Bankruptcy problems with two references: an impartial compromise

We model bankruptcy problems under uncertainty under the assumption that there are several possible states of nature, each of which is identified with a different bankruptcy problem. For this multi-dimensional extension of classic bankruptcy problems, we consider situations in which agents exhibit at the same time additive preferences and leximin preferences on their possible results. We propose division rules which combine different rationality principles and guarantee efficiency with respect to leximin preferences.

We consider the minimum spanning tree (MST) problem under the restriction that for every vertex v, the edges of the tree that are adjacent to v satisfy a given family of constraints. A famous example thereof is the classical degree-bounded MST problem, where for every vertex v, a simple upper bound on the degree is imposed. Iterative rounding/relaxation algorithms became the tool of choice for degree-constrained network design problems. A cornerstone for this development was the work of Singh and Lau [19], who showed that for the degree-bounded MST problem, one can find a spanning tree violating each degree bound by at most one unit and with cost at most the cost of an optimal solution that respects the degree bounds. However, current iterative rounding approaches face several limits when dealing with more general degree constraints, where several linear constraints are imposed on the edges adjacent to a vertex v. For example, when a partition of the edges adjacent to v is given and only a fixed number of elements can be chosen out of each set of the partition, current approaches might violate each of the constraints at v by a constant, instead of violating the whole family of constraints at v by at most a constant number of edges. Furthermore, previous iterative rounding approaches are not suited for degree constraints where some edges are in a super-constant number of constraints. We extend iterative rounding/relaxation approaches, both conceptually as well as in their analysis, to address these limitations. Based on these extensions, we present an algorithm for the degree-constrained MST problem where for every vertex v, the edges adjacent to v have to be independent in a given matroid. The algorithm returns a spanning tree of cost at most OPT, such that for every vertex v, it suffices to remove at most 8 edges from the spanning tree to satisfy the matroidal degree constraint at v.

The problem of estimating an unknown complex signal from its magnitude-only measurements is a classical problem known as phase retrieval. This problem arises naturally because in some applications, it is difficult or costly to measure the phase of the measurements. In this paper, we propose a new convex formulation, referred to as PhaseEqual, for solving the phase retrieval problem. Similar to PhaseMax T. Goldstein and C. Studer, 2018 by Goldstein and Studer (IEE TIT, 2018), PhaseEqual works in the natural signal space and thus is computationally efficient. We then extend PhaseEqual to the sparse signal case, with the proposed convex formulation termed as compressed PhaseEqual. Different from existing convex compressed phase retrieval methods, the proposed compressed PhaseEqual formulation does not involve any regularization parameter and thus is free of the parameter tuning issue which is always tricky in practice. Order-wise recovery conditions for PhaseEqual and its sparse version (i.e. compressed PhaseEqual) are analyzed. Our theoretical results show that PhaseEqual (resp. compressed PhaseEqual) achieves perfect recovery with O(n) (resp. O(klognk )) magnitude measurements, provided that a wellcorrelated reference vector is available, where k and n denote the number of nonzero entries in the complex sparse signal and the dimension of the signal, respectively. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

This cross-disciplinary text is designed to appeal to a diversity of social science scholars. The central focus is on new ways of viewing the career, or how working lives unfold over time. Fresh views from psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, organization theory, economics, and political science are among those represented in the twenty-five chapter anthology. The design of the handbook in three parts - current approaches, new ideas, and future directions - is intended to engage the reader in the debate from which new and better career theories can be developed.

The question of the gendered dimension of migrations is a topic that for some decades has involved a growing number of scholars – both historians and social scientists – in a sense, it is a theme that shows the gulf between the current approaches and the historiographical landscape where the (albeit innovative) History of Women edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot was conceived, written and published. Out of the five-volume work, only the one on the 19th century, edited by Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot themselves, included a specific section on migrations and travels (written by Perrot). Since then, growing numbers of studies have focused on female mobility and migrations and their features compared to male ones in the twentieth century and today as well as in medieval and modern times. The problematic presence of massive migration flows in today’s world has indeed prompted the interest in the mobility and migrations of the past. In this context, research on the circulation of female and male domestics over both short and long distances has played a rather important role. On the one hand, entering into service in someone else’s household has turned out to be a privileged channel for mobility and migration. On the other hand, servants and domestic workers constituted and constitute a key component among people flows on short, medium and long distances. This had and has significant implications for the subjective identity of the servants and domestic workers themselves, the experience of the (more or less socially and culturally distant) families where they work (ed), cultural circulation, cultural exchanges and conflicts, the accumulation of goods, the flows of resources, marriage patterns, urbanisation, colonisation, imperialism, the development of trans-national families, etc. My article will review these studies on servants and domestic workers, focusing on the themes they deal with, the results they have achieved and future research perspectives.

