From the principle that subjective dissimilarity between 2 stimuli is determined by their ratio, Fechner derives his logarithmic law in 2 ways. In one derivation, ignored and forgotten in modern accounts of Fechner's theory, he formulates the principle in question as a functional equation and reduces it to one with a known solution. In the other derivation, well known and often criticized, he s...

L ife is complicated. It comes in all sorts of shapes, sizes, places, and combinations, and has evolved a dizzying variety of solutions to the problem of carrying on living. Yet look inside a cell and life takes on, if not simplicity, then at least a certain uniformity—a genetic system based around nucleic acids, for example, and a common set of chemical reactions for turning food into fuel. An...

A. Compositionality is often considered a fundamental principle of semantics for natural language. Yet only fairly recently has there been something of a theory of compositionality which allows to prove actual results. Basically, the lack of progress has been due to an improper understanding of what syntactic and semantic structures actually are. Many linguistic theories in one way or an...

This paper introduces Gaia theory to the general reader. It provides the necessary background to follow the development of James Lovelock's thinking as he originated the Gaia theory by comparison of the atmospheres around Mars and other planets during his sojourn at NASA. Lynn Margulis' contributions to Gaia are also presented and the bases for her collaboration with Lovelock explored. In addit...

In 1991 Lai, Massey and Murphy introduced the IPES (Improved Proposed Encryption Standard), later renamed IDEA (International Data Encryption Algorithm). In this paper we analyse versions of IDEA with a reduced number of rounds. We consider diierential attacks using truncated diierentials, which can be used to cryptanalyse, at least in theory, up to 3.5 rounds of IDEA. The attack on 3.5 rounds ...

We demonstrate the main results of the Esprit Project P6333 IDEA, lasted from June 1992 to March 1997, whose main contributors are five industrial partners from five European countries: Bull, the main contractor (France), TXTInformatica (Italy), Sema (Spain), Dutch PIT (Holland), and Bim (Belgium), and four research institutes: ECRC in Munich, INRIA in Paris, the University of Bonn, and Politec...

Since almost two decades, the block cipher IDEA has resisted an exceptional number of cryptanalysis attempts. At the time of writing, the best published attack works against 6 out of the 8.5 rounds (in the non-related-key attacks model), employs almost the whole codebook, and improves the complexity of an exhaustive key search by a factor of only two. In a parallel way, Lipmaa demonstrated that...