Suppose we have a stack of cards that is divided over some players. It may be possible to communicate your hand of cards to another player by public announcements, without yet another player learning any of your cards. A solution to this problem consists of some sequence of announcements and is called an exchange. It is called a direct exchange if it consists of (the minimum of) two announcemen...

This tutorial presents the use of OPEN at Dow Jones in order to manage the development of yet another object-oriented software called “TELAN” Telerate Analytics that provides analytical applications for financial markets (concentrating on the fixed income market in the initial iteration). While TELAN has received the Computerworld Object Developer’s Award Best 00 Development across the organiza...

Yet another introductory book on cryptography!? This is what most people from the community might think, when they first glimpse at the present book by Christof Paar and Jan Pelzl. And that is what the book entitled Understanding Cryptography really is about. It is a textbook mainly targeted to undergraduate students as a very first course in cryptography. Still, when having a closer second loo...

After the end of the Cold War, a number of welcome indications, such as attaining peace in Cambodia and the admission of Vietnam to ASEAN membership, signaled that the Asian-Pacific region was headed into a more predictable era. The Asian countries were becoming more mature politically, and this political stability in turn engendered eye-opening economic growth. However, the end of the Cold War...

We characterize the restrictions of first order Sobolev functions to regular subsets of a homogeneous metric space and prove the existence of the corresponding linear extension operator. Let (X, d, µ) be a metric space (X, d) equipped with a Borel measure µ, which is non-negative and outer regular, and is finite on every bounded subset. In this paper we describe the restrictions of first order ...

Given an undirected graph g or hypergraph 'H model for a given set of variables V , we introduce two marginalization operators for obtaining the undirected graph YA or hy­ pergraph 'HA associated with a given subset A c V such that the marginal distribution of A factorizes according to YA or 'HA, respec­ tively. Finally, we illustrate the method by its application to some practical examples. Wi...