Absolute Winner Research Articles

Пушкинский юбилей 1937 г. в судьбе фронтового поколения

This article is focused on to the participation of the young Soviet generation in the Pushkin Jubilee. In the judgments of teenagers, the poet was depicted as a hero and an absolute winner over the forces of reactionary forces of his time. Moreover, during the celebration, he was awarded the gift of an endless and happy life in unity with his people, whereas his persecutors and murderer were sentenced to eternal torment and shame. Transcendent motifs also defined the teenage reinterpretation of Pushkin as the returned living god of literature. The Pushkin cult became an important source of faith in victory and of the steadfastness of young Red Army soldiers in the war.

Shedding light on the strength, nature, and cooperativity/anti-cooperativity between intermolecular H…N hydrogen and Cl…C halogen bonds in the competitive binary and ternary complexes

In equimolar mixture of monomers N≡C-Cl (M−1) and C=N-H (M−2), formation of N…H hydrogen-bonded complex HB-Dim and C…Cl halogen-bonded complex XB-Dim compete with each other. Values of counterpoise-corrected interaction energy indicate that HB-Dim is absolute winner in such a competition. Existence of N…H HB- and C…Cl XB-interactions is characterized through geometrical parameters analysis, Quantum theory of atoms-in-molecules descriptors, and Independent gradient model based on Hirshfeld partition of molecular density. Interaction energy decomposition reveals that electrostatic with orbital interactions and, electrostatic with dispersion interactions are main driving forces for the formation of, respectively, HB- and XB-Dim. Moreover, substantially stronger electrostatic and orbital interactions characterized with Molecular electrostatic potential and Extended Transition State-Natural Orbitals for Chemical Valence analyses explain why formation of HB-Dim is quite preferred over that of XB-Dim. Two N…H HB- and C…Cl XB-interactions, present at the same time, make each other slightly strength in ternary complex Trim.

Challenging machine translation engines: some Spanish-English linguistic problems put to the test

This work is an evaluation of machine translation engines completed in 2018 and 2021, inspired by Isabelle, Cherry & Foster (2017), and Isabelle & Kuhn (2018). The challenge consisted of testing MTs Google Translate and Bing and DeepL in the translation of certain linguistic problems normally found when translating from Spanish into English. The divergences representing a “challenge” to the engines were of morphological and lexical-syntactical types. The absolute winner of the challenge was DeepL, in second place was Bing from Microsoft, and Google was the engine that was the poorest in the management of the linguistic problems. In terms of time, when comparing the engines three years apart, it was found that DeepL was the only one that enhanced its performance by correcting a problem it had before in a test sentence. This was not the case for the other two, on the contrary, their translations were of lower quality. These machines do not seem to be consistent in the manner in which they are improved. These findings may be valuable for translators who may work with these systems as pre or post-editors so that their efforts may be better directed.

Политические партии ФРГ на современном этапе

The topic of the paper is research on the relationships among the political parties of the FRG after the federal election for the 20th German Bundestag (2021). The purpose of the research is to study the factors that determine the development of the German party system at the present stage. The research objectives are as follows: the analysis of the balance of forces between governing and opposition parties after the election for the Bundestag; the explication of the factors of stability and conflictogenicity within the governing coalition; the characteristic of the results of the 2022–2023 regional elections as an intermediate result of the interparty competition; and the study of the present political potential of the parliamentary opposition. The research resulted in the identification of the specific features of the interparty distribution of power during the current legislature period; the description of the scenarios within the governmental coalition as well as amongst the Parliamentary opposition; the explication of the reasons for instability and potential risks for the existing government; and the analysis of factors that stabilize the actions of the latter and ensure the government against possible disintegration or collapse. The conclusions of the research are as follows: the major domestic factor in the preservation of the governing coalition is the weakness of the SPD’s key competitor – the CDU/CSU Union – which does not allow the latter to offer a real political alternative to the government in power. The intermediate results of the activities of the governing coalition testify to the existence of a tension amongst the coalition members. This refers especially to its minority partners – Alliance 90 / The Greens and FDP which are balanced by the Social Democrats. The results of the 2022–2023 regional elections became important indicators of their political influence for the German political parties. Examining these results through the prism of competition between the “people’s parties” – CDU and SPD – leads to the conclusion that their competition proceeded with varying success. The Greens turned out to become the absolute winners of those regional elections. The political well-being of the opposition parties vary. The CDU/CSU Union is undergoing the stage of reconstruction and gradual gain in its public impact. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is also gaining in popularity. The Left Party is undergoing a structural crisis and the ways of the crisis resolution found by the party will determine its further existence and the place within the German party system.

