Biologists and Carbon Neutrality

Communism, Value Neutrality and Monetary Neutrality

One of the most puzzling aspects about the functioning of the floating exchange rate regime of the 1980s has been that huge swings in exchange rate have had only muted effects on anything real. To understand this phenomenon, we study the relationship between communism and value neutrality and monetary neutrality. We find that the symmetry of communism is bound to lead to value neutrality. In th...

An Investigation of the Carbon Neutrality of Wood Bioenergy

Wood biomass has been viewed as “carbon neutral”—its uses as energy have a zero carbon footprint. Some observers argue that the use of wood biofuels will result in a decrease of the forest stock and a net reduction of the carbon captured in the forest. Such assessments take a static, accounting view of forest systems and do not consider the effects of management in renewing the forest and incre...

Robustness, evolvability, and neutrality.

Biological systems, from macromolecules to whole organisms, are robust if they continue to function, survive, or reproduce when faced with mutations, environmental change, and internal noise. I focus here on biological systems that are robust to mutations and ask whether such systems are more or less evolvable, in the sense that they can acquire novel properties. The more robust a system is, th...

Discounting and Risk Neutrality

Let be a binary relation in which is a real vector space of vector-valued discrete-time Ð ¤ ß Z Ñ Z stochastic processes with as the sequence of zero vectors. If satisfies four axioms, then ! Ð ¤ ß Z Ñ there are unique discount factors such that preferences regarding stochastic processes induce prefences among present value random vectors. Three of the axioms are familiar: weak ordering, contin...

Network Neutrality and Transparency