Experts and lay people alike can sometimes find it difficult to demarcate the absurd. Here I propose a set of criteria that may be helpful in achieving this in the realm of healthcare: falsifiability, plausibility and some hallmarks of pseudoscience. Applying this method is unlikely to be fool-proof but it might be a valuable aid in discriminating credible from incredible health claims.

In the last 5 years, we have gained an increasing appreciation for the genetic contribution to atrial fibrillation (AF). While Mendelian families with AF have been reported, they have typically been considered rare. Studies from Framingham and Iceland have demonstrated a genetic basis for AF in the general population. Family members of those with AF have an odds ratios of 1.8 for developing the...

Bounded Model Checking (BMC) techniques have been used for formal hardware verification, with the help of tools such as GRASP (Generic search Algorithm for Satisfiability Problem) and more recently zchaff. In order to cope with very large hardware designs, our work exploited the unique characteristics of bounded model checking to enhance the SAT algorithms used to solve our problems. In our wor...

A well-known example is the 2001 paper by the group of Sharad Malik at Princeton, appropriately titled “Chaff: Engineering an Efficient SAT Solver” [7]. This has become one of the most cited papers on formal verification and represents a major break-through, even though the contribution of this paper is not a new theoretical formulation. The contribution was in the exploitation of the synergy b...

This paper presents a satisfiability-based method for solving the board-level multiterminal net routing problem in the digital design of clos-folded field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based logic emulation systems. The approach transforms the FPGA board-level routing task into a Boolean equation. Any assignment of input variables that satisfies the equation specifies a valid routing. We use t...

There are literally several books, dozens of psychoanalytic journals and hundreds of psychoanalytic articles published each month; with this flood of content it often seems an impossibility to separate wheat from chaff. As readers, our hope is that with each new article or book, the material will open unexpected ideational doors and thrust us into revisiting old issues or exploring new ones pre...