Statistical games against a prophet-proof of a minimax conjecture

“Prophet theory” quantifies the price a statistician has to pay for his lack of information in stochastic sequences. In a recent paper, Schmitz (1991) gave a game-theoretical interpretation of this situation and he formulated in particular a minimax conjecture for the difference case. In this note we prove that conjecture and, moreover, present minimax ran domized stopping times (minimax procedures for the statistician).     

Bribes,power, and managerial control in corporate voting games

Proxy fights have received comparatively little attention relative to the more popular methods for corporate control transfer: merger and tender offers. This paper presents an analytic model of the proxy contest as a cooperative game with four players: management, passive shareholders, insurgent shareholders and a trust fund. The power of the players and the effectiveness of certain managerial actions is discussed.     

官场小说叙事伦理的建构——以王跃文《国画》为例

“官场小说”更多接续的是通俗文学的资源,但这种运用平民 视角的叙述方式又导致了“官场小说”叙事伦理上的紧张。由于丧失了 过去和未来的维度,《国画》等系列官场小说,着眼于在“1970年代末 期”即改革开放以来官场游戏规则“猎奇式”的揭示,始终无法树立起 正面的人物形象。《国画》中强调的“人”和“人性”,于叙事中被逐 渐发掘,人和官场的关系,也在不同历史环境中发生互动。     

幼儿园心理健康教育的途径及实施中存在的问题

在概述幼儿园心理健康的基础上,总结了幼儿园心理健康教育的实施途径,对幼儿园心理健康教育中存在的问题进行了探讨并提出了相关对策。旨在引起幼儿园管理者及一线教师对幼儿园心理健康教育的重视,进而改善心理健康教育方法,提高心理健康教育质量,最终促进幼儿心理健康发展。     

Some notes on Church's thesis and the theory of games

This paper considers games in normal form played by Turing Machines. The machines are fed as input all the relevent information and then are required to play the game. Some impossibility results are derived for this set-up. In particular, it is shown that no Turing Machine exists which will always play the correct strategy given its opponent's choice. Such a result also generalizes to the case in which attention is restricted to economically optimizing machines only. The paper also develops a model of knowledge. This allows the main results of the paper to be interpreted as stemming out of the impossibility of always deciding whether a player is rational or not in some appropriate sense.     

Athletic Involvement and Its Relevance to Hazardous Alcohol Use and Drinking Game Participation in Female College Athletes: A Preliminary Investigation

Objective and Participants: The authors designed this cross-sectional study to examine sports team differences in hazardous alcohol use and drinking game participation, as well as the social correlates of these behaviors among female college athletes (N = 176; M age = 19.9 years, SD = 1.24, range = 18-22). Methods: Respondents completed self-report surveys in small groups. They reported drinking behaviors, frequency of team social events involving alcohol use, and team cohesion. Results: The authors found significant differences across sports teams with regard to hazardous alcohol use and participation in drinking games with teammates. Findings also revealed that a high frequency of team social events involving alcohol use was associated with elevated use and an increased likelihood of drinking game participation. Conclusions: The authors discuss future research directions and implications.     

YOUR SECOND LIFE?

This article examines the performativity of intellectual property in digital gaming environments, with a focus on Massively Multi-Player On Line Games (MMOGs). The analysis centers on the creation and management of goodwill, an intangible asset of considerable value to corporations based on affective bonds between consumers, corporations, and their commodities in the marketplace. Most critical analyses of intellectual property consider neither the centrality of goodwill to corporate management of their intellectual properties in digital environments, nor the significance of the legal conditions that structure activity in such contexts. We develop a theoretical framework based on cultures of circulation involving network sociality, circuits of interactivity and the extensibility of the computer/user interface. This enables us to better understand shifting relations of power and reciprocity between corporations and consumers in digital gaming contexts, where the division between player-consumption and player-production is increasingly blurred. Technological capacities for consumers to become producers of gaming content changes the terrain upon which conflicts between corporations and consumers about intellectual property are negotiated and enhances the value of goodwill. An examination of Linden Lab's Second Life – one of the fastest growing MMOGs and the first to affirm players’ intellectual property rights in their digital creations – provides an illustration of both the limits and possibilities afforded by goodwill as a form of emerging governance in game worlds.     

网吧治理的法律问题

从1998年公安部发布第一个关于网吧管理的法规以来，网吧发展与监管已走过了十年。文章讨论了其中涉及到的几个重要法律问题：网络信息安全、保护未成年人、版权问题、网络游戏、黑网吧等等。通过梳理分析政府管制的起因、逻辑和效果，展示转型中国网吧管制的复杂状况，同时也试图反映国家在互联网控制方面的政策与管理模式的变迁。     

The Evolution of Coding in Signaling Games

Signaling games with reinforcement learning have been used to model the evolution of term languages (Lewis 1969, Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Skyrms 2006, “Signals” Presidential Address. Philosophy of Science Association for PSA). In this article, syntactic games, extensions of David Lewis’s original sender–receiver game, are used to illustrate how a language that exploits available syntactic structure might evolve to code for states of the world. The evolution of a language occurs in the context of available vocabulary and syntax—the role played by each component is compared in the context of simple reinforcement learning.     

Domesticating technology for shared success: collective enactments of World of Warcraft

In this paper, we analyse processes of domestication as collective enactments, using online game playing of World of Warcraft as a case. We study how groups of players – guilds – develop practices and sense-making with respect to the technologies they use in their shared endeavours in raids to battle monsters. Previous studies of domestication have mainly focused on single-actor strategies and relatively little attention have been given to the impact of concerns for particular domestication outcomes, for example in competitive situations or with goals related to efficiency. This paper contributes to domestication theory by analysing what we call collective domestication in a performance-oriented setting, to see how domestication may produce compatible outcomes for individuals that need to act together. The paper is based on a one-year participant observation and qualitative interviews with players. Three types of players were identified – hardcore, casual and moderate – representing three rationales of play: a high level of performance, social benefits, or a combination of the first two. In the analysis, we compare how these three types of player groups’ domesticated the game. A main finding is that collective enactments of technology need extensive managerial efforts unless the group share a coherent and uncontested rationale for playing, thus being a moral community.