Related papers: Systematic Errors: facts and fictions

Systematic literature reviews play a vital role in identifying the best available evidence for health and social care policy. The resources required to produce systematic reviews can be significant, and a key to the success of any review is…

The spreadsheet has been used by the business community for many years and yet still raises a number of significant concerns. As educators our concern is to try to develop the students skills in both the development of spreadsheets and in…

Many undergraduate students of engineering and the exact sciences have difficulty with their mathematics courses due to insufficient proficiency in what we in this paper have termed clear thinking. We believe that this lack of proficiency…

Fifteen years of research studies have concluded unanimously that spreadsheet errors are both common and non-trivial. Now we must seek ways to reduce spreadsheet errors. Several approaches have been suggested, some of which are promising…

Thanks to their flexibility and capability to perform different tasks and organize data in the best form and format, spreadsheets are widely used in different organizations and by different end users. Many business organizations rely on…

Automated simplification models aim to make input texts more readable. Such methods have the potential to make complex information accessible to a wider audience, e.g., providing access to recent medical literature which might otherwise be…

The common practice for displaying error bars on distributions of numbers of events is confusing and can lead to incorrect conclusions. A proposal is made for a different style of presentation that more directly indicates the level of…

Meta-analysis is a systematic approach for understanding a phenomenon by analyzing the results of many previously published experimental studies. It is central to deriving conclusions about the summary effect of treatments and interventions…

This paper presents the results of a research study related to software system failures, with the goal of understanding how we might better evolve, maintain and support software systems in production. We have qualitatively analyzed thirty…

Software misconfiguration has consistently been a major reason for software failures. Over the past two decades, much work has been done to detect and diagnose software misconfigurations. However, there is still a gap between real-world…

Accuracy is one of the basic principles of journalism. However, it is increasingly hard to manage due to the diversity of news media. Some editors of online news tend to use catchy headlines which trick readers into clicking. These…

We address the timing problem in realizing correcting codes for quantum information processing. To deal with temporal uncertainties we employ a consistent quantum mechanical approach. The conditions for optimizing the effect of error…

The concept of complexity appears in virtually all areas of knowledge. Its intuitive meaning shares similarities across fields, but disagreements between its details hinders a general definition, leading to a plethora of proposed…

This article examines the overlooked risk of false negative errors arising from eliminations in forensic firearm comparisons. While recent reforms in forensic science have focused on reducing false positives, eliminations--often based on…

System administration is a difficult, often tedious, job requiring many skilled laborers. The data that is protected by system administrators is often valued at or above the value of the institution maintaining that data. A number of…

The notion of an instruction sequence fault is considered from various perspectives. Four different viewpoints on what constitutes a fault, or how to use the notion of a fault, are formulated. An integration of these views is proposed.

The usual aim of spreadsheet audit is to verify correctness. There are two problems with this: first, it is often difficult to tell whether the spreadsheets in question are correct, and second, even if they are, they may still give the…

Starting from two case histories, where only after thorough Failure Analysis the suddenly appearance of a failure was linked to much earlier events, the possibility of improving the reliability and of adjusting the reliability prediction…

The paper presents two complementary strategies for identifying errors in spreadsheet programs. The strategies presented are grounded on the assumption that spreadsheets are software, albeit of a different nature than conventional…

Unobserved confounding arises when an unmeasured feature influences both the treatment and the outcome, leading to biased causal effect estimates. This issue undermines observational studies in fields like economics, medicine, ecology or…