To cite: Abel G, Lyratzopoulos G. BMJ Qual Saf Published Online First: [please include Day Month Year] doi:10.1136/bmjqs2015-004366 Reducing the number of avoidable deaths in hospital is the focus of many quality improvement initiatives worldwide. Comparing indicators of avoidable mortality between different hospitals could help to target improvement efforts, but optimally defining and measurin...

The theory that happiness is relative is based on three postulates: (1) happiness results from comparison. (2) standards of comparison adjust, (3) standards of comparison are arbitrary constructs. On the basis of these postulates the theory predicts: (a) happiness does not depend on real quality of life, (b) changes in living-conditions to the good or the bad have only a short-lived effect on h...

The published Commentary by Hoppe et al. (Environ Sci Eur 27-28, 2015) makes a number of strong criticisms of Pilling et al. (PLoS One 8:e77193, 2013), which this authors' response will show are either wrong, inaccurate or misleading. A selection of these misrepresentations include a claim that technical thiamethoxam was used rather than the commercial product. This is not true. Pilling et al. ...

MS.S. Intended for piblication and books, etc.. intended fer review should be senlt to Professor J. McKeen Cattell, Garrisonon-Hludson, N. Y, THE CHARACTERIZATION AND CLASSIFICATION OF BACTERIAL TYPES' THE vast majority of students of microbial life are preoccupied with immediately practical problems, and most of them have been trained for their work from the standpoint of some practical art, m...

Haemophilus ducreyi is the etiologic agent of the sexually transmitted genital ulcer disease chancroid. H. ducreyi serum resistance protein A (DsrA) is a member of a family of multifunctional outer membrane proteins that are involved in resistance to killing by human serum complement. The members of this family include YadA of Yersinia species, the UspA proteins of Moraxella catarrhalis, and th...

To the editor: Iacoangeli et al. (1) set out to reexamine our model that FMRP and the noncoding RNA BC1 act together to bind to mRNAs (2). Basing conclusions entirely on an inability to find this specific interaction, the authors suggest that FMRP and BC1 operate independently. Repeated statements suggesting experimental procedures are ‘‘replicating’’ those in ref. 2 imply the authors tried to ...

The hidden Markov model (HMM) has proven to be the model which has made large-vocabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR) possible. The HMM is robust, versatile and has at its disposal a host of efficient algorithms which deal with training, speaker adaptation and recognition. However, there is nothing uniquely speech orientated about the HMM. In fact, certain assumptions are made of speech w...

– A recent Letter by Hess and Philipp claims that Bell's theorem neglects the possibility of time-like dependence in local hidden variables, hence is not conclusive. Moreover the authors claim that they have constructed, in an earlier paper, a local realistic model of the EPR correlations. However, they themselves have neglected the experimenter's freedom to choose settings, while on the other ...

The formal methods community has long known about the need to formally analyze concurrent software, but the OS community has been slow to adopt such methods. The foremost reasons for this are the cultural and knowledge gaps between formalists and OS hackers, fostered by three beliefs: inaccessibility of the tools, the disabling gap between the validated model and actual implementation, and the ...

'Clear and precise definitions of diseases, and the application of such names to them as are expressive of their true and real nature, are of more consequence than they are generally imagined to be: untrue or imperfect ones occasion false ideas; and false ideas are generally followed by erroneous practice.' Sir Percival Pott, 1765, in a treatise on fistula-in-ano Introduction The little word 'p...