From creationism to economics: How far should analyses of pseudoscience extend?

How Far Should Theory be from Practice?

New countermeasures aiming at protecting against power analysis attacks are often proposed proving the security of the scheme given a specific leakage assumption. Besides the classical power models like Hamming weight or Hamming distance, newer schemes also focus on other dynamic power consumption like the one caused by glitches in the combinational circuits. The question arises if with the inc...

How Far Can We Extend the Limits of Human Vision?

Methods to correct the optics of the human eye are at least 700 years old. Spectacles have been used to correct defocus at least as early as the 13th century1,2 and to correct astigmatism since the 19th century.3 Though it is well established that the eye suffers from many more monochromatic aberrations than defocus and astigmatism, aberrations we will refer to as higher-order aberrations, ther...

How economics could extend the scope of ethical discourse.

Ethical discourse is typically inconclusive, and with good reason. But this inconclusiveness is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to helping publicly accountable policy-makers in the health care system provide an ethical justification for their decisions. It is suggested that instead of ending with platitudinous statements such as that a balance has to be struck between the rival ethical co...

How far should salt intake be reduced?

The current public health recommendations are to reduce salt intake from 9 to 12 g/d to 5 to 6 g/d. However, these values are based on what is feasible rather than the maximum effect of salt reduction. In a meta-analysis of longer-term trials, we looked at the dose response between salt reduction and fall in blood pressure and compared this with 2 well-controlled studies of 3 different salt int...

Trisomy 18: how far should we go.