Whether we choose to admit it or not, the anecdote continues to be an important engine of novel ideas in medicine. The anecdote is rife with such diffi culties as openness to interpretation, and the biases of faulty memory and foolish optimism; it is just as likely to be explained by fi ckle...

This paper discusses recent claims made by Caplan (2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2002, 2007) who argues that democracies produce bad policies as a result of voters' irrational beliefs. We start by outlining the motives which led Caplan to amend classic Public Choice in such a radical fashion. We...

The Majority Strategy for finding medians of a set of clients on a graph can be relaxed in the following way: if we are at v, then we move to a neighbor w if there are at least as many clients closer to w than to v (thus ignoring the clients at equal distance from v and w). The graphs on which...

The analysis of the empirical distribution of univariate data often includes the computation of location, scale, skewness, and tail-heaviness measures, which are estimates of specific parameters of the underlying population distribution. Several measures are available, but they differ by...