Medical malpractice doctrine is one of the core issues in the current debate over healthcare reform in the United States. For decades now, it has been universally accepted that the threat or reality of formal litigation stemming from—or at least claiming—malpractice has been the single most important factor shaping the medico–legal arena. While conventional wisdom has it that patient safety is ...

We introduce a new protocol for prediction with expert advice in which each expert evaluates the learner’s and his own performance using a loss function that may change over time and may be different from the loss functions used by the other experts. The learner’s goal is to perform better or not much worse than each expert, as evaluated by that expert, for all experts simultaneously. If the lo...

How people maintain and repair their self-esteem has been a topic of widespread interest. In this article, the authors ask, What determines whether people will use direct, remedial actions, or defensive actions? In three studies, they tested the hypothesis that a belief in fixed intelligence (entity theory) would produce defensiveness, whereas a belief in improvable intelligence (incremental th...

Abstract Defence cases with an escalatory structure, in which the levels of violence between aggressor and defender start out as minor then become major, even lethal, raise sharp problems for defence theory, our understanding conditions defence: proportionality, necessity, imminence. It is argued here that defenders are not morally required to withdraw from participation these cases, defensive ...

Caudal autotomy is a defensive mechanism widely adopted by lungless salamanders (Plethodontidae) from the New World. In contrast, in Europe, this mechanism was not described until very recently for just one Sardinian species, Hydromantes (Speleomantes) sarrabusensis. We report on tail autotomy observed in another species from the same island, Hydromantes (Atylodes) genei. In Europe, self-amputa...