Economic Instruments and the Greenhouse Effect

The recent build-up of "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere means that there is a significant probability of global warming over the coming half-century. This prediction is subject to very great uncertainties concerning both the actual likelihood of warming, its possible magnitude, and the probable effects on the world economy. Faced with these uncertainties, the nations of the world can be expected to adopt some form of minimum-regret response. At this stage, such a response is likely to consist of two elements: an accelerated programme of scientific research, and further steps towards the negotiation of international agreements to deal with the identified problems. The 1987 Montreal Protocol on CFCs and halons has demonstrated the speed with which such agreements can be reached, and the possibility of their effective implementation, once political will is established. The 1988 Toronto conference resolution on first steps towards reducing CO2 emissions over the long run opens the way to debate and negotiation over an international policy regime to tackle Co2, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions. This paper considers four policy options which show promise in the search for a long-run solution to a perceived greenhouse threat. These should be regarded as potentially-complementary, not mutually-exclusive, elements in a total policy package. The options are: (a) a system of tradeable emission permits or entitlements, issued by an international agency and exchanged through an open international marketplace; (b) a system of detailed quantitative e mission permits enforceable in international law; (c) a system of taxes or levies targeted at emissions or at consumption of specified fuels; (d) a convention setting ambient standards to be met on a country-by-country basis, and legitimating international sanctions against offending countries

Technologies for Future High Capability Micro-Milsatcom Systems

Satellite communications systems are a vitally important component of our Defense infrastructure for both tactical and strategic missions. In particular, satellite communications (whether military or commercial) have become increasingly important to support tactical operations, as was clearly demonstrated during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. In the emerging doctrinal shift to a CONUS-based force structure with capabilities for rapidly responsive lethal power projection to meet global crises, the vital necessity for SATCOM to provide an omnipresent communications infrastructure for immediate support of the developing theater will become a key element in the successful realization of our new warfighting strategy. This infrastructure must provide RF bandwidth on demand and access to ATM switches and B-ISDN or SONET services as required from any worldwide location for any type of terminal. DARPA is developing the enabling technologies to give future systems the ability to realize their potential for becoming more affordable, more capable and more accessible by a theater commander. Advanced technologies are facilitating microminiaturization of key subsystems for communications satellite payloads, their host satellite buses, terminals and interfaces with terrestrial systems. These technologies can enhance the capability density of large spacecraft, as well as facilitate small, highly capable space and terrestrial assets, which can be labeled microMILSATCOM systems

An almost sure limit theorem for super-Brownian motion

We establish an almost sure scaling limit theorem for super-Brownian motion on $\mathbb{R}^d$ associated with the semi-linear equation $u_t = {1/2}\Delta u +\beta u-\alpha u^2$, where $\alpha$ and $\beta$ are positive constants. In this case, the spectral theoretical assumptions that required in Chen et al (2008) are not satisfied. An example is given to show that the main results also hold for some sub-domains in $\mathbb{R}^d$.Comment: 14 page

Rumen ecology research planning. Proceedings of a workshop

This workshop was conducted to identify and prioritise areas of rumen ecology which are promising for their potential impact on improving nutrition status of tropical ruminants, to develop a rumen ecology research programme for ILRI based on relevance to developing countries and ILRI's comparative advantage vis-a-vis other institutions, to identify potential collaborators in advanced research institutes, and to define model(s) of collaboration. Major topics of discussion include - potential application of rumen ecology manipulation to animal nutrition in developing countries, state of art in manipulation of the rumen microbial ecosystem, and state of art in bioengineering of rumen microorganisms

Spin-orbit final state interaction in the framework of Glauber theory for (e,e'p) reactions

We investigate the reactions D(e,e'p)n and D(\vec e,e'p)n at GeV energies and discuss the opportunities to distinguish between different models for the nuclear ground state by measuring the response functions. In calculating the final-state interaction (FSI) we employ Glauber theory, and we also include relativistic effects in the electromagnetic current. We include not only the central FSI, but also the spin-orbit FSI which is usually neglected in (e,e'p) calculations within the Glauber framework and we show that this contribution plays a crucial role for the fifth response function. All of the methods developed here can be applied to any target nucleus.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures, minor change in figures 3 and 4 (changed beam energy), correction of error in figure 4 in the previous replacemen

