Something to Think About-Anything Goes

Anything Goes

Representing OT hierarchies in terms of weighted sums of violations requires in the general case exponential growth of weights; and any such weight system will only work for finite fragments of grammars in which the quantity of violations incurred by optima does not grow without bound (typically, those fragments in which input size is bounded). This conclusion is based on a worst-case analysis,...

Mitochondrial genomes: anything goes.

Mitochondria have their own genetic system – a vestigial genome originating from an endosymbiotic a-proteobacterial ancestor. The genetic function of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is well-conserved, being involved in a maximum of five mitochondrial processes: invariantly in respiration and/or oxidative phosphorylation and translation, and also in transcription, RNA maturation and protein import. Re...

On the Nature of Scientific Progress: Anarchistic Theory Says “Anything Goes”—But I Don't Think So

Philosophy is the oldest of the disciplines that have been taught in places that we have called universities for centuries. Many of the readers of this journal have a PhD—nominally we are doctors of philosophy—even if you hadn’t especially cared or even noticed. This is, of course, a holdover of a history and tradition that dates back to the ancient Greeks and is based on the primacy of philoso...

Relative Commodity Prices , and Anything Goes

Fifty years ago T. M. Rybczynski [3] published a frequently referenced note in which he inaugurated a systematic investigation of the comparative statics associated with a change in the endowment of a factor. The questions that he posed are broad and fundamental: How do the prices and consumptions of final goods depend on factor endowments? How do factor prices and consumer wealth vary with cha...

Cognitive Distraction : Something to Think About Lessons Learned from Recent Studies June 2013