Liberal equality : political not erinaceous

Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs defends liberal political morality on the basis of a rich account of dignity as constitutive of living well. This article raises the Rawlsian concern that making political morality dependent on ethics threatens citizens’ political autonomy. Thereafter, it addresses whether the abandonment of (erinaceous) ethical foundations signals the demise of Dworkin’s liberalism and explores the possibility of laundering his conception so as to facilitate a marriage between the political philosophies of Rawls and Dworkin. The article finishes by rebutting some objections Dworkin raises against Rawls’s account of public reason

Episodic mass ejections from common-envelope objects

After the initial fast spiral-in phase experienced by a common-envelope binary, the system may enter a slow, self-regulated phase, possibly lasting 100s of years, in which all the energy released by orbital decay can be efficiently transported to the surface, where it is radiated away. If the remaining envelope is to be removed during this phase, this removal must occur through some as-yet-undetermined mechanism. We carried out 1-d hydrodynamic simulations of a low-mass red giant undergoing a synthetic common-envelope event in such a slow spiral-in phase, using the stellar evolutionary code MESA. We simulated the heating of the envelope due to frictional dissipation from a binary companion's orbit in multiple configurations and investigated the response of the giant's envelope. We find that our model envelopes become dynamically unstable and develop large-amplitude pulsations, with periods in the range 3-20 years and very short growth time-scales of similar order. The shocks and associated rebounds that emerge as these pulsations grow are in some cases strong enough to dynamically eject shells of matter of up to 0.1 $\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$, $\sim 10$ % of the mass of the envelope, from the stellar surface at above escape velocity. These ejections are seen to repeat within a few decades, leading to a time-averaged mass-loss rate of order $10^{-3}$ $\mathrm{M}_{\odot} \: \mathrm{yr}^{-1}$ which is sufficiently high to represent a candidate mechanism for removing the entire envelope over the duration of the slow spiral-in phase.Comment: 24 pages, 15 figures. This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, published by Oxford University Pres

Debt, Investment, and Product Market Competition

Recent empirical literature on the interaction between capital structure, investment, and product market decisions suggests that debt leads to lower investment expenditures and weaker product market competition. Theoretical literature in this area has been unable to fully explain this finding (perhaps because all theoretical papers look only at two of the above decisions). This paper develops a model which examines all three decisions and shows that debt and investment can be substitutes in a model where firms rationally take on debt. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that when firms compete with prices in the product market, an increase in debt leads to lower investment and higher prices

A grammar-based technique for genetic search and optimization

The genetic algorithm (GA) is a robust search technique which has been theoretically and empirically proven to provide efficient search for a variety of problems. Due largely to the semantic and expressive limitations of adopting a bitstring representation, however, the traditional GA has not found wide acceptance in the Artificial Intelligence community. In addition, binary chromosones can unevenly weight genetic search, reduce the effectiveness of recombination operators, make it difficult to solve problems whose solution schemata are of high order and defining length, and hinder new schema discovery in cases where chromosome-wide changes are required.;The research presented in this dissertation describes a grammar-based approach to genetic algorithms. Under this new paradigm, all members of the population are strings produced by a problem-specific grammar. Since any structure which can be expressed in Backus-Naur Form can thus be manipulated by genetic operators, a grammar-based GA strategy provides a consistent methodology for handling any population structure expressible in terms of a context-free grammar.;In order to lend theoretical support to the development of the syntactic GA, the concept of a trace schema--a similarity template for matching the derivation traces of grammar-defined rules--was introduced. An analysis of the manner in which a grammar-based GA operates yielded a Trace Schema Theorem for rule processing, which states that above-average trace schemata containing relatively few non-terminal productions are sampled with increasing frequency by syntactic genetic search. Schemata thus serve as the building blocks in the construction of the complex rule structures manipulated by syntactic GAs.;As part of the research presented in this dissertation, the GEnetic Rule Discovery System (GERDS) implementation of the grammar-based GA was developed. A comparison between the performance of GERDS and the traditional GA showed that the class of problems solvable by a syntactic GA is a superset of the class solvable by its binary counterpart, and that the added expressiveness greatly facilitates the representation of GA problems. to strengthen that conclusion, several experiments encompassing diverse domains were performed with favorable results

The political economy of neighborhood change and public housing (re)development in Austin, Texas

textThe aim of this thesis is to explore the evolving relationship between neighborhood change and public housing in the historically black neighborhood of Rosewood in Austin, Texas. In October 2010, the Housing Authority of the City of Austin was awarded a grant to begin the process of redeveloping one of the nation’s oldest federally funded public housing facilities – Rosewood Courts. As the once segregated public housing complex is slated for redevelopment, community members representing an assortment of interests have engaged in a series of heated exchanges and elevated discourse surrounding the legacy of public housing in Austin, Texas. At the same time, the Rosewood Neighborhood has witnessed a dramatic transformation in recent decades, losing much of its long-standing black community to an ever emergent gentrifying population. This research evaluates the relationship between neighborhood change and public housing (re)development, highlighting the position of Rosewood Courts within larger processes of policy and political economy transformation.Community and Regional Plannin

Arc of the Absent Author: Thomas Pynchon's Trajectory from Entropy to Grace

266 p.In the simplest of terms this dissertation draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to study Thomas Pynchon¿s novel Againts the Day, to do so involves study of the US literary field, the history of positions that Pynchon has occupied, and the resultant trajectory that can be derived from that. This method analyzes the sociogenesis of the author¿s habitus and thus the practice that produces the literary product being studied

Is the free market acceptable to everyone?

In this paper we take issue with two central claims that John Tomasi makes in Free Market Fairness (2012). The first claim is that Rawls’s difference principle can better be realized by free market institutions than it can be by state interventionist regimes such as property-owning democracy or liberal socialism. We argue that Tomasi’s narrow interpretation of the difference principle, which focuses largely on wealth and income, leaves other goods (such as control of the workplace and access to economic assets) worryingly unsatisfied. The second claim is that a wide set of economic liberties ought to be protected because they realize responsible ‘self-authorship.’ We argue that this claim also fails because, crucially, whether economic liberties serve individuals in pursuing their ambitions will depend on the nature of those ambitions and how the use of those liberties by others would affect their pursuit of them. If an expansion of liberty is good for us in some ways, but bad in others, we need to assess whether, all things considered, we would be better off with or without such expanded economic rights. We argue that the expansion Tomasi proposes is likely to fail this test

Major League Baseball Player Contracts: An Investigation of the Empirical Properties of Real Options

We study contracts negotiated between professional baseball players and teams to investigate the use of real options in a commercial setting. Baseball contracts feature options in diverse forms, and we find that these options have significant effects on player compensation. As predicted by theory, players receive higher guaranteed compensation when they allow teams to take options on their future services, and lower salaries when they bargain for options to extend their own contracts. The apparent value of options decreases as a function of the "spread" between option exercise price and annual salary and increases as a function of the time until exercise. Implied volatility of the options lies within the range found for other assets

What is the point of religious education?

Some liberal societies continue to require their schools to offer non-directive, but specifically religious education as part of the curriculum. This paper challenges that practice. It does so by articulating and defending a moral principle, which asserts that education policy must be regulated by principles that are acceptable to reasonable people. Thereafter, we argue that the leading arguments for prioritizing the study of religion in schools—arguments that claim that religion is special or that assert that the majority or parents are morally permitted to prioritise religion in schooling—are incompatible with the acceptability requirement