The House bill would provide incentives, in the form of highway safety funding, to states that lower the threshold and take other steps to encourage safety and driver sobriety.

CNN: By Alan K. Ota, CQ Staff Writer

Revised standards to be effective from April drastically lower the threshold for requiring a raft of safety measures at the planting stage to 100 becquerels per kilogram.

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But, the legislation proposes another aspect even less congenial to new drugs and technologies: Various government agencies are now empowered to establish a new threshold for judging products beyond the safety standards now in place.

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For things that clearly do have the springlike quality of shifting irreversibly if pulled (or pushed) too far, like the collapse of ice sheets or the melting of permafrost, a boundary system that seeks to stop you getting too close to the threshold seems as sensible as a safety rail is on a parapet.

ECONOMIST: The global environment

The truth of the matter is that essential safety, reliability and effectiveness tests cannot be accomplished within the one-kiloton threshold.

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Because of the this change, and because the data and safety monitoring board reviewed the data multiple times over the course of the study, the threshold for statistical significance was lowered to 0.036.

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