ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my sincere and deepest appreciation to my advisor, Dr. Donal F. Day for his advice, motivation and support as well as his encouragement and understanding throughout this work. who are my best friends in my life. Finally, I would like to dedicate this work to my wife, Kyung-Ran, our daughter, Lauren, my parents, and my families. A special thanks is exte...

It’s perhaps something of a surprise that almost none of the so-called New Atheists has anything to say about arguments for God’s existence. Instead, they do tend to focus on the social effects of religion and question whether religious belief is good for society. One might justifiably doubt that the social impact of an idea for good or ill is an adequate measure of its truth, especially when t...

Abstract. The paradox of pesticides was observed experimentally, which says that pesticides may dramatically increase the population of a pest when the pest has a natural predator. Here we use a mathematical model to study the paradox. We find that the timing for the application of pesticides is crucial for the resurgence or non-resurgence of the pests. In particular, regularly applying pestici...

To the Editor: Over the past 10 years in North America and western Europe, a resurgence of bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) has occurred (1). Although the basis for this resurgence is unclear, large bedbug infestations have been attributed to increased worldwide travel, altered insecticide management, and increased resistance to pesticides (2). Marginalized populations in large urban centers appear ...

The independence problems for functionalism stem from the worry that functional properties that are defined in terms of their causes and effects are not sufficiently independent of those purported causes and effects. I distinguish three different ways the independence problems can be filled out—in terms of necessary connections, conceptual connections and vacuous explanations. I argue that none...

A recent wave of economic research has studied the transformation of China from a poor country in the 1970s to a middle-income economy today. Based on this literature, we discuss the factors driving China’s development process. We provide a historical account of China’s rise, fall, and resurgence.We then discuss the stylized facts associated with China’s growth process and review a comprehensiv...