Break Ties Research Articles

VERICONDOR: End-to-End Verifiable Condorcet Voting with support for Strict Preference and Indifference

Condorcet voting is widely regarded as one of the most important voting systems in social choice theory. However, it has seen little adoption in practice, due to complex tallying and the need to break ties when there is a Condorcet cycle. Several online Condorcet voting systems have been developed to perform digital tallying and tie-breaking procedures, but they require voters to completely trust the server. Additionally, many end-to-end (E2E) verifiable e-voting systems require trustworthy authorities to perform complex decryption and tallying operations. We propose VERICONDOR, the first E2E verifibbolable Condorcet e-voting system without tallying authorities. VERICONDOR allows a voter to fully verify the tallying integrity by themselves while providing strong protection of ballot secrecy. We present novel zero-knowledge proof techniques to prove the well-formedness of an encrypted ballot with exceptional efficiency. VERICONDOR supports ranking candidates with strict preference, as well as indifference. The computational cost is exceptionally efficient for strict preferences at \(\mathcal{O}(n^{2})\) per ballot for \(n\) candidates, while remaining practical for indifferences at \(\mathcal{O}(n^{3})\) . In the case of ties, we show how to apply known Condorcet methods to break them in a publicly verifiable manner. Finally, we present a proof of concept implementation and evaluate its performance.

VIOLÊNCIA DOMÉSTICA E O ACOLHIMENTO FEMININO: A IMPORTÂNCIA DAS CASAS DE APOIO PARA MULHERES VÍTIMAS

This study addresses the issue of domestic violence against women, highlighting the role of shelters in Amazonas as essential instruments in breaking the cycle of violence. The general objective is to analyse how these institutions contribute to the protection and recovery of victims, providing comprehensive support that promotes their autonomy and security. The methodology applied is based on a theoretical and practical analysis of the functioning of shelters, assessing legislative aspects and their application in the state of Amazonas. The research reveals that sheltering offers a safe and structured environment where women receive psychological, legal, and social support, significantly contributing to breaking the violence cycle and rebuilding self-esteem. The results indicate that, beyond providing shelter, these facilities offer multidimensional support that helps victims understand their rights and develop the confidence necessary to break ties with the aggressor. The conclusions reinforce the importance of these shelters within the women's protection system, suggesting the need to improve shelter policies to fully ensure victims’ rights to safety and dignity. Expanding resources and continuous team training are recommended to ensure shelters in Amazonas can provide even more effective assistance to women in vulnerable situations.

Development and Evaluation of an Automated Protocol Recommendation System for Chest CT Using Natural Language Processing With CLEVER Terminology Word Replacement.

Purpose: To evaluate the clinical performance of a Protocol Recommendation System (PRS) automatic protocolling of chest CT imaging requests. Materials and Methods: 322 387 consecutive historical imaging requests for chest CT between 2017 and 2022 were extracted from a radiology information system (RIS) database containing 16 associated patient information values. Records with missing fields and protocols with <100 occurrences were removed, leaving 18 protocols for training. After freetext pre-processing and applying CLEVER terminology word replacements, the features of a bag-of-words model were used to train a multinomial logistic regression classifier. Four readers protocolled 300 clinically executed protocols (CEP) based on all clinically available information. After their selection was made, the PRS and CEP were unblinded, and the readers were asked to score their agreement (1 = severe error, 2 = moderate error, 3 = disagreement but acceptable, 4 = agreement). The ground truth was established by the readers' majority selection, a judge helped break ties. For the PRS and CEP, the accuracy and clinical acceptability (scores 3 and 4) were calculated. The readers' protocolling reliability was measured using Fleiss' Kappa. Results: Four readers agreed on 203/300 protocols, 3 on 82/300 cases, and in 15 cases, a judge was needed. PRS errors were found by the 4 readers in 1%, 2.7%, 1%, and 0.7% of the cases, respectively. The accuracy/clinical acceptability of the PRS and CEP were 84.3%/98.6% and 83.0%/99.3%, respectively. The Fleiss' Kappa for all readers and all protocols was 0.805. Conclusion: The PRS achieved similar accuracy to human performance and may help radiologists master the ever-increasing workload.

DOMINO: Visual Causal Reasoning With Time-Dependent Phenomena.

