Popular language-based security mechanisms for software systems are based on verifiers that enforce a fixed and trusted type system. We live in a multi-lingual world and no system is written entirely in a single strongly-typed language. Rather than seek the absolute most general type system, we propose a sound framework for customizing the mechanism (e.g., a type system or an explicit safety pr...

Ecosystems can undergo sudden shifts to undesirable states, but recent studies with simple single-species ecosystems have demonstrated that advance warning can be provided by the slowing down of population dynamics near a tipping point. However, it is unclear how this 'critical slowing down' will manifest in ecosystems with strong interactions between their components. Here we probe the dynamic...

A distributed data structure is an object which permits many producers to augment or modify its contents, and many consumers simultaneously to access its component elements. Synchronization is implicit in data structure access: a process that requests an element which has not yet been generated blocks until a producer creates it. In this paper, we describe a parallel programming language (calle...

A methodology is presented for studying the effects of automobile emission policies on the design decisions of profitseeking automobile producers in a free-entry oligopoly market. The study does not attempt to model short-term decisions of specific producers. Instead, mathematical models of engineering performance, consumer demand, cost, and competition are integrated to predict the effects of ...

Most models that are used to analyze support policies for renewable electricity neglect important market features like oligopolistic behavior, emission trading, and restricted cross-border transmission capacities. We use a quantitative electricity market model that accounts for these aspects and decompose the impact of the German Feed-in tariff (FIT) into two frequently counteracting effects: a...

Organic agriculture is often proposed as a more sustainable alternative to current conventional agriculture. We assess the current understanding of the costs and benefits of organic agriculture across multiple production, environmental, producer, and consumer dimensions. Organic agriculture shows many potential benefits (including higher biodiversity and improved soil and water quality per unit...

We present a highly-scalable non-blocking producer-consumer task pool, designed with a special emphasis on lightweight synchronization and data locality. The core building block of our pool is SALSA, Scalable And Low Synchronization Algorithm for a single-consumer container with task stealing support. Each consumer operates on its own SALSA container, stealing tasks from other containers if nec...