Topic modeling as an instrument of probabilistic clustering for text collections has gained particular attention within the computational social science in Russia. This chapter looks at how topic modeling techniques have been developed and employed by the Russian scholars, both for Russian and other languages. We divide the works on topic modeling into methodological, applied, relational, and those dedicated to modeling quality assessment. While the methodological studies are the most developed, the works explaining the substance of the Russian-language discussions cover an important niche in political and social science. However, there is a gap between method-oriented works that treat Russian as “language as such” and the works by computational linguists who focus on Russian but treat topic modeling as a method of secondary importance.

Current approaches and cultures for the economic evaluations of environmental and health policies may suffer from excessive reliance on a standard neoclassic economic toolbox that neglects alternative perspectives. This may prematurely limit the spectrum of available policy options. Here we show how the inclusion of neglected currents of thought such as non-Ricardian economics, bioeconomics and a set of qualitative-quantitative methods from post-normal science leads to richer perspectives for a more inclusive uses of quantitative evidence, and opens the analysis to more possible futures. We also present some case studies in the energy, water, health and climate domains that highlight the point in a practical context for a more policy-oriented audience. We situate our analysis in the context of recent calls in the EU for the inclusion of more perspectives from the social sciences and the humanities in environmental assessment works.

Abstract: Depending on whether creativity is studied by an economist, a sociologist, a psychologist, or some other social scientist, different terms—such as innovation or entrepreneurship‐are used to describe it. Therefore it is difficult to have a clear idea of what the boundaries of creativity research are, and what belongs to it. In this article a conceptual matrix is used to create a typology for creativity research, and it is applied to a sample of dissertations abstracts written in the last year for which complete documentation was available. The goals of the article are: (a) to provide a useful model for classifying studies in the field of creativity; (b) to provide an example of systematic library research on the topic; and (c) to show what the biases of different disciplines that study creativity are in terms of goals, methods, and perspectives.

Cluster analysis refers to a family of related techniques that are used to create groups of objects that, in some sense, minimize the distance between the objects within a cluster (Arabie, Hubert, & DeSoete, 1996; Hartigan, 1975). It is generally viewed as a type of exploratory data analysis in which the clusters emerge from the analytical procedures. Cluster analysis has been used extensively since the 1970s by social scientists, market researchers, numerical taxonomists, and many others. Cluster analysis is also at the heart of many current approaches in machine learning, pattern recognition, and data mining.

In this paper we apply the Combinatorial Neural Model (CNM) to help scientists in Applied Social Sciences to understand a proactive agent in relation to the social environment. CNM is a hybrid neural network that represents an alternative to overcome the black box limitation of the Multilayer Perceptron by applying the neural network structure along with a symbolic processing. The model built comprises the recognition of patterns from a socioeconomic survey and from a set of written texts, and aims at understanding the student point of view about its role in the society. The self-perception of the young in relation to willingness for social proactivity was studied. Proactivity was taken as the possibility of transforming society from the perspective of social inequality. The whole process was driven under CRISP-DM guidelines. The model succeeded in identifying different rules that characterize non-proactive students. Results show that current approach is useful for subsidizing educators and managers of educational institutions in decision making with information on students’ profile.

I agree with my readers on the necessary alliance of personal agency and collective agency. My point is to prioritize the former. The reasons to prioritize the latter were excellent, and it was undoubtedly a sound decision to start with this scenario: political and institutional improvement of the collectives, enlightened by progressive social sciences. My argument for suggesting a different priority—toward personal microactions and their emergent effects—relies on the opinion that we are stuck in a sustainability crisis due to our current approach. In the question “whose agency now?”, my stress is on “now”.

About the book: As ethnography enters the twenty-first century, it has been transformed from a method of research standing on the edges of mainstream social science theory and research. Ethnography now attracts widespread interest, not only from anthropology and sociology but also from many other genres. The four distinctive idioms of qualitative inquiry—naturalism, ethnomethodology, emotionalism, and postmodernism—each use field research to pursue different questions and concerns, posit different versions of “the field,” and specify different methods as appropriate for doing so. Emerson provides comprehensive reviews of core issues, reflecting the increased acceptance of and growing divergences among current ethnographic approaches. In addition, he addresses concerns central both to earlier periods of field research, particularly those marking the beginnings of the reflexive turn, and to those raised by contemporary, more radically representational and postmodern approaches to ethnography.

