Health Is Hard

Prohibition of Hard Drugs Is Harmful to Public Health

In contrast to general opinion, the responsibility of governments should lie in the prudent regulation of production and distribution of all addictive drugs, precisely because the stated aim is the protection of vulnerable individuals. Handing over the regulation and provision of hard drugs to organised crime has proved harmful to public health and damaging to the very fabric of democratic soci...

The Health Record - why is it so hard?

Testing perfection is hard

A graph property P is strongly testable if for every fixed > 0 there is a one-sided -tester for P whose query complexity is bounded by a function of . In classifying the strongly testable graph properties, the first author and Shapira showed that any hereditary graph property (such as P the family of perfect graphs) is strongly testable. A property is easily testable if it is strongly testable ...

Box Pleating is Hard

In their seminal 1996 paper, Bern and Hayes initiated investigation into the computational complexity of origami [3]. They proved that it is NP-hard to determine whether a given general crease pattern can be folded flat, when the creases have or have not been assigned crease directions (mountain fold or valley fold). Since that time, there has been considerable work in analyzing the computation...

Axiom Pinpointing is Hard

We investigate the complexity of several decision, enumeration and counting problems in axiom pinpointing in Description Logics. We prove hardness results that already hold for the propositional Horn fragment. We show that for this fragment, unless p = np, all minimal subsets of a given TBox that have a given consequence, i.e. MinAs, cannot be enumerated in a specified lexicographic order with ...