Health care systems are under intense scrutiny, and there is an increasing emphasis on patient safety and quality of care in general. Evidence continues to emerge demonstrating that health systems are performing at sub-optimal levels. The evidence includes the under-use, over-use and mis-use of health care services; new standards asking for respect, dignity, honesty and transparency; the corpor...

Expert judgment for software effort estimation is oriented toward direct evidences that refer to actual effort of similar projects or activities through experts’ experiences. However, the availability of direct evidences implies the requirement of suitable experts together with past data. The circumstantial-evidence-based judgment proposed in this paper focuses on the development experiences de...

The ASD/OSA hypothesis as proposed in this paper will incorporate over 90 pieces of the "autism puzzle". It is suggested that the cause of autism is four-fold, requiring that: 1) the mother has sleep disordered breathing (SDB) during her pregnancy, 2) the infant is born with sleep disordered breathing, 3) both mother and infant have polymorphisms of the methylation pathway which are then trigge...

This paper explores the firm growth rate distribution in a Gibrat's Law context. The aim is to provide an empirical exploration of the determinants of firm growth. The work is novel in two respects. First, rather than limiting the analysis to focus on the conditional mean growth level, we investigate the complete shape of the distribution. Second, we show that the differences in the firm growth...