Many important software systems are written in the C programming language. Unfortunately, the C language does not provide strong safety guarantees, and many common programming mistakes introduce type errors that are not caught by the compiler. These errors only manifest themselves at run time through unexpected program behavior, and it is often hard to isolate and identify their causes. This pa...

Hobbes to Rousseau: Inequality, Institutions, and Development This paper studies the endogenous evolution of economic and political institutions and the interdependencies with the process of economic development. Favorable economic institutions in form of a social contract that ensures a state of law and the absence of societal conflict are not assumed exogenously under certain political system...

In this essay I argue that one can understand the relationship between those who rule and those who are ruled in civil society as an implicit contractual relationship or contract by convention. I use variations of the extensive form Trust Game to summarize the structures of alternative forms of contracts, and apply these variations to model the relationship between the rulers and those under th...

S cholars generally reference Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan for theories in international politics. Specifically, scholars subscribe to the concept of international anarchy and the pursuit of survival to explain state behavior. Since Hobbes lived through the English Civil War (1642-1651), his observations arguably could be a reflection of insurgency warfare rather than interstate conflict. In fact,...

Web-based problem solving environments provide sharing, execution and monitoring of scientific workflows. Where they depend on general purpose workflow development systems, the workflow notations are likely far too powerful and complex, especially in the area of biology, where programming skills are rare. On the other hand, application specific workflow systems may use special purpose languages...

In an earlier study that identified previously unrecognized writings of the young 15 Thomas Hobbes, questions were raised about the authorship of some of Francis Bacon's published works. This article reports a follow-up study in which two independent statistical analyses of Bacon's English works both conclude that, whereas Bacon's autographic writings show clearly that they are authored by the ...