Good boys are problems too!

Are Virtualized Overlay Networks Too Much of a Good Thing?

The majority of recent high-profile work in peer-to-peer networks has approached the problem of location by abstracting over object lookup services. Namespace virtualization in the overlay layer provides load balance and provable bounds on latency at low costs. We contend that namespace virtualization comes at a significant cost for applications that naturally describe their data sets in a hier...

Are Australia's drugs too cheap for our own good?

The Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) plays an important role in controlling the drugs that are available at subsidised prices under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). In brief, the Committee provides advice on whether a new drug is sufficiently cost-effective to merit its being added to the PBS. Listing is important to the drug manufacturers, because it has a beneficial ...

When are results too good to be true?

SCIENCE is in crisis. Many published studies appear to be irreproducible (Prinz et al. 2011; Begley and Ellis 2012). What can be done? How concerned should we be? Is the reproducibility crisis something new? Suppose we randomly sampled studies from the past 100 years of scientific literature and attempted to replicate their findings. I expect that many of these studies would fail to replicate. ...

Good Writers Need to be Good Listeners, Too

When Deer Are Too Dear and Elk Are Too Elegant