Lankford's book makes the important point that analyses of suicide terrorists often commit the error of overestimating the importance of situational causes of behavior and underestimating dispositional causes, such as underlying pathology. Personality and individual differences are important; suicide terrorists are not ordinary people driven by situational pressures. However, citation of empiri...

Experimental evidence suggests that people make time-inconsistent choices and display overconÞdence about positive personal attributes. Do these features affect consumer behavior in the market? To address this question we use a new panel data set from three US health clubs with information on the contract choices and the day-to-day attendance decisions of 7,978 health club members over three ye...

OBJECTIVE To demonstrate how failure to account for measurement error in an outcome (dependent) variable can lead to significant estimation errors and to illustrate ways to recognize and avoid these errors. DATA SOURCES Medical literature and simulation models. STUDY DESIGN/DATA COLLECTION Systematic review of the published and unpublished epidemiological literature on the rate of preventab...

Most people are aware that regular alcohol drinkers can become tolerant to the effects of alcohol. Tolerance can lessen the outward manifestations of intoxication, and this poses challenges for the drinker and other observers, including law enforcement officers. On the basis of a National Institutes of Health-funded longitudinal study examining a cohort of convicted alcohol-impaired drivers, th...

She was quiet awhile and then said, Many a night when I was little, alone in that cabin, I wished I could take that fiddle of his up to the jump-off and pitch it and let the wind fly it away. In my mind I'd just watch it go till it was just a speck , and then I'd think about the sweet sound it would make breaking to pieces on the river rocks way down below. from Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier.1

For many years, the only way to attain an education in software engineering has been through the school of hard knocks. A common lament among experienced software developers is that colleges don’t teach students the skills they need to perform effectively on the job. What is needed to give software developers a better start? Formal professional education has traditionally been divided into thre...