The recent publicity surrounding tuberculosis (TB) in both the medical and the lay press, particularly in reference to a number of outbreaks of the disease in British schools, is a timely reminder of a 'forgotten' disease that has never really gone away. Following a marked decrease in notification rates in developed counties in the 1960s and 1970s, TB control and treatment programmes were downg...

• The launch of the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI), a national non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness about patient safety and to facilitating the implementation of best practices (www.patientsafetyinstitute.ca). • The publication of the results of the Canadian Adverse Events Study (Baker, Norton et al. 2004), which identified an adverse events (AEs) rate of 7.5% (proj...

Howard Gardner, professor ofeducation and codirector ofProject Zero at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts), is recipient ofa MacArthur Prize Fellowship (1981-1986), the Grawemeyer Award in Education (1990), an American Psychological Association (APA) William James Award, and an APA National Psychology Awardfor Excellence in the Media . Gardner is author ofCreating Minds : An Anatomy o...

By sequencing tens of millions of TCRa transcripts from naive mouse CD8 T cells, Genolet et al (2012) show that the TCRa repertoire is at least as diverse as the TCRb repertoire. This overturns a long held view in the field that recombination of the Tcra locus occurs in a co-ordinate sequential bidirectional manner that relies on proximity of Va and Ja gene segments. The observation that rearra...

To make informed forecasting and replenishment decisions, many companies bring together operational elements of production and distribution with sales and marketing, executing Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) collaborative improvement processes. As cross-functional and consensus-based processes, S&OP activities create value by keeping supply and demand in balance. But most S&OP arrangements...

In traditional systems engineering (TSE) environments, and particularly in recent years, many are concerned about risk management. So much so that risks are identified early and often, and mitigation techniques are aggressively pursued. In contrast one does not hear as much about opportunity management. What about enterprise systems engineering (ESE) environments? Do traditional methods of hand...

In this paper we consider a block replacement model in which a component can be replaced preventively at maintenance opportunities only. Maintenance opportunities occur randomly and are modelled through a renewal process. In the first, theoretical part of the paper we derive an optimality equation and show that the optimal opportunity block replacement policy can be described as a so-called one...