Public health emergencies from natural disasters, infection, and man-made threats can present ethically or legally challenging questions about who will receive scarce resources. Federal and state governments have offered little guidance on how to prioritize distribution of limited resources. Several allocation proposals have appeared in the medical literature, but components of the proposed app...

Many phenomena with power laws have been observed in various fields of the natural and social sciences, and these power laws are often interpreted as the macro behaviors of systems that consist of micro units. In this paper, we review some basic mathematical mechanisms that are known to generate power laws. In particular, we focus on stochastic processes including the Yule process and the Simon...

The debate on the existence of laws in individual and social behaviour dates back to the very beginnings of economics as a modern science. In adopting the concept of natural laws from classical mechanics, economics originally evolved as ‘social physics.’ But is it really appropriate to transfer the idea of precise and accurate laws to social life and social science? We attempt to answer this qu...

Overwash is a physical process of coastal sediment transport driven by storm events and is essential to landscape resilience in low-lying barrier environments. This work establishes a comprehensive set of scaling laws for overwash morphology: unifying quantitative descriptions with which to compare overwash features by their morphological attributes across case examples. Such scaling laws also ...

Three laws of architectural order are obtained by analogy from basic physical principles. They apply to both natural and man-made structures. These laws may be used to create buildings that match the emotional comfort and beauty of the world's great historical buildings. The laws are consistent with Classical, Byzantine, Gothic, Islamic, Eastern, and Art Nouveau architectures; but not with the ...

Physics is so successful today in understanding the nature of matter. What can it say about mind ? Is it possible to have a unified theory of matter and mind within the framework of modern science ? Is Consciousness an accident or is it a natural consequence of laws of nature ? Are these laws of nature the same as the laws of physics ? We make an attempt here to unify mind with matter based on ...

Philosophers of science will be familiar with the ‘canonical’ debate in metaphysics over the modal status of natural laws. In this debate, the Humean faction adopts a world-view in which the fundamental properties are categorical, from which it follows that natural laws are metaphysically contingent. The AntiHumeans, on the other hand, adopt an account in which the fundamental properties are es...

We describe the A (1) 1 soliton cellular automata as an evolution of a poset. This allows us to explain the conservation laws for the A (1) 1 soliton cellular automata, one given by Torii, Takahashi and Satsuma, and the other given by Fukuda, Okado and Yamada, in terms of the stack permutations of states in a very natural manner. As a biproduct, we can prove a conjectured formula relating these...

A rather natural way to address the stabilizability problem for switched systems is to make use of periodic switching laws. The success is guaranteed, provided that the discrete dynamical system associated to the periodic law is stable. In this paper we discuss a more general type of stabilizing switching laws, called near-periodic, which can be implemented when the associated discrete dynamica...