Fiddling With Trade as Home Burns

Fiddling with PageRank

This paper deals with the various changes that can be made to the basic PageRank model. We document the recent findings and add a few new contributions. These contributions concern (1) the sensitivity of the PageRank vector, (2) another method of forcing the Markov chain to be irreducible, and (3) a proof of the full spectrum of the PageRank matrix.

Fiddling with the Neural Code

Book Review how the stimulus changes over time introduces a complexity into the neural code that is often avoided by using static or stationary stimuli. The authors of Spikes Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code take the bull by the horns and deal directly with the problem of encoding time-varying stimuli. To under-Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck, and William Bialek stand the issues involved, a music...

Outsourcing with Home Bias and Trade Policy∗

This paper examines a simple model of outsourcing involving matching frictions and home bias in firms’ acquisition of intermediate goods. Two groups of seller firms—local sellers and foreign sellers—may face different degrees of search frictions even though they are identical in terms of productivity. Two groups of buyer firms are considered: one group accepts local and foreign sellers equally,...

The management of burns begins at home.

More fiddling with the definition of death?

Stanley contends that G.R. Gillett, in the last paragraph of an otherwise excellent article, "Why let people die?" (Journal of Medical Ethics 1986 Jun; 12(2): 83-86), is "fiddling about" with the definition of death when he argues that the patient in a persistent vegetative state is, in an ethical sense, no longer alive as a person; that what remains is a body in which the former patient has no...