Oilfields, Mosques and Violence: Is There a Resource Curse in Xinjiang?

Cholesterol and violence: is there a connection?

PURPOSE To determine whether the seeming relation between low or lowered cholesterol levels and violence is consistent with causality according to Hill's criteria and whether construct validity is supported by convergence of findings across different types of studies. DATA SOURCES Search of the MEDLINE database for English-language articles published between 1965 and 1995 was supplemented by ...

Is There a Curse of the Fields Medal?

H ow worried should you be that getting a Fields medal might destroy your research career? The question seems preposterous, but a recent paper [BD14] by two economists, George Borjas and Kirk Doran, suggests that this is a question that we, the mathematical and scientific community, should consider. Happily, readers over the age of forty do not need to worry, but perhaps young researchers shoul...

Is There a Curse of Dimension for Integration?

Is There a Curse of Dimensionality for Contraction

This paper analyzes the complexity of the contraction fixed point problem: compute an ε-approximation to the fixed point V ∗ = Γ(V ∗) of a contraction mapping Γ that maps a Banach space Bd of continuous functions of d variables into itself. We focus on quasi linear contractions where Γ is a nonlinear functional of a finite number of conditional expectation operators. This class includes contrac...

Is There a Cure for Violence?

If you want to avoid violence, stay away from hospitals. The first time I went to an emer- gency room, to pick up an elderly friar who had taken a fall, I was shocked to encounter armed guards, metal detectors, police officers and even a handcuffed prisoner sitting in the waiting area. Was I in a hospital or a jail? This brief, daytime experience changed my im- age of emergency care forever. Si...