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 [...]

[Note from Eric Eldon: I wrote a rather positive article this week on the proposed $10 billion California High-Speed Rail bond measure. If approved by the state’s voters this November, the bond will lead to high-speed trains stretching from Sacramento and the Bay Area all the way down to San Diego. Martin Engel, a transportation [...]

What are your suggestions for assessing the capabilities of the U.S. Presidential candidates?

The current Presidential primary season has dramatically illustrated the unrealistic expectations that are being placed upon today’s political leaders.
For a second, let’s assume that the three remaining major candidates for President are basically good people, who want to do what they believe [...]

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 [...]