Languages with many speakers tend to be structurally simple while small communities sometimes develop languages with great structural complexity. Paradoxically, the opposite pattern appears to be observed for non-structural properties of language such as vocabulary size. These apparently opposite patterns pose a challenge for theories of language change and evolution. We use computational simul...

RDF is a general model and representing a piece of information in RDF/XML can be done in many lexical/syntactic/structural/ontological ways. Unfortunately, these different representations often cannot be automatically compared with each other and therefore retrieved, merged or reused. We cannot expect the metadata providers to follow the same schemas and this would not be prevent incomparable s...

Cryptographers agree that large-scale algorithms are an interesting new topic in the field of machine learning, and information theorists concur. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the synthesis of 802.11b, which embodies the natural principles of hardware and architecture. In order to achieve this aim, we disprove that though neural networks and linked lists can cooperate t...

Hurlbert's conceptions of pseudoreplication, such as the loss of independent replicates with repeated sampling over time and the lack of appropriate spatial interspersion of experimental units to achieve statistical independence, are really theoretical hypotheses that warrant empirical confirmation or disconfirmation. Schank and Koehnle have provided a valuable service to researchers in ecology...

Conventions are an important concept in multi-agent systems as they allow increased coordination amongst agents and hence a more efficient system. Encouraging and directing convention emergence has been the focus of much research, particularly through the use of fixed strategy agents. In this paper we apply temporary interventions using fixed strategy agents to destabilise an established conven...

Acknowledgments: The National Science Foundation and Texas Advanced Research Program provided financial support. A faculty development leave at the University of Pittsburgh provided time to write this paper. 1 The definition is from Lewis (1969) who demonstrated that it is useful to model people using sounds, gestures, or symbols to communicate things to one another as a coordination game and h...

David Lewis famously proposed to model conventions as solutions to coordination games, where equilibrium selection is driven by precedence, or the history of play. A characteristic feature of Lewis Conventions is that they are intrinsically nonnormative. Some philosophers have argued that for this reason they miss a crucial aspect of our folk notion of convention. It is doubtful however that Le...

almost all countries in the world are party to the rio conventions. this entails a number of responsibilities, including reporting periodically on aspects of environmental health and national implementation of the convention. these reports can cover hundreds of pages, so completing reports is often a significant undertaking. since countries can be party to numerous multilateral environmental ag...