(31 Aug., p. 819) argue that, because current pricing practices do not internalize environmental costs, some mechanism other than the market is needed to protect environmental values. They propose a system of environmental credits-natural resource units (NRU's)-to be allocated to individuals and industrial organizations. Although their system is ingenious, I offer the following objections. 1) T...

A monopolist produces a good with two qualities. All consumers have the same valuation of the first quality, but their valuations of the second vary, and are their private information. A public agency can verify qualities, and make credible reports to consumers. In Full Quality Report, the public agency reports both qualities. In Average Quality Report, it reports a weighted average of qualitie...

Human presence and accordingly establishing suitable condition for social interactions are important factors in shaping urban spaces. Caring to different aspects of improving environmental qualities especially perception aspect and ease of perception from the environment with legibility improvement is an element that was emphasized from the base of urban design. The role of time, commence of da...

Leadership generally entails sustaining, improving, or changing strategic directions within small or large, simple or complex, organizations. 1 Today’s era raises issues for leadership that focus on reducing social and health benefits, and downsizing workforces and related services. Leadership requires making choices with finite resources based upon plausible alternatives, and it depends on mot...

The distinction between two kinds of qualities, primary and secondary, is one of the core doctrines of Scholastic natural philosophy. Far from being an invention of the modern era, it is something to which any student of Aristotelian philosophy—which is to say anyone who studied philosophy in a European university up until the eighteenth century—would have been introduced at a tender age. The d...

I explore two accounts of properties within a dispositional essentialist (or causal powers) framework, the pure powers view and the powerful qualities view. I first attempt to clarify precisely what the pure powers view is, and then raise objections to it. I then present the powerful qualities view and, in order to avoid a common misconception, offer a restatement of it that I shall call the tr...

With the complete sequencing of the human genome under way and the sequencing of complete microorganism genomes becoming commonplace, we have truly entered the era of large-scale DNA sequencing. Why now? As in some other data-rich areas of modern biology, for example, protein structure determination, it can be argued that the ratelimiting factors in increasing efficiency and throughput have bee...

Inserm, UMR-S 1144, 75006 Paris, France Service de psychiatrie adulte, pôle neurosciences, groupe hospitalier Saint-Louis-Lariboisière-Fernand Widal, AP–HP, 200, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, 5475 Paris cedex 10, France UMR-S 1144, université Paris Descartes, 75006 Paris, France UMR-S 1144, université Paris Diderot, 75013 Paris, France Fondation FondaMental, 94000 Créteil, France Inserm U 1171, ...

the assessment of document qualities such as depth and objectivity. The primary purpose is to develop a qualitysensitive functionality, orthogonal to relevance, to select documents for an interactive question-answering system. The study consisted of two stages. In the classifier construction stage, nine document qualities deemed important by information professionals were identified and classif...