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Strategies for controlling invasive species can be aimed at any or all of the stages in the life cycle. In this paper we show how to combine biological data on population dynamics with simple economic data on control cost options to determine the least costly set of strategies that will halt an invasion. We then apply our methods to oyster drills (Ocinebrellus inornatus), an economically important aquaculture pest that has been accidentally introduced worldwide. If the costs of intervention were the same across life stages, extermination of adults would be an inefficient way to control species with the population dynamics characteristics of invaders. In the oyster drill case, however, efficient control targets adults because they are much easier to find.

This article examines the prominence of Web sites of major and minor parties in the United States and the United Kingdom, comparing features such as search capabilities, membership forms, information on party organization and issues, characteristics of graphics, and currency of updates as well as their relative quality and sophistication.We also look at the prominence of major and minor parties in newspapers and magazines and in various search engines and sites for political junkies. We find that minor parties have a greater presence on the Web in the United Kingdom than in the United States, but even so, the sites of major parties in both countries are more prominent and sophisticated than those of minor parties, and major parties generally receive more media coverage than minor parties, both on-line and off-line.The data suggest that the established interests dominating most of the communications, transactions, elections, and political processes of advanced industrialized countries are extending their influence to these processes in cyberspace.

Trade has become the main mode of transport for many invasive species including diseases and agricultural pests. Most species are brought to their new homes unintentionally, which constitute a market failure rooted in international trade. Unless it is practical to drive invasion risk to zero, the external costs may justify a tariff. In this paper we analyze the political process likely to govern the formation of tariffs so justified, using a straightforward incorporation of an invasive species externality into Grossman and Helpman's well-known political economy model. We show our measure of disguised protectionism-the gap between the optimal tariff and that set in the equilibrium of the political economy game-is equal to the tariff that would be set if there were no invasive species and no international disciplines on trade policy. The informational needs required to distinguish disguised protectionism from legitimate publicgoods protection are formidable.

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This article is a comparative analysis of British and American parties and candidate election campaigning on the World Wide Web during the Presidential and General Elections of 2000 and 2001, respectively. The central questions are twofold: (1) Do parties differ across the two systems in terms of how they use the Web as a campaign tool? (2) Does the Web promote a more balanced or equalized exposure for party messages than other media? A combination of interview data, content analysis of sites and analysis of online and offline media coverage of the election is used to investigate these questions. Conclusions are drawn about the similarity of Web campaigning across the two countries and about the increasing dominance of the major parties, particularly in the UK.

Micro-controllers such as Arduino are widely used by all kinds of makers worldwide. Popularity has been driven by Arduino's simplicity of use and the large number of sensors and libraries available to extend the basic capabilities of these controllers. The last decade has witnessed a surge of software engineering solutions for "the Internet of Things", but in several cases these solutions require computational resources that are more advanced than simple, resource-limited micro-controllers.Surprisingly, in spite of being the basic ingredients of complex hardware-software systems, there does not seem to be a simple and flexible way to (1) extend the basic capabilities of micro-controllers, and (2) to coordinate inter-connected micro-controllers in "the Internet of Things". Indeed, new capabilities are added on a per-application basis and interactions are mainly limited to bespoke, point-to-point protocols that target the hardware I/O rather than the services provided by this hardware.In this paper we present the Arduino Service Interface Programming (ASIP) model, a new model that addresses the issues above by (1) providing a "Service" abstraction to easily add new capabilities to micro-controllers, and (2) providing support for networked boards using a range of strategies, including socket connections, bridging devices, MQTT-based publish-subscribe messaging, discovery services, etc. We provide an open-source implementation of the code running on Arduino boards and client libraries in Java, Python, Racket and Erlang. We show how ASIP enables the rapid development of non-trivial applications (coordination of input/output on distributed boards and implementation of a line-following algorithm for a remote robot) and we assess the performance of ASIP in several ways, both quantitative and qualitative.