New QCD Sum Rules for Nucleons in Nuclear Matter

Two new QCD sum rules for nucleons in nuclear matter are obtained from a mixed correlator of spin-1/2 and spin-3/2 interpolating fields. These new sum rules, which are insensitive to the poorly known four-quark condensates, provide additional information on the nucleon scalar self-energy. These new sum rules are analyzed along with previous spin-1/2 interpolator-based sum rules which are also insensitive to the poorly known four-quark condensates. The analysis indicates consistency with the expectations of relativistic nuclear phenomenology at nuclear matter saturation density. However, a weaker density dependence near saturation is suggested. Using previous estimates of in-medium condensate uncertainties, we find $M^* = 0.64^{+0.13}_{-0.09}$ GeV and $\Sigma_v = 0.29^{+0.06}_{-0.10}$ GeV at nuclear matter saturation density.Comment: 10 page RevTeX Manuscript with embedded figures. Revised manuscript accepted for publication. This and related papers may also be obtained from http://www.phys.washington.edu/~derek/Publications.htm

Immorality and Irrationality

Does immorality necessarily involve irrationality? The question is often taken to be among the deepest in moral philosophy. But apparently deep questions sometimes admit of deflationary answers. In this case we can make way for a deflationary answer by appealing to dualism about rationality, according to which there are two fundamentally distinct notions of rationality: structural rationality and substantive rationality. I have defended dualism elsewhere. Here, I’ll argue that it allows us to embrace a sensible – I will not say boring – moderate view about the relationship between immorality and irrationality: roughly, that immorality involves substantive irrationality, but not structural irrationality. I defend this moderate view, and argue that many of the arguments for less moderate views turn either on missing the distinction between substantive and structural rationality, or on misconstruing it

