Previous work investigating the performance of genetic algorithms (GAs) has attempted to develop a set of fitness landscapes, called “Royal Roads” functions, which should be ideally suited for search with GAs. Surprisingly, many studies have shown that genetic algorithms actually perform worse than random mutation hill-climbing on these landscapes, and several different explanations have been o...

Physician-written "do not resuscitate" DNR orders elicit negative reactions from stakeholders that may decrease appropriate end-of-life care. The semantic significance of the phrase has led to a proposed replacement of DNR with "allow natural death" (AND). Prior to this investigation, no scientific papers address the impact of such a change. Our results support this proposition due to increased...

In the comment [1], Zanardi and Rasetti argue that several claims in our recent letter [2] are questionable. Here we show these claims remain true. Our points are that (i) the Hamiltonian (1) in Ref. [2] describes amplitude damping as well as phase damping; (ii) the free-Hamiltonian-elimination (FHE) has feasible implementation in practice and there exists a simple FHE procedure which is design...

KINSELLA AND TINSLEY (2004) IS beautifully written, infused with keen insights, in some ways solidly predicated upon libertarianism and praxeology, and yet, and yet, much as I enthusiastically agree with goodly portions of it and am even inspired by them, I cannot see my way clear to accepting all of their insights. The present paper is devoted to a critique of those parts of the paper with whi...

Taxation and Internal Migration: Evidence from the Swiss Census Using Community-Level Variation in Income Tax Rates We investigate the relationship between income tax rate variation and internal migration for the unique case of Switzerland, whose system of determining tax rates primarily at the community level results in enough variation to permit analysis of their influence on migration. Speci...

California’s failure in restructuring its electricity market has been interpreted to mean that “deregulation will not work.” A number of studies have pointed to flaws in the California experience that -if corrected -should allow restructuring to be successful. This study compares the California experience with the actual, successful experience of several other states/countries to identify what ...

This essay is concerned with concentrations of entities, which play an important— albeit often overlooked—role in scientific explanation. First, I discuss an example from molecular biology to show that concentrations can play an irreducible causal role. Second, I provide a preliminary philosophical analysis of this causal role, suggesting some implications for extant theories of causation. I co...

Research is often conducted in agricultural education with the purpose of explaining and/or predicting phenomena. This research is frequently labeled associational, relational, correlational, a m facto or causal-comparative depending primarily upon which author one studied when learning about research. The purpose of explaining is most often addressed by what is known as the correlation questio...

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the probability of causation, that is, the probability that one event was the real cause of another, in a given scenario. Starting from structural-semantical deenitions of the probabilities of necessary or suucient causation (or both), we show how to bound these quantities from data obtained in experimental and observational studies, under general...

Introduction A recent innovation in support of the final segment of the immunization supply chain is licensing certain vaccines for use in a controlled temperature chain (CTC), which allows excursions into ambient temperatures up to 40°C for a specific number of days immediately prior to administration. However, limited evidence exists on CTC economics to inform investments for labeling other e...