Naturalism, Evolution and Culture

In my essay, I will argue that evolution does not undermine naturalism. This is because Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism rests on a false and unmotivated premise and is thus invalid. My argument consists of two parts: In the expository part, I outline Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in considerable detail (section 2). In the argumentative part, I firstly pose William Ramsey’s challenge to Plantinga’s probabilistic claim that the reliability of human cognitive faculties is low and critically examine Plantinga’s response in order to reinforce it (section 3). Secondly, I attack Plantinga’s understanding of human evolution, which motivates his cognitive skepticism, as being unduly narrow (section 4)

Water purchases to save the Murray-Darling Basin

Murray-Darling Basin communities have suffered recurring and prolonged droughts over the past decade. Now that the rains have returned, these communities see the Sustainable Diversion Limits (SDLs) planned by the Commonwealth as a new threat. Modelling with TERM-H2O assumes that since the SDL process is voluntary, Commonwealth purchases will proceed slowly over the next 12 years. This gives farmers time to utilize water saving technologies as they emerge. This is in contrast to the relatively rapid purchase of 920 GL up until September 2010 that has already occurred. These relatively rapid sales reflect hardship associated with drought. If the Commonwealth is to reach the 3500 GL target, it may need to pay over $4 billion more to farmers for water (2010 dollars). The Commonwealth’s budget constraint will limit the volume purchased. Implementing (SDLs) will raise the price of water and the asset value of water held by farmers. At the same time, the value of irrigated land will fall, partly offsetting the increase in the asset value of water. This means that some irrigators may gain more than others. Those who do best will be those whose water entitlements have a high value relative to the value of their land. Under a voluntary scheme that proceeds slowly and gives time for further water savings to occur, there will be modest job losses across the basin. These might fall to 500 jobs below forecast by the year 2026. The extent to which farmers who sell water to the Commonwealth leave the region will have a moderate influence on regional outcomes. TERM-H2O is the only model which has been calibrated by using the drought of 2006-07 to 2008-09 to estimate regional impacts. In the drought scenario, over 6,000 jobs were lost in the short term relative to forecast across the basin. Therefore, SDL impacts are much smaller than drought impacts.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Artificial boundary conditions for stationary Navier-Stokes flows past bodies in the half-plane

We discuss artificial boundary conditions for stationary Navier-Stokes flows past bodies in the half-plane, for a range of low Reynolds numbers. When truncating the half-plane to a finite domain for numerical purposes, artificial boundaries appear. We present an explicit Dirichlet condition for the velocity at these boundaries in terms of an asymptotic expansion for the solution to the problem. We show a substantial increase in accuracy of the computed values for drag and lift when compared with results for traditional boundary conditions. We also analyze the qualitative behavior of the solutions in terms of the streamlines of the flow. The new boundary conditions are universal in the sense that they depend on a given body only through one constant, which can be determined in a feed-back loop as part of the solution process

Closing the factory doors until better times: CGE modelling of drought using a theory of excess capacity

The aim of this paper is to analyse the regional economic impacts of a prolonged period of recurrent droughts. The model used for analysis is TERM-H2O, a dynamic successor to the bottom-up, comparative static TERM (The Enormous Regional Model). We concentrate on the regions of the southern Murray-Darling basin. Large change simulations are a challenge for modellers. Drought brings substantial inward supply shifts for farm sectors. This paper outlines various theoretical modifications undertaken to improve the modelling of drought in a computable general equilibrium (CGE) framework and then applies them to the period from 2005–06 on. In particular, we apply a theory of sticky capital adjustment to downstream processing sectors, whereby processors temporarily retire capital in response to scarcer farm products, limiting upward price movements in farm outputs and resulting in more realistic modelling of drought. Results are explained using a back-of-the-envelope approach. This framework allows us to estimate the economic impacts of allowing water trade. In addition, the approach provides some estimate as to the impact of prolonged drought on structural change in predominantly rural regions of south-eastern Australia.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Two-part pricing, public discriminating monopoly and redistribution : a note.

This note analyzes some properties of optional two-part pricing in a two-type economy. First, the optimal contracts along the Paretian frontier are described. Then, the duality relation between the Rawlsian program and the discriminating monopoly is demonstrated. Last, this property is used to build a mutualist mechanism implementing the constrained Pareto optima.Monopolies; Pricing; Two-part pricing;

The Impacts of Higher Energy Prices on Indonesia’s and West Java’s Economies using INDOTERM, a Multiregional Model of Indonesia

Indonesia’s national and regional/local policy makers are becoming increasingly concerned with disparities between regions. Aggregate incomes and expenditures in one region may change proportionally more than national changes. This paper contains a technical summary of the structure and special features of INDOTERM model, a member of the TERM family (TERM = The Enormous Regional Model). It treats West Java and the rest of Indonesia as separate economies. We discuss the data required to prepare a version of INDOTERM that represents all the provinces of Indonesia. Finally, we present a long-run simulation of the impacts of the recent hike in global energy prices on the Indonesian economy combined with possible depletion of Indonesia’s crude oil supplies. The special features for future development of INDOTERM are multiple household incomes and expenditures and a “top-down” extension representing sub-provincial municipalities. Nationally, Indonesia’s real income losses due to resource depletion are more than compensated by the sharp increase in the terms of trade arising from the increase in global demand for energy. West Java and the rest of Indonesia fare similarly, as a large proportion of the composite region consists of the remaining provinces of Java which have a similar economic structure to West Java. The relatively sparsely populated outer islands that are relatively rich in mineral resources are not represented separately. Using a “top-down” extension of West Java’s 25 municipalities and districts in INDOTERM, the simulation shows that Kabupaten Indramayu fares best. This local region also loses from the decline in crude oil productivity, and indeed the output loss more than outweighs the increase in natural gas production for this effect. But it gains substantially from the energy price hikes: the increase in nominal income has a substantial positive effect on the municipality, with local industries, including trade and motor repairs experiencing output increases in excess of 40%. Overall, the municipality experiences a gain in factor income of 7.3%, whereas most other regions of West Java lose income in the scenario.Computable General Equilibrium, Regional CGE, Indonesia

Asymptotics of solutions in nA+nB->C reaction Diffusion systems

We analyze the long time behavior of initial value problems that model a process where particles of type A and B diffuse in some substratum and react according to $nA+nB\to C$. The case n=1 has been studied before; it presents nontrivial behavior on the reactive scale only. In this paper we discuss in detail the cases $n>3$, and prove that they show nontrivial behavior on the reactive and the diffusive length scale.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figur

Geometric Stability Analysis for Periodic Solutions of the Swift-Hohenberg Equation

In this paper we describe invariant geometrical ~structures in the phase space of the Swift-Hohenberg equation in a neighborhood of its periodic stationary states. We show that in spite of the fact that these states are only marginally stable (i.e., the linearized problem about these states has continuous spectrum extending all the way up to zero), there exist finite dimensional invariant manifolds in the phase space of this equation which determine the long-time behavior of solutions near these stationary solutions. In particular, using this point of view, we obtain a new demonstration of Schneider's recent proof that these states are nonlinearly stable.Comment: 44 pages, plain tex, 0 figure