One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

The goal of a visualization system is to facilitate data-driven insight discovery. But what if the insights are spurious? Features or patterns in visualizations can be perceived as relevant insights, even though they may arise from noise. We often compare visualizations to a mental image of what we are interested in: a particular trend, distribution or an unusual pattern. As more visualizations...

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

System of Rice Intensification (SRI) management practices depart from conventionallyrecommended methods for rice cultivation, aiming to provide rice plants with optimal growing conditions, to enhance yield and resource productivity (Stoop et al. 2002). The benefits of SRI practices have been seen already in 42 countries and are reported to increase yields of irrigated rice by 25–50% or even mor...

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

We consider philanthropy by college alums from an innovative and provocative perspective: what if prospective college students were considered members of asset classes with different risk-return combinations? Using forty years of merged admissions-philanthropy records on students at a highly selective liberal arts college, we estimate the simple financial model that this allegory implies. We fi...

How to trust without knowing the truth? This is probably the key question that arises while designing applications using virtual tags. A virtual tag is a geo-referenced note that is visible for all the people that are in a specific place. But what if you see a tag about an event or an object that is not here? How to know if you are facing a spam attack, or if the tag is simply outdated? And, ho...

Comments: The great enumerator Germain Kreweras empirically discovered this intriguing fact, and then needed lots of pages[K], and lots of human ingenuity, to prove it. Other great enumerators, for example, Heinrich Niederhausen[N], Ira Gessel[G1], and Mireille Bousquet-Mélou[B], found other ingenious, “simpler” proofs. Yet none of them is as simple as ours! Our proof (with the generous help of...

Service providers argue that if net neutrality is not enforced, they will have sufficient incentives to build special high-quality channels that will take the Internet to the next level of its evolution. But what if they do get their wish, net neutrality is consigned to the dustbin, and they do build their new services, but nobody uses them? If the networks that are built are the ones that are ...