For Ten Seconds

Seconds, anyone?

Scientists and journalists don’t always see the world the same way. A “first” often makes news. But in science, the “second” – that is the confirmation – may actually be more important. Journalists are like toddlers, though, when it comes to seconds. They often need coaxing. Consider two recent cases. First, Neanderthal DNA. Back in 1997, reporters made a bit of a fuss when scientists announced...

Gone in 60 Seconds :

The growth of Internet-based piracy has led to a wide-ranging debate over how copyright policy should be enforced in the digital era. In this paper we analyze the impact of the US government’s shutdown of a major piracy site — Megaupload.com — on digital sales and rentals of movies. Exploiting cross-country variation in pre-shutdown usage of Megaupload, we find that the shutdown of Megaupload a...

15 seconds of fame ∗

“15 seconds of fame” is an interactive installation which every 15 seconds generates a new pop-art portrait of a randomly selected person from the audience. The installation was inspired by Andy Warhol’s ironical statement that “In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes”. The installation detects human faces to crop them from the wide-angle picture of people who are standing in fron...

Phylogenetic diversity within seconds.

We consider a (phylogenetic) tree with n labeled leaves, the taxa, and a length for each branch in the tree. For any subset of k taxa, the phylogenetic diversity is defined as the sum of the branch-lengths of the minimal subtree connecting the taxa in the subset. We introduce two time-efficient algorithms (greedy and pruning) to compute a subset of size k with maximal phylogenetic diversity in ...

["Sleep for seconds" in elderly automobile drivers].