CHANGING BALANCES IN SOUTH CAUCASUS AFTER 44 DAYS WAR, KEY AZERBAIJAN AND KEY ZENGEZUR

The 44-Day War was a groundbreaking war that radically changed the existing practices and balances in the South Caucasus. After the collapse of the USSR on December 26th, 1991, Armenia unjustly occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding areas of Lachin, Gubatli, Zangilan, Cebrayil, Fizuli, Agdam and Kelbajar with the support of Moscow. During these occupations, thousands of Azerbaijani Turkish women were brutally murdered, along with their children. As a result of this occupation by Armenia in violation of the rules of international law, Azerbaijan lost 20% of its territory. After that date, until the 44-Day War began, Armenia continued to violate the borders it had carried out unjustly and to make provocations that had the potential to start a total war. Finally, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, in his speech at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on September 25th, 2020, stated that a counter-attack would be launched within the boundaries of the right to self-defense. He also announced that this operation would be carried out in order to realize Azerbaijan’s vision of ending Armenia’s unjust occupation in the region. This honorable war, launched against a long-standing injustice, is the UN Security Council affirming that Armenia is an occupier and that the occupied territories belong to Azerbaijan, and at the same time calling on the Armenians to end the occupation; It is compatible with the four UN Decision “822, 853, 874, 884”. The war started against the Armenian occupation elements on September 27th, 2020, ended with the absolute victory of Azerbaijan on November 10th, 2020. According to the basic principles of international law; attacks to change the borders by using force are not allowed under any circumstances, and the use of force to protect the attacked country and people is considered within the boundaries of the “right to self-defense”. Hence the 44 Day War; Since it complies with the rules of International Law, the UN, the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), it does not have a legal problem. The changing world after the Cold War and the 2008 global economic crisis; It has brought up the changing security perceptions and the ongoing global and regional conflicts, changing balances, new alliances and new potential regional power actors. Considering these developments that took place after the millennium, we can say that Azerbaijan is an important “keyhole” country, especially in the Caucasus region, and by looking at its geographical location that provides an opening from Europe to Asia, and the key to the lock is Zangezur. In this study, especially after the 44-Day War, the changing balances and opportunities in the South Caucasus will be examined. In this context, the importance of the Azerbaijan and Zangezur corridor, which we describe as the key country that was the absolute winner of the 44-Day War, will be discussed.

Paralinguistic singing attribute recognition using supervised machine learning for describing the classical tenor solo singing voice in vocal pedagogy

Humans can recognize someone’s identity through their voice and describe the timbral phenomena of voices. Likewise, the singing voice also has timbral phenomena. In vocal pedagogy, vocal teachers listen and then describe the timbral phenomena of their student’s singing voice. In this study, in order to enable machines to describe the singing voice from the vocal pedagogy point of view, we perform a task called paralinguistic singing attribute recognition. To achieve this goal, we first construct and publish an open source dataset named Singing Voice Quality and Technique Database (SVQTD) for supervised learning. All the audio clips in SVQTD are downloaded from YouTube and processed by music source separation and silence detection. For annotation, seven paralinguistic singing attributes commonly used in vocal pedagogy are adopted as the labels. Furthermore, to explore the different supervised machine learning algorithm for classifying each paralinguistic singing attribute, we adopt three main frameworks, namely openSMILE features with support vector machine (SF-SVM), end-to-end deep learning (E2EDL), and deep embedding with support vector machine (DE-SVM). Our methods are based on existing frameworks commonly employed in other paralinguistic speech attribute recognition tasks. In SF-SVM, we separately use the feature set of the INTERSPEECH 2009 Challenge and that of the INTERSPEECH 2016 Challenge as the SVM classifier’s input. In E2EDL, the end-to-end framework separately utilizes the ResNet and transformer encoder as feature extractors. In particular, to handle two-dimensional spectrogram input for a transformer, we adopt a sliced multi-head self-attention (SMSA) mechanism. In the DE-SVM, we use the representation extracted from the E2EDL model as the input of the SVM classifier. Experimental results on SVQTD show no absolute winner between E2EDL and the DE-SVM, which means that the back-end SVM classifier with the representation learned by E2E as input does not necessarily improve the performance. However, the DE-SVM that utilizes the ResNet as the feature extractor achieves the best average UAR, with an average 16% improvement over that of the SF-SVM with INTERSPEECH’s hand-crafted feature set.

The Game Theory Modeling of the Conflict between the Jammer Set, and the ARM Missile with the Search Radar Set and the Missile Equipped with HOJ to Find the Best Response of the Parties

    One of the points that can be deduced from the study of common methods and techniques in electronic warfare is that none of these methods is considered absolute winners and the holder can’t consider himself the undisputed winner of this field because there is more or less the opposite of every technique. Using a method or tool in a situation can be very effective, but it becomes a weakness when a competitor changes the method or tool. Therefore, in this battle, the correct and timely use of any technique and with full knowledge of the opponent and in accordance with the actions performed by him can be considered a factor of success and use all useful tools in this field. One of the useful tools in the field of strategic decision analysis is the game theory. With the help of this mathematical tool, the decision-making process between two or more decision-makers can be examined and the results can be analyzed. It is also possible to observe the effect of various parameters involved in the result of the problem and plan the result in the desired direction. In this paper, the selection of the best response in different stages of the conflict to solve different problems has been achieved. The main purpose is to provide a new approach to adopt a strategy, select radar technique, destructive response in case of incomplete information from each. The second goal is to use mathematical and algorithmic methods for better performance in the functionality of the parties.

NLUBroker : A QoE-driven Broker System for Natural Language Understanding Services

Cloud-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) services are becoming more popular with the development of artificial intelligence. More applications are integrated with cloud-based NLU services to enhance the way people communicate with machines. However, with NLU services provided by different companies powered by unrevealed AI technology, how to choose the best one is a problem for developers. Existing tools that can provide guidance to developers and make recommendations based on their needs are severely limited. This article comprehensively evaluates multiple state-of-the-art NLU services, and the results indicate that there is no absolute winner for different usage requirements. Motivated by this observation, we provide several insights and propose NLUBroker , a Quality of Experience-driven (QoE-driven) broker system, to select the proper service according to the environment. NLUBroker senses the client and service status and leverages a solution to the multi-armed bandit problem to conduct online learning, aiming to achieve maximum expected QoE. The performance of NLUBroker is evaluated in both simulation and real-world environments, and the evaluation results demonstrate that NLUBroker is an efficient solution for selecting NLU services. It is adaptive to changes in the environment, outperforms three baseline methods we evaluated and improves overall QoE up to 1.5× for the evaluated state-of-the-art NLU services.

