The term “bovine aortic arch” is widely used to describe a common anatomic variant of the human aortic arch branching, regarding the common origin of the brachiocephalic and left common carotid artery from the aorta. This anatomy pattern is not generally found in the cattles and the term “bovine aortic arch” is a common misnomer [...]

A China-focused business group’s advice to President-elect Barack Obama: the U.S. trade deficit is less of a problem than many believe.
Trade goes to the heart of China’s main reservations about the election of Mr. Obama, a concern shared by the groups like the Washington-based US-China Business Council that urged the president-elect’s team to “get it [...]

I was never a big fan of Six Sigma. As approaches to business process improvement and management go, it always had some glaring shortcomings. First, there was all the statistical mumbo-jumbo it implied — but seldom delivered on in most companies’ implementations. Second, it didn’t incorporate information technology — arguably the most powerful force available [...]

The government today released its annual revisions to GDP data for the past three years. And among the changes is this turnabout: The economy contracted slightly in the fourth quarter of 2007.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis now says gross domestic product declined 0.2% in the final three months of the year. The previous estimate [...]

The government’s mixed signals about rescuing financial institutions may have added to market turmoil in recent months, a Federal Reserve policy maker said Monday.
In remarks to a conference in Israel, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker said the “disparate” government responses to potential failures at major firms created uncertainty and “may have made [...]

The huge borrowing by the U.S. Treasury to prop up U.S. financial firms is producing at least one surprise – Americans are doing a bigger percentage of the buying than in the past.
“The U.S. will go through several years where the size of the Treasury debt held by Americans increases,” says Brad Setser, an economist [...]

A tuning fork is an acoustic resonator in the form of a two-pronged fork with the tines formed from a U-shaped bar of elastic metal (usually steel). It resonates at a specific constant pitch when set vibrating by striking it against a surface or with an object… Wikipedia

If what Richard Solomon is saying over at [...]

Recently, we worked with an organization that had made a decision to outsource one of their major processes. This decision was driven by the fact that they had been struggling unsuccessfully to reduce costs of the process for years, and research indicated that outsourcing the process would not only reduce costs by approximately 25%, but [...]

Background:
Kulldorff’s spatial scan statistic and its software implementation – SaTScan – are widely used for detecting and evaluating geographic clusters. However, two issues make using the method and interpreting its results non-trivial: (1) the method lacks cartographic support for understanding the clusters in geographic context and (2) results from the method are sensitive to parameter [...]