South America and tropical Asia have the most diverse plant life on earth, so it seems intuitive that these regions would supply much of the world’s invasive species. But that’s not the case, according to a new analysis of global plant databases led by Mark van Kleunen of the University of Konstanz in Germany. The data show more nonnative plants originating from temperate Asia and Europe than a...

This paper aims to empirically evaluate the extent to which the 1986 Semiconductor Trade Arrangement (STA) affected the Japanese producers’ behavior and thus the evolution of the markets for the 256K and the 1M Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) chips. We find that overall the STA facilitated the collusive behavior of the Japanese producers even beyond the myopic optimization: during the STA p...

Mathematical formalism is the view that numbers are “signs” and arithmetic like a game played with such signs. Frege’s colleague Thomae defended using an analogy chess, critique of this has had major influence on discussions in analytic philosophy about signs, rules, meaning, mathematics. Here I offer new interpretation as by his predecessors, paying close attention to mathematical details hist...