This paper calculates new bounds on the size of the performance gap between random codes and the best possible codes. The first result shows that, for large block sizes, the ratio of the error probability of a random code to the sphere-packing lower bound on the error probability of every code on the binary symmetric channel (BSC) is small for a wide range of useful crossover probabilities. Thu...

The distributed blocking flow shop scheduling problem (DBFSP) allows modeling the scheduling process in companies with more than one factory. It configures production systems as flow shop lines where the blocking constraint must be considered. To the best of our knowledge, this variant of the distributed permutation flow shop scheduling problem has not been studied. In this working paper, we sh...

The Bridge dilemma (pushing a heavy man from a bridge in front of a train that would otherwise kill five persons) and the Switch dilemma (redirecting a train that would otherwise kill five persons onto another track where it kills one person) are presumably the two best-known moral dilemmas in philosophy and psychology. In this paper we claim that people’s intuitions about what to do in Bridge ...

Cribbage is (normally) a two-player card game where the aim is to score 121 points before your opponent. The game has four stages, one of which involves discarding two cards from the six cards you are dealt. A later stage scores the four cards in your hand together with a card cut randomly from the deck after the discards have been made. The two cards that were discarded are used to form anothe...

☆ The authors gratefully acknowledge financial sup Science Foundation of China (08CTQ008), the National China (70832001, 70902017), the Shanghai Pujiang Ta Competitive Research Grant from Hong Kong Polytech authors thank two anonymous reviewers and the gue Megehee, for their insightful comments on content acknowledge the revision suggestions by Alison Lloyd version of this article. ⁎ Correspond...

The most recent results and some of the open key questions on the evolution of early-type galaxies are reviewed in the general cosmological context of massive galaxy formation.

On today’s Internet, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is often used (some would say abused) to enable asynchronous, "serverinitiated" communication from a server to a client as well as communication from a client to a server. This document describes known issues and best practices related to such "bidirectional HTTP" applications, focusing on the two most common mechanisms: HTTP long poll...

Recently, a new structure called butterfly introduced by Perrin et at. is attractive for that it has very good cryptographic properties: the differential uniformity is at most equal to 4 and algebraic degree is also very high when exponent e = 3. It is conjecture that the nonlinearity is also optimal for every odd k, which was proposed as a open problem. In this paper, we further study the butt...

Most areas of health research will have accepted data and a dominating interpretation. If the interpretation is not correct, contradictions will accumulate, and it will eventually become clear that the current interpretation is untenable. In this situation, the best hypothesis is the one that accounts for all of the known data as well as the apparent contradictions. The area of vitamin A supple...