Strange Buddhas and the King of the Monks: Locating History and Community in a Muslim State

In this paper I discuss the way in which ethnic and cultural minorities articulate a sense of community through the production and negotiation of historical agency. The Thai Buddhist villagers of Kelantan live in a predominantly Malay and Muslim state along Malaysia's eastern seaboard. Although possessing few myths of common origin, these villagers use a myriad of autonomous reckonings of the past in constructing a sense of cultural distinctiveness in the modern Malaysian nation state. The past is often spoken of by Thai villagers in the guise of anecdotal stories which encapsulate the dizzying array of relationships the community is enmeshed in. My paper shows how these stories are meaning filled texts by which villagers understand their marginal identity. I conclude by arguing that anthropologists should pay close attention to the minutiae of disjunctured histories that permeate the lives of men and women everywhere as a valuable means of making sense of contemporary social realities.     

Popular matchings: structure and algorithms

An instance of the popular matching problem (POP-M) consists of a set of applicants and a set of posts. Each applicant has a preference list that strictly ranks a subset of the posts. A matching M of applicants to posts is popular if there is no other matching M′ such that more applicants prefer M′ to M than prefer M to M′. Abraham et al. (SIAM J. Comput. 37:1030–1045, 2007) described a linear time algorithm to determine whether a popular matching exists for a given instance of POP-M, and if so to find a largest such matching. A number of variants and extensions of POP-M have recently been studied. This paper provides a characterization of the set of popular matchings for an arbitrary POP-M instance in terms of a structure called the switching graph, a directed graph computable in linear time from the preference lists. We show that the switching graph can be exploited to yield efficient algorithms for a range of associated problems, including the counting and enumeration of the set of popular matchings, generation of a popular matching uniformly at random, finding all applicant-post pairs that can occur in a popular matching, and computing popular matchings that satisfy various additional optimality criteria. Our algorithms for computing such optimal popular matchings improve those described in a recent paper by Kavitha and Nasre (Proceedings of MATCH-UP: Matching Under Preferences—Algorithms and Complexity, 2008).     

Information evaluation under nonadditive expected utility

We examine the choice-of-single-stage-experiment problem (Raiffa and Schlaifer, 1961) under the assumption that the decider's (weak) preference relation satisfies Schmeidler's (1989) or Gilboa's (1987) axiomatization and is thus representable by a nonadditive expected-utility functional as a Choquet integral w.r.t. a monotone probability measure on events. The basic properties of information value, certainty equivalent of information cost, net gain of information, and optimal choice of experiment that obtain (La Valle, 1968) when satisfies the Anscombe-Aumann (1963) or Savage (1954) axiomatizations continue to obtain in the more general Schmeidler-Gilboa context-provided that there is no incentive to randomize the choice of experiment. When this proviso fails, information value can in general be assigned only to the set of available experiments.     

Signed orders in linear and nonlinear utility theory

Self-reflecting signed orders on a set A and its anti-set A ^* were introduced previously as a way to account for negative as well as positive feelings about the inclusion of items in A in potential subsets of choice. The present paper extends the notion of signed orders to lotteries on A A ^*, describes reflection axioms for the lottery context, and shows how these axioms simplify utility representations for preference between lotteries. The simplified representations are then used to guide procedures for extending preferences from A A ^* and its lotteries to preferences between subsets of items.     

Measuring State TANF Policy Variations and Change After Reform*

Objectives. Our objectives are to describe the policies adopted after PRWORA, which vary across states, to test for common underlying policy concepts, demonstrating how these policies are interrelated, and to examine whether policy stringency diffused to neighboring states results in greater policy stringency across all states over time. We convert textual TANF welfare guidelines into empirically derived policy dimensions and use the derived quantitative scores to describe variation and change in welfare policy dimensions across status during the 1996–2003 post‐welfare‐reform period. Methods. Utilizing the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, we apply a factor analytic methodology to 78 unique state policy guidelines that were coded on a lenient‐to‐stringent continuum. Regression analyses, employing spatial contiguity weighting, are used to describe policy diffusion. Results. The results identified 15 underlying first‐order post‐welfare‐reform policy dimensions, which for scientific parsimony were further reduced to three second‐order underlying dimensions representing rules governing eligibility: eligibility requirements for groups, behavioral responsibilities for maintaining eligibility, and eligibility time limits and exemptions. Analysis of the quantitative scores showed that by 2003 states had become more lenient regarding eligibility criteria for groups but decidedly more stringent regarding behavioral guidelines for maintaining eligibility and eligibility time limits and exemptions. Spatial clustering is not found globally but is significant for some states at the local level. Spatial diffusion is apparent only for behavioral rules. Conclusions. Our results suggest that TANF policy variations across states go beyond payment levels to include salient eligibility rules. The patterns of variability in change scores across states do not support a pervasive “race to the bottom” conclusion.     

Approximation algorithms for hard variants of the stable marriage and hospitals/residents problems

When ties and incomplete preference lists are permitted in the Stable Marriage and Hospitals/Residents problems, stable matchings can have different sizes. The problem of finding a maximum cardinality stable matching in this context is known to be NP-hard, even under very severe restrictions on the number, size and position of ties. In this paper, we describe polynomial-time 5/3-approximation algorithms for variants of these problems in which ties are on one side only and at the end of the preference lists. The particular variant is motivated by important applications in large scale centralised matching schemes. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of COCOON 2007, LNCS, vol. 4598, pp. 548–558. This work was supported by EPSRC grant EP/E011993/1.     

Coming out of the editorial closet: From feminist issues to gender issues

“Coming Out of the Editorial Closest” refers to the unusual circumstance of a man editing” Gender Issues during an editorial interregnum brought about by the abrupt resignation of an editor for personal/medical reasons. The year's plus time during which I, in effect, edited this journal, taught me many things. (1) That in the short run at least, issues of ascribed status and biosocial designation are overruled by the essentially universal premises of scholarship in social science. (2) Appeals to evidence based on experience and commonly accepted standards of data are paramount. (3) An appreciation for different points of view in any particular subject, especially policy issues, requires public awareness rather than gender specificities. This statement is hardly intended to be definitive, but it is suggestive, especially at a time when gender, class, and race stratification are viewed as entry tickets to some editorial and scholarly positions. My own experience convinces me that while gender issues are most often best covered by women—or at least those intimately concerned with the problems of the status of women in society—this does not preclude possibilities that “outsiders” can serve a useful and constructive role in the development of specialist journals. He continues to serve as editorial director and chairman of the board of Transaction Publishers—the publisher of among other journals, Gender Issues, originally known as Feminist Issues, now approaching its silver anniversary.