How Harmful are Adaptation Restrictions

How Harmful Are the Average American’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

It has sometimes been claimed (usually without evidence) that the harm caused by an individual’s participation in a greenhouse-gas-intensive economy is negligible. Using data from several contemporary sources, this paper attempts to estimate the harm done by an average American. This estimate is crude, and further refinements are surely needed. But the upshot is that the average American is res...

Are lotteries harmful ?

In 1987 the State of Wisconsin, in authorizing a state lottery, required the Wisconsin Lottery Board to contract with IRP to undertake a study of the impact of the lottery on Wisconsin residents of various income levels. Titled "Who Plays the Lottery? A Comparison of Patterns in Wisconsin and the Nation," the study was carried out by Irving Piliavin and Michael Polakowski and is available as IR...

Food Taxes: How Likely Are Likely Effects?

When Power Adaptation is Useless or Harmful

We consider the design of optimal strategies for joint power adaptation, rate adaptation and scheduling in a multi-hop wireless network. Most existing strategies for ad-hoc networks control either power and scheduling, or rates and scheduling, but not the three together as we do. We assume the underlying physical layer allows finegrained rate adaptation (like in 802.11a/g, HDR/CDMA, UWB). Our g...

Restrictions on biological adaptation in language evolution.

Language acquisition and processing are governed by genetic constraints. A crucial unresolved question is how far these genetic constraints have coevolved with language, perhaps resulting in a highly specialized and species-specific language "module," and how much language acquisition and processing redeploy preexisting cognitive machinery. In the present work, we explored the circumstances und...