Compression and intelligence: social environments and communication

Compression has been advocated as one of the principles which pervades inductive inference and prediction - and, from there, it has also been recurrent in definitions and tests of intelligence. However, this connection is less explicit in new approaches to intelligence. In this paper, we advocate that the notion of compression can appear again in definitions and tests of intelligence through the concepts of `mind-reading¿ and `communication¿ in the context of multi-agent systems and social environments. Our main position is that two-part Minimum Message Length (MML) compression is not only more natural and effective for agents with limited resources, but it is also much more appropriate for agents in (co-operative) social environments than one-part compression schemes - particularly those using a posterior-weighted mixture of all available models following Solomonoff¿s theory of prediction. We think that the realisation of these differences is important to avoid a naive view of `intelligence as compression¿ in favour of a better understanding of how, why and where (one-part or two-part, lossless or lossy) compression is needed.We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and we thank Kurt Kleiner for some challenging and ultimately very helpful questions in the broad area of this work. We also acknowledge the funding from the Spanish MEC and MICINN for projects TIN2009-06078-E/TIN, Consolider-Ingenio CSD2007-00022 and TIN2010-21062-C02, and Generalitat Valenciana for Prometeo/2008/051.Dowe, DL.; Hernández Orallo, J.; Das, PK. (2011). Compression and intelligence: social environments and communication. En Artificial General Intelligence. Springer Verlag (Germany). 6830:204-211. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22887-2_21S2042116830Chaitin, G.J.: Godel’s theorem and information. International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21(12), 941–954 (1982)Dowe, D.L.: Foreword re C. S. Wallace. Computer Journal 51(5), 523–560 (2008); Christopher Stewart WALLACE (1933-2004) memorial special issueDowe, D.L.: Minimum Message Length and statistically consistent invariant (objective?) Bayesian probabilistic inference - from (medical) “evidence”. Social Epistemology 22(4), 433–460 (2008)Dowe, D.L.: MML, hybrid Bayesian network graphical models, statistical consistency, invariance and uniqueness. In: Bandyopadhyay, P.S., Forster, M.R. (eds.) Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Philosophy of Statistics, vol. 7, pp. 901–982. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2011)Dowe, D.L., Hajek, A.R.: A computational extension to the Turing Test. Technical Report #97/322, Dept Computer Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, 9 pp (1997)Dowe, D.L., Hajek, A.R.: A non-behavioural, computational extension to the Turing Test. In: Intl. Conf. on Computational Intelligence & multimedia applications (ICCIMA 1998), Gippsland, Australia, pp. 101–106 (February 1998)Hernández-Orallo, J.: Beyond the Turing Test. J. Logic, Language & Information 9(4), 447–466 (2000)Hernández-Orallo, J.: Constructive reinforcement learning. International Journal of Intelligent Systems 15(3), 241–264 (2000)Hernández-Orallo, J.: On the computational measurement of intelligence factors. In: Meystel, A. (ed.) Performance metrics for intelligent systems workshop, pp. 1–8. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, U.S.A (2000)Hernández-Orallo, J., Dowe, D.L.: Measuring universal intelligence: Towards an anytime intelligence test. Artificial Intelligence 174(18), 1508–1539 (2010)Hernández-Orallo, J., Minaya-Collado, N.: A formal definition of intelligence based on an intensional variant of Kolmogorov complexity. In: Proc. Intl Symposium of Engineering of Intelligent Systems (EIS 1998), pp. 146–163. ICSC Press (1998)Legg, S., Hutter, M.: Universal intelligence: A definition of machine intelligence. Minds and Machines 17(4), 391–444 (2007)Lewis, D.K., Shelby-Richardson, J.: Scriven on human unpredictability. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 17(5), 69–74 (1966)Oppy, G., Dowe, D.L.: The Turing Test. In: Zalta, E.N. (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford (2011), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/Salomon, D., Motta, G., Bryant, D.C.O.N.: Handbook of data compression. Springer-Verlag New York Inc., Heidelberg (2009)Sanghi, P., Dowe, D.L.: A computer program capable of passing I.Q. tests. In: 4th International Conference on Cognitive Science (and 7th Australasian Society for Cognitive Science Conference), vol. 2, pp. 570–575. Univ. of NSW, Sydney, Australia (July 2003)Sayood, K.: Introduction to data compression. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2006)Scriven, M.: An essential unpredictability in human behavior. In: Wolman, B.B., Nagel, E. (eds.) Scientific Psychology: Principles and Approaches, pp. 411–425. Basic Books (Perseus Books), New York (1965)Searle, J.R.: Minds, brains and programs. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 3, 417–457 (1980)Solomonoff, R.J.: A formal theory of inductive inference. Part I. Information and control 7(1), 1–22 (1964)Sutton, R.S.: Generalization in reinforcement learning: Successful examples using sparse coarse coding. Advances in neural information processing systems, 1038–1044 (1996)Sutton, R.S., Barto, A.G.: Reinforcement learning: An introduction. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1998)Turing, A.M.: Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59, 433–460 (1950)Veness, J., Ng, K.S., Hutter, M., Silver, D.: A Monte Carlo AIXI Approximation. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, JAIR 40, 95–142 (2011)Wallace, C.S.: Statistical and Inductive Inference by Minimum Message Length. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Wallace, C.S., Boulton, D.M.: An information measure for classification. Computer Journal 11(2), 185–194 (1968)Wallace, C.S., Dowe, D.L.: Intrinsic classification by MML - the Snob program. In: Proc. 7th Australian Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 37–44. World Scientific, Singapore (November 1994)Wallace, C.S., Dowe, D.L.: Minimum message length and Kolmogorov complexity. Computer Journal 42(4), 270–283 (1999); Special issue on Kolmogorov complexityWallace, C.S., Dowe, D.L.: MML clustering of multi-state, Poisson, von Mises circular and Gaussian distributions. Statistics and Computing 10, 73–83 (2000

Trends in cyclones in the high-latitude North Atlantic during 1979-2016

We report an increase in winter (DJF) cyclone densities in the areas around Svalbard and in northwestern Barents Sea and a decrease in cyclone densities in southeastern Barents Sea during 1979-2016. Despite high interannual variability, the trends are significant at the 90% confidence level. The changes appear as a result of a shift into a more meridional winter storm track in the high-latitude North Atlantic, associated with a positive trend in the Scandinavian Pattern. A significant decrease in the Brunt-Vaisala frequency east of Svalbard and a significant increase in the Eady Growth Rate north of Svalbard indicate increased baroclinicity, favouring enhanced cyclone activity in these regions. For the first time, we apply composite analysis to explicitly address regional consequences of these wintertime changes in the high-latitude North Atlantic. We find a tendency toward a warmer and more moist atmospheric state in the Barents Sea and over Svalbard with increased cyclone activity around Svalbard.Peer reviewe

Diverse consequences of algorithmic probability

We reminisce and discuss applications of algorithmic probability to a wide range of problems in artificial intelligence, philosophy and technological society. We propose that Solomonoff has effectively axiomatized the field of artificial intelligence, therefore establishing it as a rigorous scientific discipline. We also relate to our own work in incremental machine learning and philosophy of complexity. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg