Artificial life is the simulation and synthesis of living systems, and ALife models show how interactions between simple entities give rise to complex effects. Ecology is the study of the distribution and abundance of organisms, and ecological modelling involves fitting a linear model to a large data set and using that model to identify key causal factors at work in a complex ecosystem. We are ...

When news of West Africa’s Ebola outbreak first appeared in the spring of 2014, “the world wasn’t paying a lot of attention,” says Bryan Lewis. After all, previous flare-ups of the virus had burned out quickly, mainly because victims tend to die of fever, shock, and spontaneous bleeding before they can spread the virus very far. Except this time was different. In the hardest hit nations of Guin...

There is a growing body of robot-based research that makes a serious claim to be a new methodology for biology. Robots can be used as models of specific animal systems to test hypotheses regarding the control of behaviour. At levels from learning algorithms to specific dendritic circuits, implementing a proposed controller in a robotic device tests it against real environments in a way that is ...

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as refer...

When firms go public in an IPO, they must choose a number of shares to offer and a price level for those shares. Given an estimated total value, this division would seem to have little economic significance. Casual empiricism and the evidence from stock splits, however, suggest that firms do not choose their IPO share price level arbitrarily. We ask whether IPO prices are informative, in the se...

One form of bounded rationality is a breakdown in the commonality of the knowledge that the players are rational. In Rubinstein’s two-person alternating-offer bargaining game, assuming time preferences with constant discount factors, common knowledge of rationality is necessary for an agreement on a subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) partition to be reached (if ever). In this note, assuming time...

Current Web-based electronic commerce systems are lacking in efficient electronic brokerage. Over the past few years significant research has been done in the area of electronic commerce, based on distributed object technology. Distributed object systems provide a key to building interoperable applications that can execute on a range of platforms. However, this new generation of electronic comm...

the present study aimed to identify strategies used to realize the speech act of offerin persian. to do so, 195 male and female native persian speakers were selected fromdiverse age ranges, educational backgrounds, and social classes, and were assigned a36-item discourse completion task (dct) to elicit the speech act of offer. thirtyfield workers also recorded naturally occurring interactions c...

Mold contamination inside buildings is a widespread occurrence that can cause a range of adverse health effects in certain people. But with tens of thousands of mold species and many mechanisms through which they may cause harm, much remains unknown about this realm of environmental exposures. Investigators now report that one mold, Trichoderma longibrachiatum, does some of its damage through a...