Traffic Partition in WDM/SONET Rings to Minimize SONET ADMs

SONET (Synchronous Optical NETworks) add-drop multiplexers (ADMs) are the dominant cost factor in the WDM(Wavelength Division Multiplexing)/SONET rings. The number of SONET ADMs required by a set of traffic streams is determined by the routing and wavelength assignment of the traffic streams. Previous works took as input the traffic streams with routings given a priori and developed various heuristics for wavelength assignment to minimize the SONET ADM costs. However, little was known about the performance guarantees of these heuristics. This paper contributes mainly in two aspects. First, in addition to the traffic streams with pre-specified routing, this paper also studies minimizing the ADM requirement by traffic streams without given routings, a problem which is shown to be NP-hard. Several heuristics for integrated routing and wavelength assignment are proposed to minimize the SONET ADM costs. Second, the approximation ratios of those heuristics for wavelength assignment only and those heuristics for integrated routing and wavelength assignment are analyzed. The new Preprocessed Iterative Matching heuristic has the best approximation ratio: at most 3/2.     

The elites’ collective subjectivities of the history of ethnic politics in Malaysia

ABSTRACT

Malaysia is one of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious countries in Southeast Asia. Due to the pluralistic nature of Malaysia, it has a political structure based on ethnic politics. The ethnic preferential policies affected most domains of this country. The objective of this article is to examine the origin and background of ethnic politics in Malaysia. Findings of this study indicate that, ethnic politics originated during the British colonial period, it became a tool used by the Barisan Nasional for the legitimacy of regime. Moreover, ethnic politics in Malaysia today is intertwined with religion. Besides, there is the dilemma of the choice between the interest of certain ethnic group and national interests. However, with the opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan won the election in 9th May, UMNO-led BN lost power and interrupted its 61 years control, which leaves us an interesting topic to think about the future of Malaysian ethnic politics.     

Personality at Face Value: Facial Appearance Predicts Self and Other Personality Judgments among Strangers and Spouses

Character judgments, based on facial appearance, impact both perceivers’ and targets’ interpersonal decisions and behaviors. Nonetheless, the resilience of such effects in the face of longer acquaintanceship duration is yet to be determined. To address this question, we had 51 elderly long-term married couples complete self and informant versions of a Big Five Inventory. Participants were also photographed, while they were requested to maintain an emotionally neutral expression. A subset of the initial sample completed a shortened version of the Big Five Inventory in response to the pictures of other opposite sex participants (with whom they were unacquainted). Oosterhof and Todorov’s (in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:11087–11092, 2008) computer-based model of face evaluation was used to generate facial trait scores on trustworthiness, dominance, and attractiveness, based on participants’ photographs. Results revealed that structural facial characteristics, suggestive of greater trustworthiness, predicted positively biased, global informant evaluations of a target’s personality, among both spouses and strangers. Among spouses, this effect was impervious to marriage length. There was also evidence suggestive of a Dorian Gray effect on personality, since facial trustworthiness predicted not only spousal and stranger, but also self-ratings of extraversion. Unexpectedly, though, follow-up analyses revealed that (low) facial dominance, rather than (high) trustworthiness, was the strongest predictor of self-rated extraversion. Our present findings suggest that subtle emotional cues, embedded in the structure of emotionally neutral faces, exert long-lasting effects on personality judgments even among very well-acquainted targets and perceivers.     

Shame,Sexual Compulsivity,and Eroticizing Flirtatious Others: An Experimental Study

Clinical observation and correlational studies with nonclinical samples suggest that a linkage between negative affective states (especially shame) and engagement in erotic pursuits typifies sexual compulsivity. The present study tested whether experimental induction of shame leads to increased interest in erotically suggestive targets among more sexually compulsive individuals. A total of 74 age-traditional heterosexual university students first recalled either an emotionally neutral or a shame-inducing personal experience, then completed a nonpredictive gaze-cueing task featuring flirtatious or emotionally neutral faces of the same or opposite sex. They also rated the faces’ attractiveness and completed a validated sexual compulsivity scale and two control measures (executive control, sociosexuality). Higher (versus lower) sexual compulsivity predicted weaker gaze-triggered attentional orienting in response to the flirtatious opposite-sex face in the shame (versus neutral) condition, and this was accounted for by (higher) attractiveness ratings of the flirtatious opposite-sex face. Shame thus appears to increase sexualization (i.e., reduces salience of agentic features and increases appeal of physical attributes) of erotically suggestive targets among more sexually compulsive individuals.     

The Ambiguity of Return Migration: Prolonged Crisis and Uncertainty in the Life Strategies of Young Romanian and Latvian Returnees

Drawing on qualitative research, this study endeavours to identify the determinants of return migration of young Romanians and Latvians in light of the most recent global economic crisis (GEC). The decision-making patterns of young returnees are examined by three main research questions. How do macro-events, such as the GEC, interfere with individual biographies creating specific return experiences? What can we say about the “crisis returnees”, their migration motivations and re-adaptation in the origin country? What are the main challenges of young adults facing life strategies in such uncertain periods? Data are drawn from 51 in-depth interviews with Romanian and Latvian young adults, carried out in late 2015 and early 2016. Findings show that return migration is associated with economic conditions, family life, feelings of homesickness, and re-adaptation experiences. Our results also confirm that youth transitions and migration have become more diversified and complex in the context of the economic crisis.     

