Are ‘Dirty Hands’ Possible?

The Lawyer's Dirty Hands

Dirty hands: bacteria of faecal origin on commuters' hands.

Although many studies have investigated bacteria on the hands of health-care workers and caregivers, few have looked at microbiological contamination on the hands of the general adult public. This study investigated faecal bacteria on the hands of commuters in five UK cities. Of the 404 people sampled 28% were found to have bacteria of faecal origin on their hands. A breakdown by city showed th...

Getting Students’ Hands Dirty with Clean-Slate Networking

Conventional networking courses treat today’s protocols and mechanisms as fixed artifacts, rather than as part of a continually evolving system. To prepare students to think critically about Internet architecture, we created a graduate networking course that combines “clean slate” networking research with hands-on experience in analyzing, building, and extending real networks. Our goal was to p...

How Dirty are "Quick and Dirty" Methods of Project Appraisal?

Routine "quick-and-dirty" (QD) methods of project appraisal can be so dirty in guiding project selection as to wipe out the net social gains from public investment. A common QD method for estimating benefits from irrigation investments is tested using data for Viet Nam. The results are compared to impacts assessed through econometric modelling of marginal returns that allows for household and a...

Unbounded Loss in Writing on Dirty Paper is Possible

For a generalization of Costa’s writing on dirty paper with irregular additive noise distribution, we show that the loss between the zerointerference capacity and the causal side information capacity can be arbitrarily large. This contrasts to the Gaussian noise case, where the capacity loss is zero or at most 1/4 bit for the non-causal and causal side information cases, respectively. This also...