Book Review: Israeli Constitutional Law in the Making, edited by Gideon Sapir, Daphne Barak-Erez, Aharon Barak

Boaz Barak

1. It confirms a 1986 conjecture of H̊astad (also raised by and discussed by many others) that the polynomial hierarchy is infinite with respect to a random oracle. (We’ve already had strong reasons to believe H̊astad’s conjecture, since Book showed in 1994 that it’s true unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses.) The prior best result was by O’Donnell and Wimmer in 2007, who showed that Σ3 6⊆ Σ...

Book Review: Law in the Making

Barak Shenhav * , † , Aia Oz and Doron Lancet

The coevolution of environment and living organisms is well known in nature. Here, it is suggested that similar processes can take place before the onset of life, where protocellular entities, rather than full-fledged living systems, coevolve along with their surroundings. Specifically, it is suggested that the chemical composition of the environment may have governed the chemical repertoire ge...

Barak-Erdős graphs and the infinite-bin model

A Barak-Erdős graph is a directed acyclic version of an Erdős-Rényi graph. It is obtained by performing independent bond percolation with parameter p on the complete graph with vertices {1, ..., n}, where the edge between two vertices i < j is directed from i to j. The length of the longest path in this graph grows linearly with the number of vertices, at rate C(p). In this article, we use a co...

Book Review Constitutional Confrontation

Much has been written about the flight of Hong Kong residents to various western countries in the past few years. The popular fear of political instability, which has caused this flight, stems from the anticipated transfer of Hong Kong's sovereignty from the United Kingdom to the People's Republic of China ("PRC" or "China") in 1997. If present emigration figures' are used to predict the future...