We discuss the physical interpretation of unparticles and review the constraints from cosmology. Unparticles may be understood in terms of confined states of a strongly-coupled scale-invariant theory, where scale-invariance implies that the confined states have continuous masses. This picture is consistent with the observation that unparticle operators can be represented in terms of continuous ...

We propose the idea of building a secure hash using quadratic or higher degree multivariate polynomials over a finite field as the compression function. We analyze some security properties and potential feasibility, where the compression functions are randomly chosen highdegree polynomials, and show that under some plausible assumptions, high-degree polynomials as compression functions has good...

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of rule changes on game-related statistics in men’s water polo matches. A total of 856 men’s matches played in all Olympic Games and World Championship since 1936 was analysed. The game-related statistics considered were: total goals, winners’ goals, losers’ goals, goals per minute, goals difference, relationship difference goals and total go...

Salazar, Dunn and Graham in [15] presented an improved Feng-Rao bound for the minimum distance of dual codes. In this work we take the improvement a step further. Both the original bound by Salazar et. al., as well as our improvement are lifted so that they deal with generalized Hamming weights. We also demonstrate the advantage of working with one-way well-behaving pairs rather than weakly wel...

This paper considers the problem of efficiently generating a sequence of secrets with the special property that the knowledge of one or several secrets does not help an adversary to find the other ones. This is achieved through one-way cross-trees, which may be seen as a multidimensional extension of the so-called one-way chains. In a dual way, some applications require the release of one or se...

Economics has hit the mainstream in the last decade with popular books like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist reaching the masses. These authors have used their toolkits far beyond the narrow scope of money and finance and answered questions pertaining to anything from social policy to demographics to crime. Their appeal has largely been their ability to explain that small underlying fo...

The main purpose of this paper is to use a new way to extend fuzzy implications $I$ from a generalized sublattice $M$ to a bounded lattice $L$, such that the extended implications preserve many of the considered properties of fuzzy implications on $M$.Furthermore, as a special case, we investigate the extension of $(S,N)-$implications. Results indicate that the extended implications preserve ma...

viduals in both the United States and China. This paper includes a history of philanthropy in each nation, as well as the impact of notable wealthy figures on philanthropy. We also asses the motivations of wealthy donors and review the charitable areas that receive the most donations from this population. This paper analyzes and compares the donation trends from the top fifty philanthropists in...