Memory is useful only if you consult it

How to Measure Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See it

The US Supreme Court, many state constitutions, and numerous judicial opinions require that legislative districts be “compact,” a concept assumed so simple that no definition is offered other than “you know it when you see it.” Academics, in contrast, have concluded that the concept is so complex that it has multiple theoretical dimensions requiring large numbers of conflicting empirical measur...

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it".

If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It

Start of the lab: 2006 Size of the lab: Currently ten—size has fluctuated between five and 20 Research field: Systems and synthetic biology In 2005, I was working in the bioinformatics group of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a subsidiary of DuPont. The company was downsizing its research and development effort. At the same time, synthetic biology was emerging as a new discipline, and I wanted t...

If Rotablator is useful, why don't we use it?

manufacturer has produced tapered, more flexible guidewires that straighten arterial contours less and push the burr into the edge of a curve less forcefully. The distal 9 cm of the drive shaft tubing was removed, also making the shaft more flexible. With evolution of the shaft-guidewire system biased cutting is reduced. However, in severely angulated segments such as the takeoff of a left circ...

A Negative Conjunctive Query is Easy if and only if it is Beta-Acyclic

It is known that the data complexity of a Conjunctive Query (CQ) is determined only by the way its variables are shared between atoms, reflected by its hypergraph. In particular, Yannakakis [18, 3] proved that a CQ is decidable in linear time when it is α-acyclic, i.e. its hypergraph is α-acyclic; Bagan et al. [2] even state: Any CQ is decidable in linear time iff it is α-acyclic. (under certai...