The ancestral dinner table

Absence at the Dinner Table:

The Dinner Table Problem: the Rectangular Case

Consider n people who are seated randomly at a rectangular table with ⌊n/2⌋ and ⌈n/2⌉ seats along the two opposite sides, for two dinners. What is the probability that neighbors at the first dinner are no longer neighbors at the second one? We give an explicit formula and show that its asymptotic behavior as n goes to infinity is e(1+ 4/n) (it is known that it is e(1−4/n) for a round table). A ...

Dinner Table Human Capital and Entrepreneurship

We document three new facts about entrepreneurship. First, a majority of male entrepreneurs start a firm in the same or a closely related industry as their fathers’ industry of employment. Second, this tendency is correlated with intelligence: higher-IQ entrepreneurs are less likely to follow their fathers. Third, an entrepreneur that starts a firm in the same 5-digit industry as where his fath...

Does antimicrobial stewardship begin at the dinner table?

Stewardship Begin at the Dinner Table? To the Editor—Waters et al [1] are to be congratulated for their work characterizing and profiling Staphylococcus aureus found in commercially available meat purchased throughout the United States. This study found that 50% of retail beef, pork, and poultry products are contaminated with S. aureus, and 96% of these isolates were resistant to at least 1 ant...

Ju l 2 00 5 The dinner table problem : the rectangular case

Assume that 8 people are seated around a table and we want to enumerate the number of ways that they can be permuted such that neighbors are no more neighbors after the rearrangement. Of course the answer depends on the topology of the table: if the table is a circle then it is easy to check by a simple computer program that the permutations that verify this property are 2832, if it is a long b...