The last 12 years have seen historically high levels of interest in biosecurity among life scientists, science policymakers, and academic experts on science and security policy. This interest was triggered by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the ‘anthrax letters’ attack of the same year, and two virology papers, published early last decade, that were thought to raise serious biosecurity concerns. Et...

Ants solve complex and dynamic problems with virtually no formalized mechanisms to coordinate their work. Ants are known to divide the labour, such that highly specialized groups perform different tasks. This enhances colony efficiency. As a model for computing ants are good because they are simple, distributed, autonomous and yet solve complex tasks. In this thesis specific questions are addre...

Group living is a widely adopted strategy by many organisms and given the advantages offered by a social lifestyle, such as increased protection from predators or increased ability for resource exploitation, a wide variety of animals have adopted a social lifestyle. Arguably none have done this more successfully than the social insects. Indeed their efficient division of labour is often cited a...

Horn’s division of pragmatic labour (Horn, 1984) is a universal property of language, and amounts to the pairing of simple meanings to simple forms, and deviant meanings to complex forms. This division makes sense, but a community of language users that do not know it makes sense will still develop it after a while, because it gives optimal communication at minimal costs. This property of the d...

This paper develops a model of intellectual labor augmentation to explain both the marriage wage premium and educational assortative mating. We suggest that husbands and wives are complementary factors of production where a spouse’s education and skills augment their partner’s productivity and earnings potential. We test this proposition using data from the 2000 U.S. Census of Population and th...