They can run controlled experiments, they can track their progress toward goals and they can gather constructive feedback to improve the value proposition or execution.

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First, Loveman seems to run his business in a highly empirical fashion, using small, controlled experiments whenever he can to guide decision-making and boost revenue.

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The next step would be to have controlled experiments concerning food and dementia in which participants are randomly assigned to follow a diet, Cole said.

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Such controlled experiments are, needless to say, problematic in humans.

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By contrast, the approach in modern medicine, one that has been validated in hundreds of thousands of controlled experiments, is to rigorously identify, and observe, any factors that may unfairly bias a study.

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The consequence of that mistake, as John Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina School of Medicine, in Greece, explained to the meeting, is that a lot of observational health studies those that go trawling through databases, rather than relying on controlled experiments cannot be reproduced by other researchers.

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Thomas Cook, a pioneer of controlled experiments in education at Northwestern University, in Chicago, suggests that much of the opposition to experimental evaluation stems from a common philosophical malaise among social scientists, who doubt the validity of the natural sciences, and therefore reject the potential of knowledge derived from controlled experiments.

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As her experiments controlled for both diet and exercise, she thinks fetal exposure to the drug must play a role in the fattening that was evident later in life.

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This is done through wind-tunnel experiments and analysis of controlled burns and naturally occurring wildfires.

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