Making Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes, especially when it comes to entering numbers into a [calculator:computer] or spreadsheet. It's not such a big deal if you're [tracking:counting] how much you spend on pizza. But if you're [administering:admitting] drugs in a hospital, such a slip can be deadly. Now a report in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface shows how devices can be programmed to catch at least some [mistakes:scars] on the spot.Dosing a patient with 10 times too much medication is disturbingly common. One study suggests this error occurs in 1 percent of all hospital admissions. And though the person [punching:putting] in the numbers is at fault, most drug-delivery devices don't help.In one machine, for example, mistakenly entering a number with two decimal points - like 1.2.3 - might be read by the machine as 1.23, or as a 123. To prevent such wild guessing, scientists tested a system that [immediately:automatically] flags any input that's not a real number. According to their analysis, that safeguard alone could cut factor-of-10 errors in half.Charles Darwin once noted that "to kill an error is as good a service as...establishing a new truth or fact." Even more so when killing the error keeps you from killing a patient.