The relevance of research. The paper analyzes the heading “Mainstream issue” of the current issue of the journal “Legal Concept = Pravovaya Paradigma” “Procedural law technologies for preventing offenses and combating crime”. The prepared issue deals with the problem of modern procedural approaches and the methods of procedural communication in civil, arbitration, and criminal proceedings, modernized by the procedural reform of 2018–2022. The paper highlights the factors of modern reality that necessitated the inclusion of legal science, legislator, and law enforcement officer in the process of actively seeking a balance between a wide variety of procedural approaches and the methods of procedural communication. The scientific and practical significance of the papers presented in the heading is analyzed. The scientific novelty of the conducted comprehensive intersectoral legal research, which has made up the content of the heading “Mainstream issue”, is based on the results obtained by the authors of the scientific papers touching on various aspects of the consequences of the procedural reform, which was initiated by the draft law proposed by the Supreme Court of Russia and followed by Federal Law No. 451-FZ of November 23, 2018 “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation”. The fundamental changes that the “procedural revolution” entailed were reflected in more than 20 federal laws and influenced the transformation of established approaches in civil, arbitration, criminal and administrative proceedings, as well as the order of the judicial system as a whole. Many of the most controversial issues related to both traditional and modernized procedural regulation under the influence of digitalization and scientific and technological progress are also analyzed. The methodological framework for the intersectoral legal research has traditionally been made up of general scientific methods of cognition used in the social sciences and humanities in general, including in law. Among the most significant general methods of cognition are the method of historical materialism, as well as the general logical methods: analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction. The special and private methods are presented in the scientific papers of the heading mainly by formal legal and comparative legal methods. Results. It is revealed that some of the most important topics of judicial proceedings remained untouched by the reform, although they were repeatedly raised both within the framework of doctrinal discussions and in the process of developing legislative initiatives. In this connection, their coverage in the framework of scientific papers prepared under the heading “Mainstream issue” remains relevant. Conclusions. Taking into account the opinion of specialized professionals, as well as based on the analysis of the legislative novelties, the conclusion is substantiated that the main purpose of the changes introduced through procedural reforms both in Russia and abroad is the unification of procedural law. As another fundamental reason, the author cites the optimization of legal proceedings caused by the processes of digitalization of all spheres of public life and the creation of a new order of procedural communication. It is established that many controversial issues related to the current procedural approaches, not affected by the reform, have received coverage within the framework of the feature topic of the prepared issue of the journal “Legal Concept = Pravovaya Paradigma” “Procedural law technologies for preventing offenses and combating crime”.

This paper presents a model of contrastive explanation using structural casual models. The topic of causal explanation in artificial intelligence has gathered interest in recent years as researchers and practitioners aim to increase trust and understanding of intelligent decision-making. While different sub-fields of artificial intelligence have looked into this problem with a sub-field-specific view, there are few models that aim to capture explanation more generally. One general model is based on structural causal models . It defines an explanation as a fact that, if found to be true, would constitute an actual cause of a specific event. However, research in philosophy and social sciences shows that explanations are contrastive : that is, when people ask for an explanation of an event—the fact —they (sometimes implicitly) are asking for an explanation relative to some contrast case ; that is, ‘Why P rather than Q ?’. In this paper, we extend the structural causal model approach to define two complementary notions of contrastive explanation , and demonstrate them on two classical problems in artificial intelligence: classification and planning. We believe that this model can help researchers in subfields of artificial intelligence to better understand contrastive explanation.

The problem faced by all symmetric or private key cryptosystems is the difficulty of communicating the private key to all participants in the network. The degree of key sharing is on the order of the square of the number of nodes in the network. The concept of asymmetric or public key cryptology effectively solved this problem by dividing the key into two parts, one of which is made public. The remaining part need never be transmitted beyond the creator of the key. At the beginning of the era of public-key cryptology, many proposed cryptosystems were based on the classic subset sum knapsack problem. However most of these were shown to be insecure by the research of Lagarias and Odlyzko, and also Brickell. In this paper, we modify a previous method that we originally called the Pascal Knapsack Method. The current approach improves on security and computation time and provides a reasonable alternative to the most common public-key cryptosystem, the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman PKC.