Romanian social workers facing the challenges of neo-liberalism

ABSTRACT

With a history of almost 90 years, professional social work in Romania once flourished up until World War II. The Communist Party disbanded the profession in 1968 and it was reinstated after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. Within the context of the socio-economic transition from a centralised to a free-market economy, Romanian social policy and social work have evolved from a Marxist/socialist-type ideology, one that advocates for state intervention, to a libertarian/neo-liberal-type ideology, which promotes both state withdrawal from welfare provision and individuals taking responsibility for their own welfare. These two trends continue to co-exist subject to sometimes divergent forces such as international institutions and internal Romanian social pressures. Using a qualitative approach, we explore how Romanian social workers are adapting to the neo-liberal realities and identify three types of perceived challenges: 1. those related to regulation, 2. linked with collaboration in social work activity and 3. those related to the social worker-client relationship. Under neo-liberal pressures, the social worker's role of agent of social change becomes marginalised in daily practice, leaving little power to influence agency policies that negatively impact clients.     

1.61-approximation for min-power strong connectivity with two power levels

Given a directed simple graph \(G=(V,E)\) and a cost function \(c:E \rightarrow R_+\), the power of a vertex \(u\) in a directed spanning subgraph \(H\) is given by \(p_H(u) = \max _{uv \in E(H)} c(uv)\), and corresponds to the energy consumption required for wireless node \(u\) to transmit to all nodes \(v\) with \(uv \in E(H)\). The power of \(H\) is given by \(p(H) = \sum _{u \in V} p_H(u)\). Power Assignment seeks to minimize \(p(H)\) while \(H\) satisfies some connectivity constraint. In this paper, we assume \(E\) is bidirected (for every directed edge \(e \in E\), the opposite edge exists and has the same cost), while \(H\) is required to be strongly connected. Moreover, we assume \(c:E \rightarrow \{A,B\}\), where \(0 \le A < B\). We improve the best known approximation ratio from 1.75 (Chen et al. IEEE GLOBECOM 2005) to \(\pi ^2/6 - 1/36 + \epsilon \le 1.61\) using an adaptation of the algorithm developed by Khuller et al. [SIAM J Comput 24(4):859–872 1995, Discr Appl Math 69(3):281–289 1996] for (unweighted) Minimum Strongly Connected Subgraph.     

Grandiose and vulnerable narcissism: Associations with alcohol use,alcohol problems and problem recognition

Objective: This study fills a gap in the literature by examining the relationship between two types of narcissism, vulnerable and grandiose, and five alcohol-related outcomes (ie, alcohol use, alcohol problems, evaluation and expectancies of problems, and readiness to change).

Participants: 345 college students (28% men, 72% women) from a Midwestern university were recruited from undergraduate psychology courses from April 2015 to October 2016.

Methods: Participants completed an online survey with questionnaires measuring the variables of interest. Multiple regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Results: Grandiose narcissism was a positive predictor of alcohol consumption and a positive (ie, good) evaluation of alcohol-related problems. Vulnerable narcissism was a positive predictor of alcohol-related problems, problem recognition (ie, readiness to change), and problem expectancies.

Conclusions: The results speak to the effects that different types of narcissism have on alcohol use, alcohol problems and attitudes towards alcohol problems among young adults.     

On a class of bivariate mixed Sarmanov distributions

Multivariate distributions are more and more used to model the dependence encountered in many fields. However, classical multivariate distributions can be restrictive by their nature, while Sarmanov's multivariate distribution, by joining different marginals in a flexible and tractable dependence structure, often provides a valuable alternative. In this paper, we introduce some bivariate mixed Sarmanov distributions with the purpose to extend the class of bivariate Sarmanov distributions and to obtain new dependency structures. Special attention is paid to the bivariate mixed Sarmanov distribution with Poisson marginals and, in particular, to the resulting bivariate Sarmanov distributions with negative binomial and with Poisson‐inverse Gaussian marginals; these particular types of mixed distributions have possible applications in, for example modelling bivariate count data. The extension to higher dimensions is also discussed. Moreover, concerning the dependency structure, we also present some correlation formulas.     

Rewritten in stone: imperial heritage in the sacred place of the nation

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between architectural transformations and the reshaping of memory in post-imperial urban space. It reflects on two forms of symbolic violence: first, iconoclastic acts of reshaping space to reflect national self-determination and moving away from empire, and second, acts that embody the recovery of imperial legacies. It analyzes the recent restoration of the Habsburg-built Alba Iulia citadel in the eve of Romania’s Centennial celebrations of the 1918 Alba Iulia assembly which proclaimed the unification of Transylvania with Romania. It interrogates the intentionality of architectural transformations and how this heritage project expresses the frictions between memory narratives centred on the nation and forms of imperial duress and nostalgia. It traces how the after-lives of empire materialize in the built environment, as they do in the attitudes and yearnings of the cultural elite. Moreover, it reflects on parallels between European post-imperial and Global South post-colonial nation-building.