Harmful Aids

AIDS

Harmful Farming

This issue of PLoS Genetics contains the second of two important papers describing the high levels of meiotic failure caused by exposure of female mice to a chemical known as Bisphenol A (BPA) [1]. In the first article [2], Pat Hunt and her collaborators demonstrated high levels of meiotic failure in females exposed to BPA, suggesting that BPA exposure affects maturing oocytes. This conclusion ...

Harmful Addiction†

We construct an infinite horizon model of harmful addiction. Consumption is compulsive if it differs from what the individual would have chosen had commitment been available. A good is addictive if its consumption leads to more compulsive consumption of the same good. We analyze the welfare implications of drug policies and find that taxes on drugs decrease welfare while prohibitive policies ma...

Harmful Certification?

At this time, when we have still some months to wait for the findings of the Royal Commission, it may be of interest to consider the certification of the lunatic. It is unfortunate that on this point (as on others) there is still a conflict between the ideas of the doctor?interested solely in the ultimate as well as the immediate mental and physical welfare of the patient?and various people int...

Data Structures Considered Harmful

We describe an approach to logic programming where the execution of a pure logic program is ordered on “temporal” values in the program. The resulting programs are relational and avoid a premature commitment to data structures. This is a strong advantage in a programming language. We present the programming language Starlog as an example of this approach and give a summary of its denotational a...

Independence Assumptions Considered Harmful

Many current approaches to statistical language modeling rely on independence a.~sumptions 1)etween the different explanatory variables. This results in models which are computationally simple, but which only model the main effects of the explanatory variables oil the response variable. This paper presents an argmnent in favor of a statistical approach that also models the interactions between ...