Hell May Be Hotter Than Heaven After All

Heaven and Hell: Visions for Pervasive Adaptation

With everyday objects becoming increasingly smart and the “info-sphere” being enriched with nanosensors and networked to computationally-enabled devices and services, the way we interact with our environment has changed significantly, and will continue to change rapidly in the next few years. Being user-centric, novel systems will tune their behaviour to individuals, taking into account users’ ...

Cuprate Superconductors May Be Conventional After All

C opper oxide superconductors, or “cuprates,” are the record holders for the highest critical temperature (Tc = 134 K) at ambient pressure. Among many applications, they might one day be used to make the tens of kilometers of cables that generate accelerating magnetic fields at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The origin of high-Tc superconductivity in cuprates, however, remains a major unsolved p...

Risk Seekers May Be Antisocial After All

Undergraduates were given a battery of psychological tests to gauge their degree of antisocial personality traits (psychopathy, Machiavellianism and nihilism). The students also responded to questionnaires to assess their attitudes toward risk and

The marriage of heaven and hell.

Lempel-Ziv Factorization May Be Harder Than Computing All Runs

The complexity of computing the Lempel-Ziv factorization and the set of all runs (= maximal repetitions) is studied in the decision tree model of computation over ordered alphabet. It is known that both these problems can be solved by RAM algorithms in O(n log σ) time, where n is the length of the input string and σ is the number of distinct letters in it. We prove an Ω(n log σ) lower bound on ...