Are Political Acts Unnatural?

Are Artificial Mutation Biases Unnatural?

Whilst the rate at which mutations occur in artiicial evolutionary systems has received considerable attention, there has been little analysis of the mutation operators themselves. Here attention is drawn to the possibility that inherent biases within such operators might arte-factually aaect the direction of evolutionary change. Biases associated with several mutation operators are detailed an...

Are State Consumer Protection Acts Really Little-ftc Acts?

State Consumer Protection Acts (CPAs) were designed to supplement the Federal Trade Commission’s mission of protecting consumers and are often referred to as “little-FTC Acts.” There is growing concern that enforcement under these acts is not only qualitatively different than FTC enforcement, but may be counterproductive for consumers. This article examines a sample of CPA claims and compares t...

The Political Economy of State-level Administrative Procedure Acts*

One of the most important developments in theories of American bureaucracy has been the claim that organizational procedures that are enacted by public officials have a significant impact on the nature of both bureaucratic control and performance. This development has been accompanied, however, by limited empirical investigation. We address this gap by examining the conditions under which admin...

Unnatural Acts: Unphysical Consequences of Imposing Boundary Conditions on Quantum Fields

I examine the effect of trying to impose a Dirichlet boundary condition on a scalar field by coupling it to a static background. The zero point – or Casimir – energy of the field diverges in the limit that the background forces the field to vanish. This divergence cannot be absorbed into a renormalization of the parameters of the theory. As a result, the Casimir energy of a surface on which a D...

Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?