This paper revisits the well-known ...scal "Decentralization Theorem" of Oates(1972), by relaxing the role of the assumption that governments are benevolent, while retaining the assumption of policy uniformity. If instead, decisions are made by direct majority voting, the theorem fails. Speci...cally, (i) centralization can welfare-dominate decentralization even if there are no externalities an...

The goal of the field of Artificial Intelligence is to understand intelligence and create a human-equivalent or transhuman mind. Beyond this lies another question—whether the creation of this mind will benefit the world; whether the AI will take actions that are benevolent or malevolent, safe or uncaring, helpful or hostile. Creating Friendly AI describes the design features and cognitive archi...

A speech analysis-synthesis ystem was used to manipulate variance of fundamental frequency and a mechanical rate changer was used to manipulate speech rate. The synthesized and altered voices were tested for realism. Synthesized voices were mistaken for normal 50% to 58% of the time and rate-changed voices were mistaken for normal 78% of the time. Additional studies were conducted to test the e...

This study investigated whether attitudinal variables, such as benevolent and hostile sexism toward men and women, female rape myth acceptance, and tolerance of sexual harassment are related to women labeling their sexual assault experiences as rape. In a sample of 276 female college students, 71 (25.7%) reported at least one experience that met the operational definition of rape, although only...

Malicious users on chat network systems would reduce the willingness of benevolent users to chat on the same network. Thus it is often desirable to classify malicious users based on their personal profile and chat contents. In this study, different algorithms including Naive Bayes, SVM, Decision Table, Multilayer Perceptron, and Logistic classification are applied on the dataset from an anonymo...

We begin with some background on viruses and related topics in ‘life-like’ computational organisms. Next we examine some of the major problems facing the current global computing environment and how viruses have the potential for helping to solve these problems. We then consider several widely stated arguments against the application of computer viruses for useful purposes and provide counterpo...

Even though smiles are seen as universal facial expressions, research shows that there exist various kinds of smiles (i.e., affiliative smiles, dominant smiles). Accordingly, we suggest that there also exist various mental representations of smiles. Which representation is employed in cognition may depend on social factors, such as the smiling person's group membership: Since in-group members a...

The standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent-seeking politicians. This paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent-seeking politician chooses policies. If the politician chooses extractive policies, citizens throw him out of power. We analyse the efficient sustainable ...