The ‘Dirty Lip’ Trick

Playing a dirty trick on airway smooth muscle: house dust mite does it again.

I ncreased airway smooth muscle (ASM) mass is a hallmark of asthma and is thought to be the main contributor to the increased airway hyperresponsiveness seen in asthmatics [1]. This increase is related to disease severity (reviewed in [2]) and caused by hyperplasia alone or in combination with hypertrophy, depending on the generation of airways [3, 4]. Why and how ASM mass is increased is incom...

The Dirty Harry Problem

Policing constantly places its practitioners in situations in which good ends can be achieved by dirty means. When the ends to be achieved are urgent and unquestionably good and only a dirty means will work to achieve them, the policeman faces a genuine moral dilemma. A genuine moral dilemma is a situation from which one cannot emerge innocent no matter what one does-employ a dirty means, emplo...

The Lawyer's Dirty Hands

The Kernel Trick for Distances

A method is described which, like the kernel trick in support vector machines (SVMs), lets us generalize distance-based algorithms to operate in feature spaces, usually nonlinearly related to the input space. This is done by identifying a class of kernels which can be represented as norm-based distances in Hilbert spaces. It turns out that common kernel algorithms, such as SVMs and kernel PCA, ...

The Birthday Trick with Lies

In this article, we determine the number of yes/no questions required to figure out a birthday (a number between 0 and 31) when up to r incorrect answers to these questions are allowed. In the language of error-correcting codes, we construct optimal (shortest possible length) codes of size 32 and minimal distance d for each positive integer d .