Logrolling and a McGarvey theorem for separable tournaments

In this note we prove a McGarvey theorem for the family of Separable Tournaments. This family arises in the analysis of Logrolling and Vote Trading in Committees.     

The domination number of Cartesian product of two directed paths

Let γ(P _m □P _n ) be the domination number of the Cartesian product of directed paths P _m and P _n for m,n≥2. Liu et al. in (J. Comb. Optim. 22(4):651–662, 2011) determined the value of γ(P _m □P _n ) for arbitrary n and m≤6. In this work we give the exact value of γ(P _m □P _n ) for any m,n and exhibit dominating sets of minimum cardinality.     

罗莎·卢森堡关于"社会主义还是野蛮状态"的概念

20世纪90年代以来,罗莎·卢森堡政治学说中所包含的后现代社会的内容得到了世界学者的广泛重视和深入研究。在这里,我们根据2006年3月20—22日武汉大学哲学学院和马克思主义哲学研究所联合举办的“罗莎·卢森堡思想及其当代价值国际学术研讨会”就此问题的讨论特发表以下三篇论文。这三篇论文的特点是结合现时代世界历史提出的重大问题,从哲学的层面反思了罗莎·卢森堡政治学中的基本问题,反映了当代罗莎·卢森堡政治哲学研究的水平和视野。这些论文无论对于深化罗莎·卢森堡政治学的研究,还是对于中国开展马克思主义的政治哲学研究来说,都具有重要的启迪意义。本专栏发表的三篇论文由武汉大学哲学学院何萍教授组织,中南财经政法大学人文学院王雨辰教授也给予了大力协助,在此一并表示衷心的感谢。     

The labour movement and mutual benefit societies: Towards an international approach

The comparative history of the mutualist and workers'movements shows up several notable points of convergence, from their beginnings up until the Second World War. They were branches of a common tree: tradesmen's and workers'guilds were more often than not at the origin of union and pre-union organizations and mutual aid societies. The two movements also developed in parallel over the course of the two industrial revolutions of 1780-1840 and 1880-1890. Despite this, their paths began increasingly to diverge. Setting out from the same essentially craft-based social milieu as the unions, the mutualist movement gradually took root among the lower-middle and middle classes, the civil service and the military. The mutualist ideology of a common good shared among the social classes was the antithesis of the prevailing ethos in the union movement, of which class struggle was the defining attribute. Finally, the aims of the two movements also diverged: on one hand the trade unionists, engaging in mass and sometimes violent action in support of immediate demands; on the other, the mutualists, working away at their necessarily long-term administrative tasks. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century on, therefore, the mutualist and workers'movements entered into a process of increasing diversification.     

Patrolling Chineseness: Singapore’s Kowloon Club and the ethnic adaptation of Hong Kongese to Singaporean society

In combination with their strategy to recruit foreign talent, Singaporean state authorities have increasingly focused their attention on community integration schemes for Chinese professional newcomers. The government facilitated such integration with the creation of the Kowloon Club in 1990. The Kowloon Club is not only a government experiment that has been repeated three times since then, but also the only new migrant association that does not explicitly target Mainlanders. Through in-depth interviews with the Club’s leadership, I explore the ethnic adaptation of the Kowloon Club membership as it negotiates the evolving sense of Chineseness found in state designs and Singaporean society. Much like the emergence of the 1997 Hong Kongese identity, the Kowloon Club’s activities have shifted in strong reaction to the racialized category put forth by state authorities and embodied by Mainlander professionals in that the Club’s activities now symbolize and help patrol what Chineseness means as everyday performance in the city-state.     

Designing Personalized Treatment: An Application to Anticoagulation Therapy

In this study, we develop an analytical framework for personalizing the anticoagulation therapy of patients who are taking warfarin. Consistent with medical practice, our treatment design consists of two stages: (i) the initiation stage, modeled using a partially‐observable Markov decision process, during which the physician learns through systematic belief updates about the unobservable patient sensitivity to warfarin, and (ii) the maintenance stage, modeled using a Markov decision process, during which the physician relies on his formed belief about patient sensitivity to determine the stable, patient‐specific, warfarin dose to prescribe. We develop an expression for belief updates in the POMDP, establish the optimality of the myopic policy for the MDP, and derive conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a myopically optimal dose. We validate our models using a real‐life patient data set gathered at the Hematology Clinic of the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. The proposed analytical framework and case study enable us to develop useful clinical insights, for example, concerning the length of the initiation period and the importance of correctly assessing patient sensitivity.     

Index for Predicting Insurance Claims from Wind Storms with an Application in France

For insurance companies, wind storms represent a main source of volatility, leading to potentially huge aggregated claim amounts. In this article, we compare different constructions of a storm index allowing us to assess the economic impact of storms on an insurance portfolio by exploiting information from historical wind speed data. Contrary to historical insurance portfolio data, meteorological variables show fewer nonstationarities between years and are easily available with long observation records; hence, they represent a valuable source of additional information for insurers if the relation between observations of claims and wind speeds can be revealed. Since standard correlation measures between raw wind speeds and insurance claims are weak, a storm index focusing on high wind speeds can afford better information. A storm index approach has been applied to yearly aggregated claim amounts in Germany with promising results. Using historical meteorological and insurance data, we assess the consistency of the proposed index constructions with respect to various parameters and weights. Moreover, we are able to place the major insurance events since 1998 on a broader horizon beyond 40 years. Our approach provides a meteorological justification for calculating the return periods of extreme‐storm‐related insurance events whose magnitude has rarely been reached.     

Managing the flow of private information on children and parents in poverty situations: Creating a panoptic eye in interorganizational networks?

In this article, we discuss how the flow of private information about children and families in poverty situations is managed in interorganizational networks that aim to combat child poverty. Although practices for sharing information and documentation between child and family social work services are highly encouraged and recommended to create supportive features for parents and children, this development often results in undesirable forms of governmentality. Interorganizational networking also creates controlling side effects because the exchange of information in networks of child and family services may wield a holistic power over families. We theorize this issue by using the Foucauldian concepts of the panopticon and pastoral power, which allows us to grapple with the major tension between support and control in the information‐ and documentation‐sharing practices of social workers. A critical analysis of our empirical data reveals four central fields of tension in which social workers and their organizations must position themselves: (a) craving control and handling uncertainty, (b) using and misusing private information and trust, (c) constructing families as subjects and objects of intervention, and (d) including and excluding families.     

Deterministic Approximation of Stochastic Evolution in Games

This paper provides deterministic approximation results for stochastic processes that arise when finite populations recurrently play finite games. The processes are Markov chains, and the approximation is defined in continuous time as a system of ordinary differential equations of the type studied in evolutionary game theory. We establish precise connections between the long‐run behavior of the discrete stochastic process, for large populations, and its deterministic flow approximation. In particular, we provide probabilistic bounds on exit times from and visitation rates to neighborhoods of attractors to the deterministic flow. We sharpen these results in the special case of ergodic processes.