In the past few years sustainability and sustainable development have become important concepts widespread over the world. There is no agreement on a common definition of sustainability, but there is a general need to measure and assess sustainability in different geographical and spatial...

Causal inference in the empirical sciences is based on counterfactuals. This paper presents the counterfactual account of causation in terms of Lewis's possible-world semantics, and reformulates the statistical potential outcome framework and its underlying assumptions using counterfactual...

The current peer review system suffers from two key problems: promotion of an in-crowd whose methods, opinions and innovations it protects; and failure to represent the opinions and interests of non-peer clients. As a result, whole disciplines orient themselves toward navel-gazing research...

Causal inference in the empirical sciences is based on counterfactuals. This paper presents the counterfactual account of causation in terms of Lewis's possible-world semantics, and reformulates the statistical potential outcome framework and its underlying assumptions using counterfactual...

A classic paper of Borwein/Lewis (1991) studies optimisation problems over L^p_+ with finitely many linear equality constraints, given by scalar products with functions from L^q. One key result shows that if some x in L^p_+ satisfies the constraints and if the constraint functions are...

Many political scientists and economists have addressed the implications of the public sector's sheltered status on their unions' wage strategies vis-à-vis the government. Since the public sector is a monopoly provider of necessary and price inelastic services, conventional wisdom suggests that...

This chapter provides an overview of heuristics, shortcuts that reduce the search necessary to find a solution to a problem. It notes that initially, studies of heuristics dealt almost exclusively with cognitive processes, but they have come to incorporate emotional factors as well. Heuristics...

"The United States of America is not a Democracy." So says Gordon Phillips, founder of “Inform America” and National Representative for the Save-A-Patriot Fellowship. Mr. Phillips statement, whether true or false, typifies the frustration of many Americans during tax season. It further...