Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves

A one-horse race can have only one winner.

TO THE EDITOR: The spectrum of reactions to my Viewpoint (3) regarding the role of the airway smooth muscle (ASM) in creating airway hyperresponsiveness akin to asthma has raised several interesting points (see Ref. 4). First, I must begin with a critical clarification. A few of the responders appear under the impression that I suggested the ASM was the “horse” we should dismount or stop chasin...

On the 3-kings and 4-kings in multipartite tournaments

Koh and Tan gave a sufficient condition for a 3-partite tournament to have at least one 3-king in [K.M. Koh, B.P. Tan, Kings in multipartite tournaments, Discrete Math. 147 (1995) 171–183, Theorem 2]. In Theorem 1 of this paper, we extend this result to n-partite tournaments, where n 3. In [K.M. Koh, B.P. Tan, Number of 4-kings in bipartite tournaments with no 3-kings, Discrete Math. 154 (1996)...

Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves

Thieves of the state.

719 September 2012, Vol. 102, No. 9 SAMJ Thieves of the state To the Editor: I do not discount what has historically occurred and, according to Erasmus’ article,1 is apparently still occurring. A decade after my internship, I still recall calculating that I was, in effect, earning R12 per hour at that time. The culture dictated that one ‘sucked it up’ – and that is what we did. In the academic ...

Rainfall and Dragon-Kings

Previous studies have found broad distributions, resembling power laws for different measures of the size of rainfall events. We investigate the large-event tail of these distributions and find in one measure that tropical cyclones account for a large proportion of the very largest events outside the scaling regime, i.e., beyond the cutoff of the power law. Tropical cyclones are sufficiently ra...