such as L...

Make no mistake-errors can be controlled.

Traditional quality control methods identify "variation" as the enemy. However, the control of variation by itself can never achieve the remarkably low non-conformance rates of world class quality leaders. Because the control of variation does not achieve the highest levels of quality, an inordinate focus on these techniques obscures key quality improvement opportunities and results in unnecess...