“If the coronavirus doesn’t kill us, hunger will”

Will Reliability Kill the Web Service Composition?

Web service composition is a distributed model to construct new web service on top of existing primitive or other composite web services. The advantage of web service composition has already been demonstrated and highlighted for its capability to compose autonomous services to achieve new functionality. However, an important question is whether this distributed model will be realized or not, du...

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.

We develop a simple model of cartel behavior under conditions of Bertrand competition with differentiated products. This model is then used to analyse the effects of ”Leniency Policy” on the cartel. We find that in some market situations introducing Leniency Policy causes the cartel to cease to be viable and competition results. However, in other cases the policy only serves to raise cartel pri...

Will your safety harness kill you?

Global Carbon Pricing We Will If You Will

This paper makes the case for negotiating a common international charge on greenhouse gas emissions (“carbon”) as opposed to global cap-andtrade. All countries would be covered in principle, but a much smaller number that covered most of the emissions would suffice. The charge would be internationally adjusted from time to time, and each country would collect and keep the revenue it generated b...

Will Empathy Save Us?

Recent prescriptions for rescuing civilization from collapse involve extending our human capacity for empathy to a global scale. This is a worthy goal, but several indications leave grounds for cautious optimism at best. Evolutionary biology interprets non-kin helping behaviors as products of natural selection that rewarded only the transmission success of resident genes within ancestors, not t...