  We consider the effect of a small cut-off epsilon on the velocity of a
traveling wave in one dimension. Simulations done over more than ten orders of
magnitude as well as a simple theoretical argument indicate that the effect of
the cut-off epsilon is to select a single velocity which converges when epsilon
tends to 0 to the one predicted by the marginal stability argument. For small
epsilon, the shift in velocity has the form K(log epsilon)^(-2) and our
prediction for the constant K agrees very well with the results of our
simulations. A very similar logarithmic shift appears in more complicated
situations, in particular in finite size effects of some microscopic stochastic
systems. Our theoretical approach can also be extended to give a simple way of
deriving the shift in position due to initial conditions in the
Fisher-Kolmogorov or similar equations.
