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...

The promised operational benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) are predicated on the notion that better decisions will be enabled through a multitude of autonomous sensors (often deployed by different firms) providing real-time knowledge of the state of things. This knowledge will be imperfect, however, due to sensor quality limitations. A sensor can improve its estimation quality by solicit...

Light of different wavelengths is essential for plant growth and development. Short-wavelength radiation such as UV can shift the composition of flavonoids, glucosinolates, and other plant metabolites responsible for enhanced defense against certain herbivorous insects. The intensity of light-induced, metabolite-based resistance is plant- and insect species-specific and depends on herbivore fee...

Genome-wide 70-mer oligonucleotide microarrays of rice (Oryza sativa) and Arabidopsis thaliana were used to profile genome expression changes during light-regulated seedling development. We estimate that the expression of approximately 20% of the genome in both rice and Arabidopsis seedlings is regulated by white light. Qualitatively similar expression profiles from seedlings grown under differ...

Thomas Reid (1710-1796) offers an under-appreciated account of the primary/secondary quality distinction. He gives sound reasons for rejecting the views of Locke, Boyle, Galileo and others, and presents a better alternative, according to which the distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. Primary qualities, for Reid, are qualities whose intrinsic natures can be known through sensation....

Changes in neutral sugar and organic acid content of guard cells were quantitated by high-performance liquid chromatography during stomatal opening in different light qualities. Sonicated Vicia faba epidermal peels were irradiated with 10 [mu]mol m-2 s-1 of blue light, a fluence rate insufficient for the activation of guard cell photosynthesis, or 125 [mu]mol m-2 s-1 of red light, in the presen...

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...