Can fashion ever be fair?

Can viruses ever be useful?

M ost of the terms used for computer viruses arc metaphors: they have a largely medical origin, and are seductive if not literally sexy. The very real worries WC have about AIDS, for example, no doubt colour the way we talk about computer viruses. At the extreme, abstractly viruses arc clearly just algorithms, and like any other algorithm they arc good for some things and not good for others. T...

How Unfair can Weighted Fair Queuing be?

This paper presents a study carried out on a Weighted Fair Queuing implementation for Unix routers the WFQ implementation of the ALTQ project. It shows the WFQ/ALTQ weaknesses and explains why we cannot expect an interesting behavior from a system using such a

Can the Dice be Fair by Dynamics?

A throw of a fair die is commonly considered as a paradigm for chance. The die is usually a cube of a homogeneous material. The symmetry suggests that such a die has the same chance of landing on each of its six faces after a vigorous roll so it is considered to be fair. Generally, a die with a shape of convex polyhedron is fair by symmetry if and only if it is symmetric with respect to all its...

Burst Imaging—Can It Ever Be Useful in the Clinic?

Burst is an ultra-rapid imaging sequence that works by excitation of magnetization using a series of regularly spaced, low flip-angle pulses, applied at the same time as a gradient in the read direction. In the original concept, this gradient is constant, and multiple echoes are refocused under a constant-read gradient. This article brings together the previous literature on the subject, placin...

Can hospital mortality comparisons ever be fit for purpose?