Two people have a full B-gallon jug of wine and two empty jugs of capacity M and S, respectively, where B= M +S. Any jug may be poured into any other jug until either the first one is empty or the second is full. What is the quickest way for them to divide the wine equally? We solve this problem and show that a natural related problem may be solved in polynomial time.

‘Joined-up government’ (JUG) approaches have emerged in many industrialized countries as a means to tackle persistent ‘wicked’ public and social policy problems (Pollit 2003). Despite this, limited evidence exists concerning their implementation or effectiveness. ‘JUG’ was popularized by the Blair Government (UK) with its focus on addressing social exclusion. Following in these footsteps, in 20...

Metabolic disorders, especially hyperketonemia, are very common in dairy sheep. The whole-blood concentrations of β-hydroxybutyrate (BHBA) and glucose can be determined by commercially available electronic hand-held devices, which are used in human medicine and for the detection of ketosis in dairy cows. The aim of this study was to evaluate the suitability of the hand-held device Precision Xce...

Performance of commercially available component resolved microarray has not been widely evaluated in food allergy. Nut allergy is a prevalent and increasing food allergy in which component resolved diagnosis is crucial. In the context of a multicentric study on pollen and vegetable food allergy in Spain, we enrolled patients (n=100) who had suffered at least two episodes of immediate symptoms a...

We study the hardness of the optimal jug measuring problem. By proving tight lower and upper bounds on the minimum number of measuring steps required, we reduce an inapproximable NP-hard problem (i.e., the shortest GCD multiplier problem [G. Havas, J.-P. Seifert, The Complexity of the Extended GCD Problem, in: LNCS, vol. 1672, Springer, 1999]) to it. It follows that the optimal jug measuring pr...

Relative collections of house flies were compared on two Florida dairy farms using several monitoring methods: sticky cylinders, baited jug traps (Farnam Terminator and Victor Fly Magnet), and bait strips (Wellmark QuikStrike). Bait strips were placed over collecting pans and under 61 cm square plywood roofs to protect the toxicant from sunlight ("sheltered QuikStrike traps"). Sticky cylinders ...

BACKGROUND Modular specialist feeds may consist of a number of individual liquid ingredients. Accurate feed preparation is dependent on competent liquid measurement. We investigate the accuracy of two measuring jugs (one retail mix-and-measure; and one produced to laboratory standards); and the influence of volume and technique on accuracy. MATERIALS AND METHODS 20 health professionals aged 1...