Abundance‐ and incidence‐based estimation of total number of rare species in under‐sampled sites

AbstractQuestionsEcologists collecting field samples of biological data have a keen interest in addressing the following question: how many rare species are there in as‐yet unsurveyed additional samples? Depending on the size of a targeted additional sample, statistical models for estimating the number of rare species have not been systematically established and compared.LocationGlobal.MethodsFor fairly comparing and predicting rare‐species richness at the same sample‐size baseline, we systematically developed and compared four estimators for rarefaction and extrapolation of rare‐species richness with a given specific abundance. These four estimators included a uniformly minimum variance unbiased (UMVUE), Bayesian‐weighted, Chao‐derived unweighted and naïve estimator.ResultsAfter extensive numerical tests, for conducting rarefaction of rare‐species richness (i.e., when additional sample size was not larger than the original one) it is recommended to implement UMVUE, as it has zero bias and coverage percentage closest to 0.95. However, the performance of Bayesian‐weighted and Chao‐derived estimators is also satisfactory. By contrast, for conducting extrapolation of rare‐species richness (i.e., when the additional sample size is larger than the original one), the Bayesian‐weighted estimator is recommended, as it has the best performance among the four estimators (here UMVUE is inapplicable).ConclusionsThere was no absolute winner, as the different estimators have their own merits and are recommended under different settings. When conducting rarefaction of rare‐species richness, UMVUE, which has the highest accuracy, is recommended. By contrast, when conducting extrapolation of rare‐species richness, the Bayesian‐weighted estimator is recommended, as it has the overall best performance. To facilitate the potential application in the comparison and prediction of rare‐species diversity using rarefaction and extrapolation techniques, an R package (fRSE) has been developed; it is freely distributed at the following URL: https://github.com/ecomol/fRSE.

Find the Best Answer in the Conflict Scenario of Fighters with Electronic Warfare and a set of Defense Radars without Having Complete Information from Each other

Choosing a strategy for electronic conflicts in the field of action and situations similar to the problem scenario is a matter of experience and will not necessarily be the best possible choice. Therefore, the importance of providing a reasonable and measurable decision-making method in choosing a strategy in real conditions is quite clear. One of the points that can be deduced from the study of common methods and techniques in electronic warfare is that none of these methods are considered absolute winners and the holder can’t consider himself the undisputed winner of the field. Because there is more or less the opposite of any technique. Using a method or tool in a situation may be very effective, but with a change of method or change of tool by the competitor, it becomes a weakness. Therefore, in this battle, the correct and timely use of each technique, and with full knowledge of the opponent and in accordance with the actions performed by him can be considered a factor of success and all useful tools in this field can be used. One of the most useful tools in the field of strategic decision analysis is game theory. With the help of this mathematical tool, the decision-making process between two or more decision-makers can be examined and the results can be analyzed. It is also possible to observe the effect of various parameters involved in the result of the problem, and to plan the result in the desired direction. In this paper, selecting the best response in different stages of the conflict to solve various such problems is achieved and the main purpose is to present a new approach to adopt a strategy and select the radar and disruptive coping technique in case of incomplete information from each other, using a method It is mathematical and algorithmic, so that we have a better performance in the benefit function of the parties.

Гайдн, Моцарт… Плейель. О соперничестве и взаимовлияниях

Ignaz Pleyel was one of the talented and extraordinarily popular composers of his time. At least twice in his life he could instill a sense of rivalry in his eminent contemporaries—Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This gave birth to several most interesting instrumental works of the 18th century, i.e., the “Haydn” Quartets by Mozart and the Sinfonia Concertante in B flat major by Haydn. Mark Evan Bonds has convincingly shown that the “forefather” of the genre was not the only person involved in the three out of six Mozart’s quartets dedicated to Haydn. When composing his works, Mozart made himself familiar with Pleyel’s Quartets Oр. 1 written according to the model of Haydn’s works. Mozart, to all appearances, decided to surpass Pleyel. Haydn’s Sinfonia Concertante in B flat major was composed during the creative competition with Pleyel in London. It was organized by rival impresarios Johann Peter Salomon and Wilhelm Kramer. The composition was Haydn’s answer to similar works by his ex-pupil Pleyel—Sinfonia Concertante in F major and Sinfonia Concertante in A major. However, where Mozart was an absolute winner leaving behind not entirely independent quartet experiments of his rival, the competition between Haydn and Pleyel ended in a “draw”. The London concert symphonies of both composers are marked by the maturity of style, beautiful melodism, compositional creativity as well as the harmonic balance of virtuosic solo parts and orchestral monumentalism. Pleyel was instrumental in the very existence of certain works by Mozart and Haydn. However, both of them also influenced his style. This is especially true of Pleyel’s interpretation of the sonata form. In the first quartets he relied on Haydn’s model with the variant transformation of the main theme, then, however, he resorts to Mozart’s model with its thematic plurality, combinatorics, and thematic and structural parallels with the Italian opera arias. Pleyel's symphonies concertante are the extreme of similarity to Mozart's form.

YouTube Dominance in Sustainability of Gaining Knowledge via Social Media in University Setting—Case Study

The study deals with sustainability of social software applications in a university setting focusing primarily on the YouTube platform. The aim of this paper is to identify the potential of YouTube media in serving as a supportive educational tool. To meet the objective, researchers carried out an exploratory study based on mixed quantitative–qualitative methods. A mental knowledge model was designed as a starting point where crucial aspects of gaining knowledge were visualized. Sustainability of social media was analyzed in three defined sections encompassing three areas reflecting the needs of the educational process: social media as a tool of communication, repository of study materials and a tool for testing. The affective learning domain was highlighted in the study; one of the key explored categories was the category of satisfaction as a students’ motivation mover. Based on the findings, YouTube as an absolute winner was consequently analyzed in detail, focusing on three areas: satisfaction, kinds of activities on this platform and spent time. The discussion raises questions on pitfalls of social media utilization; this chapter also brings the latest experience from the time hit by coronavirus and related quarantine which showed incontestable benefits of social media in education and proved their irreplaceable role.

A Survey on Graph Processing Accelerators: Challenges and Opportunities

Graph is a well known data structure to represent the associated relationships in a variety of applications, e.g., data science and machine learning. Despite a wealth of existing efforts on developing graph processing systems for improving the performance and/or energy efficiency on traditional architectures, dedicated hardware solutions, also referred to as graph processing accelerators, are essential and emerging to provide the benefits significantly beyond those pure software solutions can offer. In this paper, we conduct a systematical survey regarding the design and implementation of graph processing accelerator. Specifically, we review the relevant techniques in three core components toward a graph processing accelerator: preprocessing, parallel graph computation and runtime scheduling. We also examine the benchmarks and results in existing studies for evaluating a graph processing accelerator. Interestingly, we find that there is not an absolute winner for all three aspects in graph acceleration due to the diverse characteristics of graph processing and complexity of hardware configurations. We finially present to discuss several challenges in details, and to further explore the opportunities for the future research.

Is Marathon Training Harder than the Ironman Training? An ECO-method Comparison.

Purpose: To compare the absolute and relative training load of the Marathon (42k) and the Ironman (IM) training in recreational trained athletes.Methods: Fifteen Marathoners and Fifteen Triathletes participated in the study. Their performance level was the same relative to the sex's absolute winner at the race. No differences were presented neither in age, nor in body weight, height, BMI, running VO2max max, or endurance training experience (p > 0.05). They all trained systematically for their respective event (IM or 42k). Daily training load was recorded in a training log, and the last 16 weeks were compared. Before this, gas exchange and lactate metabolic tests were conducted in order to set individual training zones. The Objective Load Scale (ECOs) training load quantification method was applied. Differences between IM and 42k athletes' outcomes were assessed using Student's test and significance level was set at p < 0.05.Results: As expected, Competition Time was significantly different (IM 11 h 45 min ± 1 h 54 min vs. 42k 3 h 6 min ± 28 min, p < 0.001). Similarly, Training Weekly Avg Time (IM 12.9 h ± 2.6 vs. 42k 5.2 ± 0.9), and Average Weekly ECOs (IM 834 ± 171 vs. 42k 526 ± 118) were significantly higher in IM (p < 0.001). However, the Ratio between Training Load and Training Time was superior for 42k runners when comparing ECOs (IM 65.8 ± 11.8 vs. 42k 99.3 ± 6.8) (p < 0.001). Finally, all ratios between training time or load vs. Competition Time were superior for 42k (p < 0.001) (Training Time/Race Time: IM 1.1 ± 0.3 vs. 42k 1.7 ± 0.5), (ECOs Training Load/Race Time: IM 1.2 ± 0.3 vs. 42k 2.9 ± 1.0).Conclusions: In spite of IM athletes' superior training time and total or weekly training load, when comparing the ratios between training load and training time, and training time or training load vs. competition time, the preparation of a 42k showed to be harder.

Faster proximity searching with the distal SAT

Searching by proximity has been a source of puzzling behaviors and counter-intuitive findings for well established algorithmic design rules. One example is a linked list; it is the worst data structure for exact searching, and one of the most competitive for proximity searching. Common sense also dictates that an online data structure is less competitive than the full-knowledge, static version. A counter example in proximity searching is the static Spatial Approximation Tree (SAT), which is slower than its dynamic version (DSAT).In this paper we show that changing only the insertion policy of the SAT, leaving every other aspect of the data structure untouched, can produce a systematically faster index. We call the index Distal Spatial Approximation Tree (DiSAT). We found that even a random insertion policy produce a faster version of the SAT, which explains why the DSAT is faster than SAT. In brief, the SAT is improved by selecting distal, instead of proximal, nodes. This is the exact opposite of the insertion policy proposed in the original paper, and can be used in main or secondary memory versions of the index.We tested our approach with representatives of the state of the art in exact proximity searching. As it happens often in experimental setups, there are no absolute winners in all the aspects tested. Our data structure has no parameters to tune-up and a small memory footprint. In addition it can be constructed quickly. Our approach is among the most competitive, those outperforming DiSAT achieve this at the expense of larger memory usage or an impractical construction time.

Absolute Strength: Exploring Momentum in Stock Returns

We document a new pattern in stock returns that we call absolute strength momentum. Stocks that have significantly increased in value in the recent past (absolute strength winners) continue to gain, and stocks that have significantly decreased in value (absolute strength losers) continue to lose in the near future. Absolute strength winner and loser portfolio breakpoints are recursively determined by the historical distribution of realized cumulative returns across time and across stocks. The historical distribution yields stable breakpoints that are always positive (negative) for the winner (loser) portfolios. As a result, winners are those that have experienced a significant upward trend, losers are those that have experienced a significant downward trend, and stocks with no momentum have cumulative returns that are not significantly different from zero. The absolute strength momentum strategy is related to, but different from, the relative strength strategy of Jegadeesh and Titman (1993). Time-series regressions show that the returns to the absolute strength momentum strategy completely explain the returns to the relative strength strategy, but not vice versa. Absolute strength momentum does not expose investors to severe crashes during crisis periods, and its profits are remarkably consistent over time. For example, an 11-1-1 strategy that buys absolute strength winners and sells absolute strength losers delivers a risk-adjusted return of 2.42% per month from 1965-2014 and 1.55% per month from 2000-2014.

Hotplug or Ballooning: A Comparative Study on Dynamic Memory Management Techniques for Virtual Machines

In virtualization environments, static memory allocation for virtual machines (VMs) can lead to severe service level agreement (SLA) violations or inefficient use of memory. Dynamic memory allocation mechanisms such as ballooning and memory hotplug were proposed to handle the dynamics of memory demands. However, these mechanisms so far have not been quantitatively or comparatively studied. In this paper, we first develop a runtime system called U-tube, which provides a framework to adopt memory hotplug or ballooning for dynamic memory allocation. We then implement fine-grained memory hotplug in Xen. We demonstrate the effectiveness of U-tube for dynamic memory management through two case studies: dynamic memory balancing and memory overcommitment. With these two case studies, we make a quantitative comparison between memory hotplug and ballooning. The experiments show that there is no absolute winner for different scenarios. Our findings can be very useful for practitioners to choose the suitable dynamic memory management techniques in different scenarios.

The Serbian question in the allied policy towards Yugoslavia in 1944

Politico-military outcome in Yugoslavia, which followed after the operations of the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia and units of the Red Army during the liberation of Serbia in the autumn of 1944, dispelled many expectations that, once the occupying forces had departed, it would become the site of a bloody civil war between the Partisans and the Chetniks, with unforeseeable consequences. Civil war was averted owing to the entrance of the Red Army and combat support that the Red Army provided to the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia in Serbia. By their political support to Tito and his forces since mid-1944, the Western Allies, especially the British, decisively contributed to 'picking the winners' in the Yugoslav war outcome, enabling the communists to end the war as the absolute winners. On the other hand, without the support and assistance of the Allies, the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland and its leader remained abandoned against the winds of political events that suited their greatest internal enemy: at the end of the war, Serbia found itself in the 'grip' of communists and the movement led by them. The politico-military outcome in Serbia in 1944 affected also the fate of Yugoslavia after the war. Sources of domestic and foreign origin, as well as modern historiographical literature, provide arguments that the great powers in the war - Germany, on the one side, and the USSR, the United Kingdom and the United States, on the other, figured that also the Yugoslavian question depended on resolving the Serbian question. Who will 'possess' Serbia in certain stages of the war and after its completion was important not only in terms of the internal relations (Chetniks-Partisans), but also in the context of the relations between allies (especially Soviet-British relations) during World War II. Due to its geopolitical position and economic importance, Serbia was equally an object of direct and global interests of the occupying forces, allies and other actors in Yugoslav theater of war, who proceeded from different positions and sought a definite resolution, the outcome of which remained uncertain for all parties almost to the end of the war.

Performance Analysis and Algorithm Selection for Reliable Multicast in IEEE 802.11aa Wireless LAN

Legacy IEEE 802.11 does not efficiently support multicast transmissions. In order to cope with the increasing demand for multicast, mainly required to deliver multimedia traffic, the IEEE 802.11aa Task Group has recently standardized new mechanisms to allow efficient and robust transmission of multicast flows in Wireless LAN. However, the standard allows the use of different mechanisms for this purpose, and leaves open the choice of which one to use for a given scenario. In this paper, we present an analytical model to evaluate the performance of the mechanisms included in the 802.11aa standard and compare their performance. Our analysis shows that there is no absolute winner out of these mechanisms, and performance strongly depends on the scenario. Building on our model, we then propose a novel algorithm that selects the best multicast mechanism to use as a function of the scenario conditions. Our results are validated by extensive simulations.

Positional Voting Systems Generated by Cumulative Standings Functions

Positional voting systems are a class of voting systems where voters rank order the candidates from best to worst and a set of winners is selected using the positions of the candidates in the voters’ preference orders. Although scoring rules are the best known positional voting systems, this class includes other voting systems proposed in the literature as, for example, the Majoritarian Compromise or the \(q\)-Approval Fallback Bargaining. In this paper we show that some of these positional voting systems can be integrated in a model based on cumulative standings functions. The proposed model allows us to establish a general framework for the analysis of these voting systems, to extend to them some results in the literature for the particular case of the scoring rules, and also facilitates the study of the social choice properties considered in the paper: monotonicity, Pareto-optimality, immunity to the absolute winner paradox, Condorcet consistency, immunity to the absolute loser paradox and immunity to the Condorcet loser paradox.