When I Use a word ... Changing your practice

Changing your mind.

When individuals detect an inconsistency in a set of propositions, they tend to change their minds about at least one proposition to resolve the inconsistency. The orthodox view from William James (1907) onward has been that a rational change should be minimal. We propose an alternative hypothesis according to which individuals seek to resolve inconsistencies by explaining their origins. We rep...

Debugging as a Science, that too, when your Program is Changing

Program debugging is an extremely time-consuming process, and it takes up a large portion of software development time. In practice, debugging is still very much of an art, with the developer painstakingly going through volumes of execution traces to locate the actual cause of an observable error. In this work, we discuss recent advances in debugging which makes it systematic scientific activit...

When Should I Use Network Emulation?

The design and development of a complex system requires an adequate methodology and efficient instrumental support in order to early detect and correct anomalies in the functional and non-functional properties of the tested protocols. Among the various tools used to provide experimental support for such developments, network emulation relies on realtime production of impairments on real traffic...

I-25: Changing Attitudes in Infertility Management

When Your Patient Refuses

Numerous malpractice lawsuits have been filed against health care providers by patients who claimed that, upon suffering a serious injury after refusing care, they did not fully understand the potential consequences of such refusal. In a typical situation, a patient alleges that the health care provider was negligent in not fully disclosing the risks of treatment refusal. Coupled with this alle...