Here is a simple trick that you can use to try to dupe a friend out of his money with high probability. Bet with him on the outcome of three specially numbered dice labelled X , Y , and Z each with six faces marked as: X (3 3 5 5 7 7), Y (2 2 4 4 9 9), Z (1 1 6 6 8 8). Each person chooses a different die. The larger number wins when the dice are rolled. Strangely, whichever die your friend has ...

Experimental studies have shown heart rates to decrease from embryo to hatchling stage in turtles, remain steady in skinks, and increase in birds. However, no snake species has been studied in this regard. I recorded heart rate evolution trajectories from embryo to juvenile stage in 78 eggs from two species of European Natricine snakes. Unexpectedly, snakes behaved more like birds than turtles ...

DICE (DIstributed Constraint Environment) is a software framework, implemented in the Manifold coordination language, for constructing distributed constraint solvers. Currently it supports the cooperation of solvers that can act as a domain reduction operator inside a constraint propagation algorithm. In this paper we propose a number of extensions to the framework, that will provide support fo...

Throughout the post-war period there have been many attempts to reform the UK education system, often with an explicit intention to try and make it more productive. The list of education policy reforms that have been attempted over the last 50 years is quite extensive, and recently the UK (and in particular England and Wales) has introduced many innovative market-oriented reforms to its educati...