The scope of reference of a word's meaning can be highly variable. We present a novel paradigm to investigate the flexible interpretation of word meaning. We focus on quantifiers such as "many" or "few," a class of words that depends on number knowledge but can be interpreted in a flexible manner. Healthy young adults performed a truth value judgment task on pictorial arrays of varying amounts ...

This study investigates whether understanding up/down metaphors as well as semantically homologous literal sentences activates embodied representations online. Participants read orientational literal sentences (e.g., she climbed up the hill), metaphors (e.g., she climbed up in the company), and abstract sentences with similar meaning to the metaphors (e.g., she succeeded in the company). In Exp...

This paper presents an analysis of the reduction in S02 emissions by electric utilities between 1985 and 1993. We find that emissions have been reduced for reasons largely unrelated to the emission reduction mandate incorporated in Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. The principal reason appears to be the change in the economics of coal choice that has resulted from the remarkable de...

In many living trees, much of the interior of the trunk can be rotten or even hollowed out. Previously, this has been suggested to be adaptive, with microbial or animal consumption of interior wood producing a rain of nutrients to the soil beneath the tree that allows recycling of those nutrients into new growth via the trees roots. Here I propose an alternative (non-exclusive) explanation: suc...

The human ego provides continuous opportunities to explore the richness and variety of human perception. It is capable of excruciating truth and insight as well as delusions of grandeur that obscure truth and reality. The maturity of an individual can be defined in relation to his ability to differentiate between these extremes. The computing practitioner, being human, is no exception. His exis...

Modal logics are widely used in a number of areas in computer science, in particular for the speciication and veriication of hardware and software systems, for knowledge representation, in databases, and in artiicial intelligence. The most important reason for the successful applications of these logics is that they provide a good balance between expressive power and computational complexity. I...

In this paper, I ask whether family firms provide stability to their stakeholders at the expense of economic growth. I build a model where current owners of dynastic firms derive private benefits from keeping the control of the firm within the family over the generations. Because these preferences limit the recourse to external finance, they induce family-minded entrepreneurs to invest in small...