`Things That Stay'

Why Can’t Things Just Stay the Same

Three important changes to how public accounting in the USA is practiced have occurred in the last few years. Large firms have expanded their scope of services to such a degree that multidisciplinary practice seems the next logical step. At the same time, the success of consulting work has required some firms to bifurcate these activities into separate entities. Meanwhile, smaller practices are...

To stay or not to stay? That is the question.

The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same: A Comparative Analysis of Budget Punctuations

In this paper, I identify whether shifts within budgets occur and investigate the variation of these shifts. Building on stochastic process methods, I find that budgets in all four cases exhibit mostly incremental changes punctuated by extreme shifts. In order to explain these punctuations in budget distributions, I rely on two models: partisan control of government and partisan distance of the...

Things That Change by Themselves

Some fluents (for instance, time) change even after events that are not assumed to affect them (such as the action wait). We propose a formal-ization of the "commonsense law of inertia" in the situation calculus that allows us to describe such fluents. 1 Introduction The frame problem in Artificial Intelligence is the problem of specifying formally "what doesn't change when an event occurs" in ...

Evolving Cultural Things-That-Think

Although cultural evolution clearly outpaces genetic evolution in the natural world due to its higher rates of reproduction, recombination and selection, it does so built on biological foundations. In the natural world, cultural change takes place in minutes, days, years or decades, whereas genetic change takes at least a decade and a half. In the natural and cultural worlds the media of evolut...