A Birthday Wish

A science editor's wish list

One-sentence summary: This article presents an experience-based opinion on resources that would help author's editors working on scientific manuscripts perform their tasks more efficiently. Before I stumbled into a career in science editing, I had not fully appreciated how multi-layered the task of an author's editor can be; I had barely even known that such a profession existed. I began to enj...

A Generalized Birthday Problem

We study a k-dimensional generalization of the birthday problem: given k lists of n-bit values, find some way to choose one element from each list so that the resulting k values xor to zero. For k = 2, this is just the extremely well-known birthday problem, which has a square-root time algorithm with many applications in cryptography. In this paper, we show new algorithms for the case k > 2: we...

We Wish to Thank

In this paper, we discuss some rather puzzling facts concerning the semantics of Warlpiri expressions of cardinality, i.e. the Warlpiri counterparts of English expressions like one,two, many, how many. The morphosyntactic evidence, discussed in section 1, suggests that the corresponding expressions in Warlpiri are nominal, just like the Warlpiri counterparts of prototypical nouns, eg. child. We...

A taxonomic wish-list for community ecology.

Community ecology seeks to explain the number and relative abundance of coexisting species. Four research frontiers in community ecology are closely tied to research in systematics and taxonomy: the statistics of species richness estimators, global patterns of biodiversity, the influence of global climate change on community structure, and phylogenetic influences on community structure. The mos...

Death wish of a cardiac transplant patient.