Current work on using visual analytics to determine causal relations among variables has mostly been based on the concept of counterfactuals. As such the derived static causal networks do not take into account the effect of time as an indicator. However, knowing the time delay of a causal relation can be crucial as it instructs how and when actions should be taken. Yet, similar to static causality, deriving causal relations from observational time-series data, as opposed to designed experiments, is not a straightforward process. It can greatly benefit from human insight to break ties and resolve errors. We hence propose a set of visual analytics methods that allow humans to participate in the discovery of causal relations associated with windows of time delay. Specifically, we leverage a well-established method, logic-based causality, to enable analysts to test the significance of potential causes and measure their influences toward a certain effect. Furthermore, since an effect can be a cause of other effects, we allow users to aggregate different temporal cause-effect relations found with our method into a visual flow diagram to enable the discovery of temporal causal networks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods we constructed a prototype system named DOMINO and showcase it via a number of case studies using real-world datasets. Finally, we also used DOMINO to conduct several evaluations with human analysts from different science domains in order to gain feedback on the utility of our system in practical scenarios.

یہود کے رسم و رواج کے مسلمانوں پر اثرات :وجوہ اور تدارک

In the Quran Allah has made it clear that a person who believes in Allah and his messenger cannot make friends with the enemies of Allah and his messenger. Although it may not have its own close relatives. Because one who is an enemy of Allah and his messenger cannot be a friend and benefactor of a Muslim. There is a need for the Muslim Ummah to break ties with disbelief and join Islam and people of Islam and instead of the enemies of Islam. he should build bonds of love and affection but rather his own society, politics, governments, friendship relationship maintain only with the people of Islam. Disobey the infidels and Idolaters from the Jews and Hindus etc., by their habits and customs. In how many habits have seen ordered to oppose Jews Christians and infidels and have been forbidden to imitate them and have been prevented from participating in their programs.

Selecting a winner with external referees

We consider a problem of mechanism design without money, where a planner selects a winner among a set of agents with binary types and receives outside signals (like the report of external referees). We show that there is a gap between the optimal Dominant Strategy Incentive Compatible (DSIC) mechanism and the optimal Bayesian Incentive Compatible (BIC) mechanism. In the optimal BIC mechanism, the planner can leverage the outside signal to elicit information about agents' types. BIC mechanisms are lexicographic mechanisms, where the planner first shortlists agents who receive high reports from the referees and then uses agents' reports to break ties among agents in the shortlist. We compare the “self-evaluation” mechanism with a “peer evaluation” mechanism where agents evaluate other agents, and show that for the same signal precision, the self- evaluation mechanism outperforms the peer evaluation mechanism. We show that optimal Ex Post Incentive Compatible (EPIC) mechanisms give the planner an intermediate value between the optimal DSIC and BIC mechanisms

Tie-Break Bootstrap for Nonparametric Rank Statistics

In this article, we propose a new bootstrap procedure for the empirical copula process. The procedure involves taking pseudo samples of normalized ranks in the same fashion as the classical bootstrap and applying small perturbations to break ties in the normalized ranks. Our procedure is a simple modification of the usual bootstrap based on sampling with replacement, yet it provides noticeable improvement in the finite sample performance. We also discuss how to incorporate our procedure into the time series framework. Since nonparametric rank statistics can be treated as functionals of the empirical copula, our proposal is useful in approximating the distribution of rank statistics in general. As an empirical illustration, we apply our bootstrap procedure to test the null hypotheses of positive quadrant dependence, tail monotonicity, and stochastic monotonicity, using U.S. Census data on spousal incomes in the past 15 years.

Neighbourhood environment as a risk factor for adverse health outcomes through association with the microbiome: protocol for a scoping review

IntroductionThe connection of the microbiome to human health intersects with the physical environment of humans. Each microbiome location can be influenced by environmental conditions that relate to specific geographical locations,...

Identifying the most important set of weights when modelling bad outputs with the weak disposability approach

Environmental efficiency and the shadow prices of undesirable outputs have received increasing attention in recent years. In data envelopment analysis the shadow prices can be calculated using the dual variables, or weights, from the solved linear programming program. However, the weights, and therefore the shadow prices, for corner points are not necessarily unique and most linear program solvers simply return one of the possible optimal values. To overcome this uncertainty we build on a model suggested by Cooper et al. (2007) which for corner points selects a set of weights that is most supported by other points on the frontier. In the context of incorporating undesirable outputs, we adjust their idea for the weak disposability model and suggest an alternative approach to break ties in case two sets of weights are supported by the same number of points. We illustrate the models using a constructed example dataset and also apply it on a sample of UK dairy farms.

A new graph parameter to measure linearity

AbstractConsider a sequence of Lexicographic Breadth‐First‐Search vertex orderings where each ordering is used to break ties for . Since the total number of vertex orderings of a finite graph is finite, this sequence must end in a cycle of vertex orderings. The possible length of this cycle is the main subject of this work. Intuitively, we prove for graphs with a known notion of linearity (e.g., interval graphs with their interval representation on the real line), this cycle cannot be too big, no matter which vertex ordering we start with. More precisely, it was conjectured by Dusart and Habib that for cocomparability graphs, the size of this cycle is always 2, independent of the starting order. Furthermore Stacho asked whether for arbitrary graphs, the size of such a cycle is always bounded by the asteroidal number of the graph. In this work, while we answer this latter question negatively, we provide support for the conjecture on cocomparability graphs by proving it for the subclass of domino‐free cocomparability graphs. This subclass contains cographs, proper interval, interval and cobipartite graphs. We also provide simpler independent proofs for each of these cases which lead to stronger results on this subclasses.

Postcolonialism in International Studies: Two Faces of Theory

Postcolonial theory is gradually entering the research arsenal of international relations, although it is not yet widely represented in modern international political science. The importance of mastering the tools and techniques of this paradigm or a set of relatively close paradigms is associated both with the gradual rejection of the Eurocentric vision of global and regional political history, as well as the identification of spatial and temporal features of theorizing on international issues. In this regard, it is necessary to identify the internal potential of postcolonial theory and those ontological, epistemological and methodological foundations of this theory, which will allow more concrete application of its concepts, interpretations and causalities to international realities. That is why the article attempts to single out the basic types of the postcolonial theory of international relations while revealing their key methodological principles and assessing the originality of the object and purpose of the study. On the basis of the interpretivist principles of the analysis of theories, the author reconstructs the key ontological and epistemological foundations and features of the interpretation of causal relationships in postcolonial way of thinking. The article highlights two main types of postcolonial theory - Postcolonialism of difference and Postcolonialism of interdependence. Despite the similarity in the basic desire to liberate scientific discourse from the techniques and concepts of Eurocentric science, these types of postcolonial thinking differ in the degree of willingness to break ties with the colonial past, in the requirements for the final result of the study, and also in the appreciation of space and social time in theorizing per se. Based on the identified types of postcolonial theory, the author proposes the trajectories of interaction of the theory with other schools of research in international relations, and also identifies geographically limits of these types. Thus, the article demonstrates porousness, analytical potential and adaptiveness of the discussed approaches that makes them more useful for the current IR studies.

Turning Ukrainians into a separate nation

Abstract Ukraine's national identity was born out of historical events which impacted the regions in Ukraine differently. In western and central parts of Ukraine, the people tend to be more pro-Western, while in the eastern and southern parts of the country, the people are more pro-Russian. This difference emerged from two approaches to the Ukrainian identity. The pro-Western part of the country believes that they were a separate nation from the Russians and should break ties with Russia. The pro-Russian part believes that the Ukrainians and the Russians are the same nation or two brotherhood nations that should stand together against outside threats. This paper will analyze which key historical events were the roots of the Ukrainian national identity and where the differences between the regional approaches are laying. This difference between pro-Western and pro-Russian attitudes influenced the Ukrainian political landscape from its independence until 2014. After the Revolution of Dignity, the occupation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas, the political situation started to change towards more pro-Western policies. The invasion in 2022 could be the final nail in the coffin of the Ukrainian-Russian brotherhood, and it might erase the last difference between the two parts of Ukraine.

Explaining a Potential Interview Match for Graduate Medical Education

Explaining a Potential Interview Match for Graduate Medical Education

The Animal Eye and Refugee Vulnerability in Wajdi Mouawad’s Anima

Anima, by Lebanese-born Canadian-raised author Wajdi Mouawad, is a road novel that takes the reader through different locations on the North American continent in order to explore the darkest side of humankind. This approach will focus on the provocative narrative technique used by Mouawad, filtered through the eyes of a significant number of animals and insects, in order to consider the different representations of vulnerability that articulate the text. In the novel, animals and insects are not only the narrators but also fundamental characters. As this analysis will show, their vulnerability represents the uncertainty of fate in contemporary society, being in the hands of those apparently superior creatures that decide when they can live and when they have to die. As an example of a vulnerable text, Anima relies on the theatricality of this animal Greek chorus to represent the need for humans to undergo a process of animalization. The protagonist, Wahhch Debch, reaches a stage of symbiosis with his animal side that allows him to transcend his vulnerability as a child refugee and as an adult who lost his wife, and this new sense of animal self serves him as an empowering element to break ties with his past.

Reference-dependent choice under plurality rule

We study a model of choice where inferior alternatives may act as reference points that influence the appeal of those that are superior. In contrast to the current literature, the model allows reference points to jointly influence choice. In particular, facing multiple reference points, we assume that the decision-maker uses plurality rule. We show that, as long as inferiors only break ties between superiors rather than reversing the choice between them, the model retains a strong connection to rational choice. More precisely, it is proved that the model is characterized by a “single-step” relaxation of an inductive decomposition of the weak axiom of revealed preference.

IP Geolocation through Reverse DNS

IP Geolocation databases are widely used in online services to map end-user IP addresses to their geographical location. However, they use proprietary geolocation methods, and in some cases they have poor accuracy. We propose a systematic approach to use reverse DNS hostnames for geolocating IP addresses, with a focus on end-user IP addresses as opposed to router IPs. Our method is designed to be combined with other geolocation data sources. We cast the task as a machine learning problem where, for a given hostname, we first generate a list of potential location candidates, and then we classify each hostname and candidate pair using a binary classifier to determine which location candidates are plausible. Finally, we rank the remaining candidates by confidence (class probability) and break ties by population count. We evaluate our approach against three state-of-the-art academic baselines and two state-of-the-art commercial IP geolocation databases. We show that our work significantly outperforms the academic baselines and is complementary and competitive with commercial databases. To aid reproducibility, we open source our entire approach and make it available to the academic community.

Implementation and evaluation of a multivariate abstraction-based, interval-based dynamic time-warping method as a similarity measure for longitudinal medical records

We extended dynamic time warping (DTW) into interval-based dynamic time warping (iDTW), including (A) interval-based representation (iRep): [1] abstracting raw, time-stamped data into interval-based abstractions, [2] comparison-period scoping, [3] partitioning abstract intervals into a given temporal granularity; (B) interval-based matching (iMatch): matching partitioned, abstract-concepts records, using a modified DTW. Using domain knowledge, we abstracted the raw data of medical records, for up to three concepts out of four or five relevant concepts, into two interval types: State abstractions (e.g. LOW, HIGH) and Gradient abstractions (e.g. INCREASING, DECREASING). We created all uni-dimensional (State or Gradient) or multi-dimensional (State and Gradient) abstraction combinations. Tasks: Classifying 161 oncology patients records as autologous or allogenic bone-marrow transplantation; classifying 125 hepatitis patients records as B or C hepatitis; predicting micro- or macro-albuminuria in the next year for 151 Type 2 diabetes patients. We used a k-Nearest-Neighbors majority, k = an odd number from 1 to SQRT(N), N = set size. 75,936 10-fold cross-validation experiments were performed: 33,600 (Oncology), 28,800 (Hepatitis), 13,536 (Diabetes). Measures: Area Under the Curve (AUC), optimal Youden's Index. Paired t-tests compared result vectors for equivalent configurations other than a tested variable, to determine a significant mean accuracy difference (P<0.05). Mean classification and prediction using abstractions was significantly better than using only raw time-stamped data. In each domain, at least one abstraction combination led to a significantly better mean performance than raw data. Increasing feature number and using Multi-dimensional abstractions enhanced performance. Unlike when using raw data, optimal mean performance was often reached with k=5, using abstractions.

Humour and Antiquity in Film: Roman Scandals and Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Antiquity appears in films from the very beginning of cinema. As in other examples of reception, the presence of antiquity depends on the context of reception, the specificity of the medium which includes the relationship with the audience, as well as the personal mark of the author. The subject of this paper are two movies set in antiquity: Roman Scandals (1933) and The Life of Brian (1977). Both films are comedies, the plots of which are set in the ancient past, and both are satirical, meaning that they have a contemporary social sting. Also, both comedies belong to the genre of swords and sandals (if we take this as an umbrella term for all films related to antiquity, and not only the epic sagas of the mid-1950s and 1960s), revealing a similar, parodic attitude to the mentioned genre. The film Roman Scandals, a musical comedy with elements of burlesque, is set both in contemporary America (the midwestern city of West Rome) and ancient Rome, constructing the complex process of identification and differentiation with ancient Rome. All this has to do with the remarkable usage of Rome in American culture and history, especially since the time when America started to break ties with Britain. This is explicitly marked in the scene of the exhibition in the Museum of Rome, which, as it is emphasized, belongs to the period of the Roman invasion of Britain. Humorous twists are numerous, being constructed in language, in problems of adaptations and dialogues between cultures, and in the parody of the genre and its motifs. The Life of Brian also parodies the genre of swords and sandals and its subgenre – biblical and Christian movies. Although both films are set in antiquity, the humorous procedures construct the satirical tone, which always bears a contemporary social sting. The anachronisms, and overlapping of history and contemporariness are constructed differently in those two films. However, they both raise, among other things, a question crucial for the research field of classical reception (to which this paper belongs), and that is the way in which antiquity is used in the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm). The paper also gives attention to the genre of parody, which already appeared in antiquity, continuing its existence through the Middle Ages, especially regarding the sacred texts and forms which, according to Bakhtin, all had their parodic version. In view of the fact that both films construct humour in numerous ways, the paper focuses particularly on the humorous procedures set in the context of antiquity, which among other things, raises the question of the attitude towards antiquity that these films pose.

A prime-partition strategy for spectrum assignment problem in elastic optical networks

Elastic optical networking is an attractive technology for the next generation of backbone networks, because it can flexibly provide spectrum resources to connection requests. In elastic optical networks, spectrum resources are generally split into frequency slices with finer granularity and each connection request can use several frequency slices according to its bandwidth requirement. In the process of spectrum assignment, numbers of frequency slices used by different connection requests are diverse, which may lead to misalignment of frequency slices in different links. The misalignment would affect the effective use of spectrum resources and result in the increase of blocking probability of connection requests. For the purpose of reducing the misalignment of frequency slices and thereby decreasing the blocking probability, we propose a prime-partition strategy for the spectrum assignment problem in this paper. The strategy partitions frequency slices in each link into prime blocks with sizes equaling prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, etc., and the prime blocks with the same size are aligned in different links. After the partition operation, each connection request can be served by one or more adjacent prime blocks with the same size, no matter how many frequency slices it needs. Based on the prime-partition strategy, we design a novel spectrum assignment algorithm in which the enhanced-most-used policy is used to break ties. The enhanced-most-used policy can make idle prime blocks more aligned in different links. Simulation results show that the prime-partition-based spectrum assignment algorithm outperforms the existing well-performed algorithms in terms of blocking probability.

Improving the Performance of SDM-EON Through Demand Prioritization: A Comprehensive Analysis

This paper studies the impact of demand-prioritization on Space-Division Multiplexing Elastic Optical Networks (SDM-EON). For this purpose, we solve the static Routing, Modulation Level, Spatial Mode, and Spectrum Assignment (RMLSSA) problem using 34 different explainable demand-prioritization strategies. Although previous works have applied heuristics or meta-heuristics to perform demand-prioritization, they have not focused on identifying the best prioritization strategies, their inner operation, and the implications behind their good performance by thorough profiling and impact analysis. We focus on a comprehensive analysis identifying the best explainable strategies to sort network demands in SDM-EON, considering the physical-layer impairments found in optical communications. Also, we show that simply using the common shortest path routing might lead to higher resource requirements. Extensive simulation results show that up to 8.33% capacity savings can be achieved on average by balanced routing, up to a 16.69% capacity savings can be achieved using the best performing demand-prioritization strategy compared to the worst-performing ones, the most used demand-prioritization strategy in the literature (serving demands with higher bandwidth requirements first) is not the best-performing one but the one sorting based on the path lengths, and using double-criteria strategies to break ties is key for a good performance. These results are relevant showing that a good combination of routing and demand-prioritization heuristics impact significantly on network performance. Additionally, they increase the understanding about the inner workings of good heuristics, a valuable knowledge when network settings forbid using more computationally complex approaches.