Approval hoped for soon

Progestogens and preterm birth—not the hoped for panacea?

2066 www.thelancet.com Vol 387 May 21, 2016 Preterm birth is the most common cause of neonatal morbidity and mortality globally, aff ecting about 15 million children every year. Of children born preterm, an estimated 2·4 million (15·6%) are born extremely preterm (before 28 weeks gestation) or very preterm (before 32 weeks gestation). Furthermore, some 1 million children every year die as a con...

Payment Approval for PayWord

In case of micropayment schemes, all costs that appear during functioning should be minimized. This includes cost of disputes and charge backs that result in penalties for the vendor. We extend the PayWord micropayment scheme with payment approval to minimize disputes, charge backs or to avoid attacks that ruin the reputation of the vendor. Payment approval is achieved by employing a MAC functi...

Apocalypse soon?

When the Lord smote the Philistines with emerods in their secret parts he left it to historians to debate the nature of this lethal affliction. Literally translated, emerods are haemorrhoids, but it is surely unlikely that so hardy a race would have succumbed to an epidemic of piles. Scholarly opinion seems to concur that the emerods were buboes in the groin, one of the agonising manifestations...

Is Approval Voting Optimal Given Approval Votes?

Some crowdsourcing platforms ask workers to express their opinions by approving a set of k good alternatives. It seems that the only reasonable way to aggregate these k-approval votes is the approval voting rule, which simply counts the number of times each alternative was approved. We challenge this assertion by proposing a probabilistic framework of noisy voting, and asking whether approval v...

No heroic measures: how soon is too soon to stop?