A recent flurry of publications and media attention has revived interest in the question of how many genes exist in the human genome. Here, I review the estimates and use genomic sequence data from human chromosomes 21 and 22 to establish my own prediction.

On the TV show “The Price Is Right,” a player tries to win a new car by guessing its price. The price consists of a known number of digits (usually 5). Possibilities (hints) for each digit are revealed to the player. If the player fails to guess at least one correct digit in its correct place during a turn, the player loses. A player who eventually guesses all digits correctly wins the car. For...

This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text. No parts of this dissertation have been submitted for any other qualification. This dissertation does not exceed the regulation length of 60, 000 words, including tables and footnotes. To Fletcher, for teaching me the value of ha...

In this paper, we consider the authentication problem where a candidate measurement presented by an unidentified user is compared to a previously stored measurement of the legitimate user, the enrollment, with respect to a certain distortion criteria for authentication. An adversary wishes to impersonate the legitimate user by guessing the enrollment until the system authenticates him. For this...

Do structural patterns tell us something about the text content? In order to give a preliminary answer to this question, an experiment in automatic text classification is performed using only surface-structural features. The features extracted – as, e.g., the complexity, length or depth of text constituents (Köhler, 1999), – produced surprisingly good classification results. This finding argues...

In 2013, Qu demonstrated that Awasthi et al.’s remote user authentication scheme is vulnerable to smart card loss attack, off-line password guessing attack and does not preserve anonymity of user. However, this paper points out that Qu’s scheme is still vulnerable to off-line password guessing attack and smart card loss attack, and also does not preserve anonymity of a user unlike its claim. Fo...