Arbitrary Rules Research Articles

Review: The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity, by Jessica Ordaz

Review: <i>The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity</i>, by Jessica Ordaz

Political Economy of Iran under the Pahlavi’s

Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, father and son, ruled Iran between 1926 and 1979. During their reign Iran saw all seasons, including modernisation, dictatorship, arbitrary rule, chaos, foreign invasion and revolution. It was also a period in which the Pahlavis’ nationalist ideology clashed with democratic ideals, communist aspirations and – ultimately – Islamist beliefs. This article is an investigation in this regard.

Political Imprisonment and Protest Mobilization: Evidence From the GDR

How does political imprisonment influence anti-regime protest? We argue that political imprisonment facilitates rather than stifles protest. Political imprisonment is a salient indicator of arbitrary rule creating ‘embodied grievances’. It enables the formation of dissident networks within prisons, and serves as a legitimating credential for former inmates to lead resistance. These mechanisms imply that political imprisonment is a self-defeating strategy, making it easier for the opposition to overcome their collective action problem. We test our argument with subnational data from the German Democratic Republic between 1984 and 1989. To account for endogenous latent dissent, we use originally collected archival data on local surveillance operations. Exploiting daily variation in the timing of protests in 1989, we analyze the long-term impact of political imprisonment on mobilization. Results from survival analyses lend support to our hypothesized relationship. Combined with semi-structured interviews to probe our mechanisms, our findings suggest that political imprisonment increases the likelihood of protest mobilization.

Tehran University: A Contested Terrain

ABSTRACT Designed by the Beaux-Arts graduates, Tehran University was founded in 1934, in the Pahlavi era (1926-79) when desires for modernisation confronted the arbitrary rule of the Iranian government. The project of the University contained all the complexities of a politically sensitive government building. It was to present an image of a modern and progressive nation to the international community. Simultaneously, the erection of the University’s first building and its site location within the Iranian Capital were illustrative of the government’s dictatorial power and control over the Iranian intelligentsia and the religious elite (the ulama). By drawing upon archival documents and photographs collected primarily from the Central Library of Tehran University, never before discussed, this research investigates the clash of political views and interests over Tehran University’s sensitive site and demonstrates the manner in which the expression of those complexities was translated and manifested through its architecture. The article simultaneously delves into the twentieth-century practice of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, introducing the Beaux-Arts design method as a powerful tool to negotiate the expression of state power through the University site plan and buildings.

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England

Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England

How do the number of missing daily diary days impact the psychometric properties and meaningful change thresholds arising from a weekly average summary score?

PurposeQuality of life research often collects daily information and averages this over a week, producing a summary score. When data are missing, arbitrary rules (such as requiring at least 4/7 observations) are used to determine whether a patient’s summary score is created or set to missing. This simulation work aimed to assess the impact of missing data on the estimates produced by summary scores, the psychometric properties of the resulting summary score estimates and the impact on interpretation thresholds.MethodsComplete longitudinal data were simulated for 1000 samples of 400 patients with different day-to-day variability. Data were deleted from these samples in line with missingness mechanisms to create scenarios with up to six days of missing data. Summary scores were created for complete and missing data scenarios. Summary score estimates, psychometric properties and meaningful change estimates were assessed for missing data scenarios compared to complete data.ResultsIn most cases, the 4/7 day rule was supported, but this depended on daily variability. Fewer days of data were sometimes acceptable, but this was also dependent on the proportion of patients with missing data. Tables and figures allow researchers to assess the potential impact of missing data in their own studies.ConclusionsThis work suggests that the missing data rule used to create summary scores impacts on the estimate, measurement properties and interpretation thresholds. Although a general rule of 4/7 days is supported, the way the summary score is derived does not have a uniform impact across psychometric analyses. Recommendations are to use the 4/7 rule, but plan for sensitivity analyses with other missing data rules.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11136-022-03198-9.

Hegel on Market Laws and External Teleology

AbstractBy highlighting the logico-metaphysical undergirding of Hegel's discussion of the market, this article brings to light certain proto-Marxist or proto-socialist tendencies in Hegel as well as key disagreements with Adam Smith, which have been missed by recent studies like Herzog's Inventing the Market (2013). For Smith, market laws function like an impartial arbiter that rewards honest effort; his main worry is that individuals may fail to display virtues like honesty, probity and frugality, thereby hindering the smooth functioning of the market mechanism. For Hegel, by contrast, the market is a de-personalized player in its own right that imposes its arbitrary rule, a rule that does not reflect in any way the virtues and efforts of market participants. This assessment is easily overlooked, unless one realizes that Hegel believes the market to be functioning according to the structures that he discusses in the ‘Objectivity’ section in his Science of Logic. As a consequence of this assessment Hegel attributes a different role to the state than Smith does: Rather than aiding and shaping individuals, by means of institutions, education and health care, the state needs to address the structural functioning of market laws and, to some extent, inhibit its free-flowing functioning. Individuals need to re-appropriate their own social relations by organizing them along the lines of the logical organism or internal teleology. After outlining Hegel's interpretation and assessment of the market structures with the help of the Logic, I will discuss Hegel's demand for an organic state, that sublates and oversees the market, thereby safeguarding the important personal freedoms enjoyed by market participants.

Military culture and political leadership in Nigeria’s democracy

ABSTRACT The nature and pattern of sustenance of democratic rule in Nigeria since the inception of the fourth republic which followed the exit of military rulers in 1999 have continued to generate scholarly debates. The conundrum of whether or not the country has freed itself from the ominous influence of the culture of military rule is a huge concern. Using former President Obasanjo and current President Buhari as case studies, this article examines the extent to which the reemergence of Nigeria’s former military Heads of State as civilian administrators since 1999 has affected constitutionalism and democratization in Nigeria’s political leadership. The patterns of administration of civilian government as well as democratic infractions of both regimes are considered. The paper relies on secondary data and the descriptive method of analysis. The Military Transition Model, a strand of Transition Theory, was used as a framework for further clarification. Rather than improve on the tenets of democracy, findings show that elements of absolutism and arbitrary rule are strongly perceptible. There are no convincing proofs that the reappearance of Nigeria’s former military rulers into political leadership is reinforcing the country’s long awaited democratization processes. The current political leadership in Nigeria has not demonstrated sufficient political will to eschew the dregs of contempt for rule of law. The study concludes that problems of democratic infractions are prevalent in the current political system largely due to the persisting influence of military culture of political leadership.

Articulatory suppression during instruction encoding impedes performance in choice reaction time tasks

Theories of instruction following assume that language contributes to our ability to understand and implement instructions. The two experiments reported here investigated that assumption. Participants (total N = 96) were required to learn a series of novel tasks, with each task consisting of six arbitrary stimulus-response rules. All tasks were preceded by an instruction phase (a visual depiction of the correct stimulus-response rules for each task), during which participants performed a verbal distractor task (articulatory suppression), a non-verbal distractor task (foot tapping) or no distractor task. Additionally, the duration of the instruction phase was varied so that it was either long (60 s) or short (30 s in Experiment 1, or 10 s in Experiment 2). In both experiments participants made more errors when they had performed articulatory suppression during the instruction interval, compared to the foot tapping and no distractor task conditions. Furthermore, Experiment 2 found that this detrimental effect of articulatory suppression was especially pronounced with a very short instruction duration. These findings demonstrate that language plays a crucial role in the encoding of novel task instructions, especially when instructions are encoded under time pressure.

SIMD-Matcher: A SIMD-based Arbitrary Matching Framework

Packet classification methods rely upon matching packet content/header against pre-defined rules, which are generated by network applications and their configurations. With the rapid development of network technology and the fast-growing network applications, users seek more enhanced, secure, and diverse network services. Hence it becomes critical to improve the performance of arbitrary matching operations. This article presents SIMD-Matcher, an efficient Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) and cache-friendly arbitrary matching framework. To further improve the arbitrary matching performance, SIMD-Matcher adopts a trie node with a fixed high fanout and a varying span for each node depending on the data distribution. The trie node layout leverages cache and modern processor features such as SIMD instructions. To support arbitrary matching, we first interpret arbitrary rules into three fields: value, mask, and priority. Second, to support insertion of randomly positioned wildcards to arbitrary rules, we propose the SIMD-Matcher extraction algorithm to process the wildcard bits. Third, we add an array of wildcard entries to the leaf entries, which store the wildcard rules and guarantee the correctness of matching results. Experiments show that SIMD-Matcher outperforms GenMatcher under large-scale ruleset and key set, in terms of search time, insert time, and memory cost. Specifically with 5M rules, our method achieves a 2.7X speedup on search time, and the insertion time takes \( ~\sim \!\! 7.3 \) seconds, gaining a 1.38X speedup; meanwhile, the memory cost reduction is up to 6.17X.

Honesty Among Lawyers: Moral Character, Game Framing, and Honest Disclosures in Negotiations

Lawyers have broad discretion in deciding how honestly to behave when negotiating. We propose that lawyers’ choices about whether to disclose information to correct misimpressions by opposing counsel are guided by their moral character and their cognitive framing of negotiation. To investigate this possibility, we surveyed 215 lawyers from across the United States, examining the degree to which honest disclosure is associated with lawyers’ moral character and their tendency to frame negotiation in game‐like terms—a construal of negotiation that we label game framing. We hypothesize that the more that lawyers view negotiation through a game frame—that is, the more they view negotiation as an adversarial context with arbitrary and artificial rules—the less honest they will be in situations in which honest disclosure is not mandated by professional rules of conduct. We further hypothesize that lawyers with higher levels of moral character will apply a game frame to negotiation to a lesser degree than will lawyers with lower levels of moral character, and that honesty when negotiating will be higher when lawyers have higher versus lower levels of moral character. Our study results support these hypotheses. This work suggests that focusing on game‐like aspects of negotiation can induce a less moral and ethical mindset. To the extent that teaching law students to “think like a lawyer” encourages them to adopt a game frame of negotiation, we can expect such training to reduce the likelihood of honest disclosure.

Neural logic rule layers

Deep neural networks (DNN) are mainly black boxes, generally suffering from bad interpretability of their behavior and the results obtained. Hence, a human can not easily derive the relations modeled by the network. A reasonable way to provide interpretability for humans are logical rules. In this paper we propose neural logic rule layers (NLRL), which are able to represent arbitrary logic rules in terms of their conjunctive and disjunctive normal forms. Stacking various layers, we are theoretically able to represent arbitrary complex rules by the resulting neural network architecture. The NLRL are end-to-end trainable allowing to learn logic rules directly on the given data without needing any background information about the origin. We show in experiments, that NLRL-enhanced neural networks can model arithmetic and logical operations over the input values. Furthermore, we apply NLRL to image classification tasks and show that interpretability is provided without sacrificing classification performance by exchanging the fully-connected head of the network. We also apply NLRL to a real world industrial control problem where the task is to model the discrete control behaviour of a programmable logic controller (PLC), following a basic step sequence.

The health returns of attending university for the marginally eligible student.

A key policy question is whether continued expansion of university education is beneficial for the marginally eligible student. In this paper we exploit an arbitrary university eligibility rule combined with regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal effect of university attendance on healthcare utilization amongst young adults in Sweden. We find that the eligibility rule leads to a clear jump in university attendance of between 10% and 14% points for both males and females. 2SLS estimates find that a 10% point increase in university attendance causes a roughly one percentage point increase in hospital admissions due to mental ill health for males, almost exclusively related to alcohol and narcotics. Our findings for females, however, imply the opposite, suggesting that university attendance decreases hospital admissions related to mental health. The results for males sit in contrast to results from previous studies, and suggest that the effect of university education on health for the male student at the margin of eligibility is different to that of the average student.

Revenue-Sharing Allocation Strategies for Two-Sided Media Platforms: Pro-Rata vs. User-Centric

We consider a two-sided streaming service platform that generates revenues by charging users a subscription fee for unlimited access to the content and compensates content providers (artists) through a revenue-sharing allocation rule. Platform users are heterogeneous in both their overall consumption and the distribution of their consumption over different artists. We study two primary revenue allocation rules used by market-leading music streaming platforms—pro-rata and user-centric. With pro-rata, artists are paid proportionally to their share of the overall streaming volume, whereas with user-centric, each user’s subscription fee is divided proportionally among artists based on the consumption of that user. We characterize when these two allocation rules can sustain a set of artists on the platform and compare them from both the platform’s and the artists’ perspectives. In particular, we show that, despite the cross-subsidization between low- and high-streaming-volume users, the pro-rata rule can be preferred by both the platform and the artists. Furthermore, the platform’s problem of selecting an optimal portfolio of artists is NP-complete. However, by establishing connections to the knapsack problem, we develop a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the optimal platform’s profit. In addition to determining the platform’s optimal revenue allocation rule in the class of pro-rata and user-centric rules, we consider the optimal revenue allocation rule in the class of arbitrary rules. Building on duality theory, we develop a polynomial time algorithm that outputs a set of artists so that the platform’s profit is within a single artist’s revenue from the optimal profit. This paper was accepted by Gabriel Weintraub, revenue management and market analytics. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4307 .

Republican Reimaginings in Marlowe’s Edward II

This essay explores the intersection of republican and nationalist ideas in Marlowe’s Elizabethan history play Edward II. I read the play less in terms of recent dominant readings: that is, focussing on the same-sex relation between King Edward and his ‘minion’ Gaveston. Instead, I focus on the play’s critique of Edward’s authoritarian and arbitrary rule, a critique of monarchy informed by proto-republican ideology and a nascent nationalism. This essay also considers the play’s archipelagic angles within the context of the play’s initial inscription—Queen Elizabeth’s two-kingdom, three-nation rule—as well as its Jacobean publications.

Review Essay: “Beyond Metaphor”: The Uncanny Precariousness of Being

Review Essay: “Beyond Metaphor”: The Uncanny Precariousness of Being

Complexity aversion when SeekingAlpha

A global field experiment with Seeking Alpha shows that textual complexity affects investor attention to news and market outcomes. Investors were randomly assigned different titles for the same news article. Holding the article fixed, a one-standard-deviation increase in complexity leads to 6.1% fewer views. Complexity is more off-putting for less-sophisticated investors, when attention is more limited, and when the news is likely less important. Exploiting an arbitrary rule for breaking ties between tested titles, I find that title complexity affects markets—lowering announcement turnover and volatility.

Improving the analysis of adverse event data in randomized controlled trials

Analyzing treatment harm is vital but problematic with the relatively small sample sizes afforded in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Good analysis practice for efficacy outcomes are well established but there has been minimal progress for the analysis of adverse events (AEs). In this commentary we examine four key issues for AE analysis. Namely, why harm data in RCTs is undervalued, why AE analysis is difficult, what aspects of current analysis practice are unsatisfactory, and the challenges for selection and interpretation of AEs results in publications. We discuss how the value of harm data from RCTs could be better realized by reframing the research question to one for detecting signals of adverse reactions. We align established good statistical practice to current unsatisfactory practice. We encourage use of Bayesian analyses to enable cumulative assessment of harm across trial research phases and discourage selecting AEs to report based on arbitrary rules. We propose comprehendible summaries to be based on core outcome sets, serious and pre-specified events, and events leading to discontinuation. Analysis of AEs in contemporary clinical trials needs attention to progress. In the following we have outlined immediate, mid and longer-term strategies for trialists to adopt to support a change in practice

Dignity, arbitrary rule, and emancipation in an authoritarian regime: ethnographic remarks on the uprising in Belarus

ABSTRACT The protest movement in Belarus has been presented by some of its protagonists and analysts as a struggle for dignity, implying a contradiction between dignity and authoritarian rule. However, the author’s ethnographic work carried out between 1999 and 2013, which focused on the dachas of city dwellers on one hand and on everyday life in the kolkhozes and villages on the other, revealed examples of the attainment of dignity within the repressive system itself. Although the system is based on violence and arbitrary rule, it simultaneously generates means of establishing forms of dignity. Dachas enable the affirmation of an enhanced representation of oneself. In the collectivized countryside, certain moral qualities – endurance, resourcefulness, and self-reliance – can be manifested in daily activities and provide access to a sense of self-worth. Since 9 August 2020, these forms of dignity have been polarized into a form of defensive dignity, in which arbitrary rule and recognition are not antinomic and which is expressed as loyalty to the incumbent regime, and an offensive dignity, for which personal dignity can be complete only if the demonstrators’ demands for collective dignity are met.

Prospects of Digital Currency in India - A Way Forward

The era of information and communication technologies has created many opportunities in every aspect. The field that has been benefitted the most from these recent developments in the financial and business sector. The scope and speed of evolution in technology, customer perception, and wide acceptance indicate that these technologies and disruptions will transform the finance and banking sector as we know it, providing both opportunities and challenges to financial institutions. Systems that have traditionally been used for savings, investments are not well suited given the scale and agility required for the digital age. Keeping in mind this array, financial institutions are responding with new digitization and innovation initiatives, using analytics, cloud technologies, and other new alternatives to respond to customer expectations. In a country like India, with a large economy and a despotic regime, the country shows decent economic growth even after having a complex system of arbitrary rules and regulations. Amidst all the growth, there is a huge scope of transforming the investment and lending patterns, with the help of technologies becoming more customer-centric and efficient. So, the technologies like blockchain are looking to drive innovation across various industries in India. In the era of blockchain, cryptocurrencies are the main part of it. They are said to be the most disruptive technologies in this area. This paper is an attempt to find the future of digital currency in India from the international experience.