This article concerns the resolution of impartial combinatorial games, and in particular games that can be split in sums of independent positions. We prove that in order to compute the outcome of a sum of independent positions, it is always more efficient to compute separately the nimbers of each independent position than to develop directly the game tree of the sum. The concept of nimber is th...

Recessions and other crises seem to occur without any large exogenous shocks. One theory is that this is due to strategic complementarities: the incentive to invest is stronger if others are expected to invest. If, in addition, each investor observes a slightly noisy signal of the true fundamentals, a crisis occurs whenever fundamentals fall below a certain threshold (Morris and Shin, AER 1998)...

This text describes the general principles underlying the concept of disease-free territory and the required statistical basis for the corresponding epidemiological surveillance operations. Among the essential points, it is emphasised that "disease-free" status should be given only under conditions substantiating the absence of infection (or infestation) and not simply on basis of a known low l...

The prospect of a superbug that could wipe out much of the human race sounds like the stuff of science-fiction novels, Hollywood movies or doomsday prophets. However, such a global pandemic might not be as unlikely as it seems—some would even go so far as to say that it is a certainty, with the only uncertainties being what pathogen will cause it, when it will happen and how well the world will...

This contribution aims at showing some of the advantages of taking a novel, broad and systemic view on constitutive rules based on a failure oriented analysis, relying on the notion of impasse. Basically, impasses can descend by two main kinds of causes: either a mismatch between rules (how things should be done) and facts (how things are actually done), or an internal contradiction among rules...

Understanding and maintaining large software systems is a complex and time-consuming yet inevitable challenge. Most systems frequently change and evolve over time to meet new requirements. To perform these changes a software engineer must have an in-depth understanding of the inner structure and implementation of a system. However, the integrated development environment (IDE) usually provides l...