Transactional Memory simplifies parallel programming by eliminating the use of locks to protect concurrent accesses to shared memory. However, when locks are used to provide mutual exclusion for irreversible operations (I/O, syscalls, calls to “black box” libraries), their replacement with transactions seems problematic: transactions can abort and restart at any arbitrary point in their executi...

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)...

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...

mutton and rice pudding form the menu at least four days out of seven. The idea that hot boiled beef is not very acceptable on a warm summer day or that salads may be a welcome change from the inevitable potato never seems to enter the heads of those responsible for the kitchen department. The two things which middle-class patients find hardest to endure in hospital are the absurd time at which...

Many known methods for analysing the communication complexity of unstructured search are based on the hardness of the set disjointness problem. Such techniques may “hide” important aspects of the original problem. Intuitively, search is a much simpler task: while set disjointness is hard even for NP, successful search necessarily results in a short witness, which makes it easy for NP. According...