When Good People Do Nothing: The Sin of Silence

When good people do bad things.

Now, Petraeus and Paula Broadwell are tabloid fodder, the details of their relationship spilled across headlines and blogs around the world. The nomination of another four-star general, John Allen, as NATO commander has been placed on hold pending investigation into possibly inappropriate emails to Tampa social maven Jill Kelley, whose closeness to Petraeus provoked Broadwell into sending her a...

When too little is as good as nothing at all: Rationing a disposable good among satiable people with acceptance thresholds

We study the problem of rationing a divisible good among a group of people. Each person’s preferences are characterized by an ideal amount that he would prefer to receive and a minimum quantity that he will accept: he finds any amount less than this threshold to be just as good as receiving nothing at all. Further, any amount beyond his ideal quantity has no effect on his welfare. The focus of ...

Do people ask good questions?

People ask questions in order to efficiently learn about the world. But do people ask good questions? In this work, we designed an intuitive, gamebased task that allowed people to ask natural language questions to resolve their uncertainty. Question quality was measured through Bayesian idealobserver models that considered large spaces of possible game states. During free-form question generati...

When Do Good Parameterizations Exist?

When nothing is good enough: Dialectal variation in Norwegian imperatives

This paper presents an analysis of imperative formation in Norwegian. The analysis occasions discussion of variation as reranking in OT, as well as providing a novel example of a grammar in which 'null' is the optimal candidate. The Norwegian imperative is in most cases identical to the verb stem (cf. Faarlund, Lie & Vannebo 1997:477). For verbs having the familiar disyllabic structure with a f...