When Bad People Happen to Good Games

When bad things happen to good trees

When the edges in a tree or rooted tree fail with a certain fixed probability, the (greedoid) rank may drop. We compute the expected rank as a polynomial in p and as a real number under the assumption of uniform distribution. We obtain several different expressions for this expected rank polynomial for both trees and rooted trees, one of which is especially simple in each case. We also prove tw...

When Bad Things Happen to Good Campuses

G ene Washington, director of acdemic computing, is buzzed by his secretary to take an urgent call from Provost Marion Mossback. “Washington,” yells Mossback, “what kind of trouble have you got Ypsilanti University into now?” After a few minutes of gentle probing, Washington has the outline of the “trouble.” Mossback has just received a letter from a prominent alumnus and benefactor, Mr. Martin...

When VAD Things Happen to Good People.

Panel: When Bad Things Happen To Good Chips

Design of reliable chips with high yield is an extremely challenging task in UDSM technologies. Time to market pressures, which often limit the necessary verification before tapeout, typically are manifested as ramp-to-production problems on "good" designs either in the manufacturing process or in the field. Burn-in process, a reactive measure to ship reliable chips, is not effective for high v...

Why Bad Things Happen to Good Projects

Christina Hanger had little reason to be pessimistic in May 2004, when she was moving one of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s biggest North American divisions onto a centralized ERP system from SAP AG. As the leader of an IT consolidation project rooted in HP's acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp. two years earlier, Hanger, HP's senior vice president of Americas operations and IT, had an unbroken record o...