Over a billion of Muslims fast worldwide during Ramadan each year. Through this religious custom, fasting contributes to their health as well as their spiritual growth. However, available evidence regarding the health-benefits of Ramadan fasting is scarce and highly contentious. Although Islam exempts patients from fasting, many fast conceivably, and their clinical condition is prone to deterio...

Building on ideas from linguistics, psychology, and social sciences about the possible mechanisms of human decision-making, we propose a novel theoretical framework for the citation analysis. Given the existing trend to investigate citation statistics in the context of various forms of power and Zipfian laws, we show that the popular models of citation have poor predictive ability and can hardl...

Problem B1 (40 pts). Give a context-free grammar for the language over the alphabet {a, b, c} given by L = {xcy | x 6= y, x, y ∈ {a, b}∗}. Hint . At first glance, this seems impossible. Think nondeterministically. You need to figure out how to express that x 6= y in such a way that you can write grammar rules that enforce this condition. Obviously, this is the case if |x| < |y| or |y| < |x|. An...

Fonkoze, a microfinance institution in Haiti, has used a poverty “scorecard” to benchmark existing client data to the $1-a-day extreme poverty line. By referring to data from a national survey of household income, 12 variables already routinely collected by Fonkoze were found to be suitable as indicators of whether a household is above or below the extreme poverty line. A scorecard was construc...

The bicentenary of the publication of William Withering's Foxglove has been well and largely perceptively celebrated the world over, but the most permanent tribute comes in the form ofthis book by J. K. Aronson. Aronson is very well qualified for the job he has set himself. He is an eminent authority on the pharmacology and clinical practice involved, and he now shows himself to be a fine and m...

The 2007–08 food price crises caused hardship on a number of fronts in countries throughout the world. The steep rise in food prices led to economic difficulties for the poor and generated social and political turmoil in many countries. Haiti, Egypt, Bangladesh, Cote D'Ivoire, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia are among the 33 countries that saw violent food riots, demonstrations, or social unres...

We can, but should we? After recently reflecting upon our profession as pediatric critical care physicians , I concluded that this one complex question gets asked many times throughout the day – or at least it should. A recent report discussed an emerging paradigm in pediatric critical care medicine (1). With more and more chronic patients filling our pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), perha...