Discounting a Surgical Risk: Data, Understanding, and Gist

Excerpt: A few days after the surgery, Ms. Reid came in for an emergency appointment with Dr. Feng. It was obvious that she was irate,but her voice could barely be heard above the noise of the clinic. "I thought you said this was rare," she said, shaking a printout of a journal article on the subject. My recurrent laryngeal nerve was injured. I'm a teacher, and I have children! I need my voice. I would have never done the surgery if I knew there was a 4 percent risk that I would lose my voice!" Was Dr. Feng negligent in explaining the risks of surgery to Ms. Reid? Was she required to use precise percentages of risk

The requirements for batteries for electric vehicles

Analysis of automobile use patterns shows that the battery requirements for an urban car can be met by mid-term battery technology. The far-term technology potentially offers greater range but does not proportionately increase the usefulness of the vehicle. This suggests that emphasis should be shifted toward more modest energy density goals, if such a shift would ease technical problems and allow the use of lower cost materials and construction methods. A technology diffusion model indicates that the impact of the mid-term batteries by the year 2000 would be greater than that of the far-term batteries because of their earlier introduction and nearly equal market potential. From the standpoint of maximizing both the cumulative impact and the benefits derived in the year 2000, however, a strategy of early introduction of near-term and mid-term cars followed by the far-term vehicle would produce the optimum results

Electric vehicle battery research and development

High energy battery technology for electric vehicles is reviewed. The state-of-the-art in conventional batteries, metal-gas batteries, alkali-metal high temperature batteries, and organic electrolyte batteries is reported

New batteries and their impact on electric vehicles

The selection of batteries to power electric motor vehicles is discussed. The problem of evaluating battery performance and the availability of different batteries are considered

On the type of triangle groups

We prove a conjecture of R. Schwartz about the type of some complex hyperbolic triangle groups.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure