We study the classification problem {\sc Metric Labeling} and its special case {\sc 0-Extension} in the context of earthmover metrics. Researchers recently proposed using earthmover metrics to get a polynomial time-solvable relaxation of {\sc Metric Labeling}; until now, however, no one knew if the integrality ratio was constant or not, ... more >>>

We prove that if a linear error correcting code
$\C:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}^m$ is such that a bit of the message can
be probabilistically reconstructed by looking at two entries of a
corrupted codeword, then $m = 2^{\Omega(n)}$. We also present
several extensions of this result.

We show a reduction from the ... more >>>