The Role of Lactose Tolerance in Pre-Colonial Development

This paper establishes a link between natural selection since the Neolithic Revolution and economic conditions in the pre-colonial era. The ability to digest milk, or to be lactose tolerant, is conferred by a gene variant, which is unequally distributed across the Old World. Digesting milk conferred qualitative and quantitative advantages to early farmers's diets, which ultimately, led to differences in the carrying capacities of respective countries. It is shown through a number of specifications that country level variation in the frequency of the ability to consume milk is positively and significantly related to population densities in 1500 CE; specifically, a one standard deviation in- crease in the frequency of lactose tolerant individuals (24% points) is associated with roughly a 60% increase in pre-colonial population densities. This relationship remains while controlling for agricultural transition dates, other measures of genetic distance, and a wide array of environmental controls. Additionally, the basis for the relation- ship between dairying and population density is confirmed with the use of instrumental variables estimation.

The Demand for Lottery Products

Lotteries constitute one of the fastest-growing categories of consumer expenditure in the United States. Not only have an increasing number of states legalized state lotteries, but the per capita expenditures on lotteries in lottery states have increased at an annual rate of 13 percent after inflation between 1975 and 1988. This article examines the demand for lottery products. A majority of the adult public in lottery states play in any one year, but relatively few of these players account for most of the action". Socioeconomic patterns of play, measured from both sales data and household surveys, offer some surprises -- for example, that the Engle curve of lottery expenditures decline with income. There is some evidence that lottery sales increase with the payout rate, although it is not clear that it would be profitable for the states to increase payout rates. The addition of a new game, such as lotto, does not undercut sales of existing games, and the oft-heard claim that interest (and sales) will "inevitably" decline is contradicted by the data. The organizational form of the lottery is evolving in response to the quest for higher revenues: in particular, smaller states are forming multistate game. This article is a chapter from Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America, an NBER monograph to be published by Harvard University Press in November, 1989.

A Web-Integrated Environment for Component-Based Software Reasoning

This thesis presents the Web IDE, a web-integrated environment for component-based software reasoning. The Web IDE is specifically tailored to emphasize the relationships among various components in component-based software engineering (CBSE) and to facilitate reasoning. It allows students to use RESOLVE, a component-based, integrated specification and programming language, to build components and systems, providing real-time feedback that can be used to reason about the correctness of their component implementations. Real-time interaction and relationship focused component presentation reinforces CBSE and reasoning principles in a way not possible with traditional programming exercises and file management systems. The Web IDE has gone through several stages of development, getting feedback from users and adding new functionality at each step. It has kept pace with web browser development by incorporating bowser features, such as the file API and local storage, to provide enhanced functionality to users. Several undergraduate software engineering courses at Clemson and elsewhere have successfully used the Web IDE for both reasoning and team-based component development exercises, demonstrating the robust and useful nature of the Web IDE

WHAT IS "THE BASIS," HOW IS IT MEASURED, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Basis behavior is generally considered to be the major determinant of hedging success or failure. In the course of our work as contract designers for Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc., we have come to the conclusion that there are many misconceptions and incorrect statements made about "the basis" among practitioners and academics alike. Our work suggests that basis values, how they are measured, what they represent and how they are interpreted may differ widely from one commodity contract to another due to differences in the specifications of the underlying futures market, as well as differences in the structure of the underlying cash market.Marketing,

Robert Frost, American symbolist: an interpretive study.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityThe aim of the present study is to discuss the sense in which Frost may be termed a symbolist and to demonstrate the validity of the symbolic approach in the interpretation of individual poems and of the poetry as a whole. Frost's artistic premises show that he advocates art for wisdom's sake, not (like most "Symbolistes") art for art's sake. He is a symbolist in the Emersonian or American tradition. In Frost's earliest works, the two dominant symbolic themes are the "withdrawal" and "sic transit" motifs. The dominant symbols are the dark wood (complicated and dynamic in implication) and miscellaneous emblems of mortal decay. North of Boston seems a conscious reaction from the subjectivity of the earliest works toward a gregarious opposite. The introductory poem, "Mending Wall," introduces the symbolic wallmotif which dominates the collection. Mountain Interval and New Hampshire provide the first prominent manifestations of the poet's artistic maturity, but the culmination toward which the early books have been tending seems to arrive in West-Running Brook. Frost utilizes his "constant" symbols to emphasize man's sense of weakness in an inimical universe. The human response to this condition is treated symbolically in the poem "West-Running Brook." The black stream, symbolizing the universal course of mortal decay, is met by a strange resistance in itself, a resistance which kicks up a white wave in the contrary direction. [TRUNCATED

The Hornblende-Aegirine Augite Reaction Relationships of the Trunk Lake Granite, Maine

Textural relationships indicate that the structure of aegirine augite controlled the secondary formation of hornblende in the Tunk Lake granite. In the marginal rocks of the granite body some grains of aegirine augite may be partially or completely enclosed by hornblende. Hornblende also replaces aegirine augite along fractures. Extensive replacement results in grains which have small cores of aegirine augite surrounded by hornblende. Cleavage patterns and optical orientations of the two minerals indicate that their c axes are parallel. Pyroxene can be transformed to hornblende by a minor shift in orientation of its basic tetrahedral structure. Chemical changes necessary in the transformation are the addition of water, a slight decrease in sodium and the substitution of some aluminum for silicon. The transformation of aegirine augite to hornblende was caused by an increase in magma water vapor pressure and a decrease in temperature

German recognition and criticism of Shakespeare from the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth century

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1945. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

The Inns of Court in London

It is a generally known fact that most of our American law was adopted from the English Common Law. Therefore, it should be interesting to learn how the English lawyers are educated. The Inns of Court: Lincoln\u27s Inn, Gray\u27s Inn, Inner Temple, and Middle Temple are the four principal Inns which gave rise to the English law schools

Investigating the role of genetic variation in long run economic outcomes

This dissertation empirically tests whether adaptations resulting from the Neolithic Revolution, or the widespread adoption of sedentary agriculture for sustenance, have led to economic differences. The development of sedentary agriculture constituted an environmen- tal shift from the previous sustenance method of hunting and gathering. This environmental shift resulted in the natural selection of certain traits. I seek to exploit differences in these traits to measure differing economic outcomes. Two main adaptations are considered in this work: the ability to consume milk, or lactose tolerance, and resistance to infectious Eurasian diseases, which is the result of genetic variation. The first essay establishes a link between lactose tolerance and economic conditions in the pre-colonial era. The ability to digest milk, or to be lactose tolerant, is conferred by a gene variant, which is unequally distributed across the Old World. Digesting milk con- ferred qualitative and quantitative advantages to early farmers’s diets, which ultimately, led to differences in the carrying capacities of respective countries. The second essay inves- tigates the role of genetic differences in resistance to infectious diseases on contemporary health outcomes. The Neolithic Revolution led to the initiation and sustainability of new infectious diseases. The differential timing of the Neolithic Revolution created differences in exposure to these infectious pathogens. Ultimately, this led to differential selection of genetic resistance, in which diversity within a key component of the immune system, the major histocompatibility complex, was favorable. We evaluate this advantage through the construction of a common measure of genetic diversity that is constructed solely from gene variants within the major histocompatibility complex, known as the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) system in humans. The final essay explores the complementarity between potatoes and milk in explaining the large population growth experienced throughout the Old World in the 18th and 19th centuries