The holographic bound that the entropy (log of number of quantum states) of a system is bounded from above by a quarter of the area of a circumscribing surface measured in Planck areas is widely regarded a desideratum of any fundamental theory, but some exceptions occur. By suitable black hole gedanken experiments I show that the bound follows from the generalized second law for two broad class...

Background One of the requirements of the Osun State smoke-free legislation is to ensure smoke-free enclosed and partially enclosed workplaces. This survey was conducted to assess the knowledge and attitude of workers in indoor bars, beer parlors and discotheques to smoke-free legislation in general and the Osun State smoke-free law in particular.   Methods A convenience sampling of 36 hospital...

Our article is a methodological critique of the recent legal origins literature. We start by showing that the legal origins literature cannot easily be based on the efficiency hypothesis of the common law. By debunking the relationship between the efficiency hypothesis and the legal origins literature, we are left with no consistent theory to explain the alleged inferiority of French civil law....

A Cumulative Advantage Distribution is proposed which models statistically the situation in which success breeds success. I t differs from the Negative Binomial Die tribution in that lack of success, being a non-event, is not punished by increased chance of failure. I t is shown that such a stochastic law is governed by the Beta Function, containing only one free parameter, and this is approxim...

Pareto, Zipf and numerous subsequent investigators of inverse power distributions have often represented their findings as though their data conformed to a power law form for all ranges of the variable of interest. I refer to this ideal case as a strong inverse power law (SIPL). However, many of the examples used by Pareto and Zipf, as well as others who have followed them, have been truncated ...

The second law of thermodynamics states the increase of entropy, ∆S > 0, for real processes from state A to state B at constant energy from chemistry over biological life and engines to cosmic events. The connection of entropy to information, phase-space, and heat is helpful but does not immediately convince observers of the validity and basis of the second law. This gave grounds for finding a ...