Coherent Hierarchy Research Articles

Подходы к оценке эффективности стратегий мезо- и микроуровней на основе индекса экономической сложности

The world economy is on the threshold of radical transformation of sectoral structure, modernization, robotiza-tion. The principles of its existence will change significantly in the near future (re-industrialization, regionaliza-tion, robotization, Internet of Things, cyber-physical complexes, etc.). Obviously, the development strategies of states, having a significant period of implementation, should already take into account new trends and prepare their economies for new realities. An important aspect is to build a coherent hierarchy of strategic plans by lev-els of management (state macro-level, regional meso-level and the level of individual economic entities – en-terprises (micro-level)). Cross-cutting strategy indicators are needed to address this challenge. It is clear that they should reflect the effectiveness of such strategies, such as the degree of alignment with the ideas of the new industrial policy and the current technological mode. The article attempts to analyze the possibilities of tools for assessing economic complexity at the subnational level and at the level of an individual enterprise.

Organizational structure and human agency within the South African health system: a qualitative case study of health promotion.

Despite international recognition of health promotion (HP) as a cost-effective way to improve population health, it is not highly regarded nor is it sufficiently institutionalized in many health systems. This diminishes its ability to deliver on its public health promises. This paper examined the role of organizational structure and human agency within the South African health system (drawing on Giddens’s structuration theory) in determining the extent of, and barriers to, the institutionalization of HP. We conducted a qualitative case study using a combination of in-depth interviews (n = 37), key informant interviews (n = 8) and one-day workshops (n = 5) with Department of Health (DoH) staff (HP and non-HP personnel) from national, provincial and district levels as well as external HP stakeholders. Within the South African health system, there are dedicated HP staffs, with no specified professional competencies or a coherent hierarchy of job titles. Allocated HP resources were frequently shifted to other programmes. This resulted in a disconnect between national and provincial levels, which impeded communication and opportunity to develop a shared vision and coherent programme. We found some examples of successful HP organization and implementation practices, such as the tobacco control legislation. Overall, HP staff had limited agency and were often unable to articulate the vision for HP. Uncertainty about the role of HP has led to powerlessness, and feelings of resentment have generated demotivation and moral distress. HP voices were seldom heard and were repressed by dominant curative-focused structures. If leaders of HP continue to be embedded in such an institution, there is little chance of driving an effective HP agenda. Therefore, there is a need to engage policy-makers to integrate HP into the health system fabric. Establishment of an independent HP foundation could be one mechanism to drive multi-sectoral collaboration, contribute to evidence-based HP research and further develop health in all policies through advocacy.

How Poor is Poor? A novel look at multidimensional poverty in the UK

The integrated nature of well-being produces difficulty in evaluating poverty levels and one issue is the neglected of human life aspects, multiple feedback loops, and an over-emphasis on income. In the light of current structural changes a multidimensional poverty measure (MPI), which includes some of those missing dimensions, closely related to the well-being of individuals, is constructed in this paper. Using data from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions Survey, this paper provides a fresh insight into the analysis of multidimensional poverty in the United Kingdom. One of the distinctive feature of the study is the use of polychoric factor loadings to estimate dimensional weights of the MPI, in addition to more arbitrary weighting schemes. This technique consists of a coherent hierarchy of principles, to verify which of the many acknowledged dimensions of poverty hold both theoretical and practical importance. Findings indicate that, the MPI is highly consistent with the conventional measures of poverty and multidimensional poverty has decreased over the period of examination.

Rethinking Globalization, English and Multilingualism in Thailand: A Report on a Five-Year Ethnography

The starting point of this paper is to the development of a relatively panoramic account of English and multilingualism in Thailand, illuminating the relationships among powers (trends), individuals and groups and their multilingual practices. Most previous studies draw upon arguments from the traditional monocentric model of nation-state multilingualism. Surprisingly, little is known about the polycentric forces influencing multilingual distributions. Methodologically, large-scale data sets are gathered through literature, documents, questionnaires, interviews and observing actual language behaviors. The ethnographic data gathered are analyzed through content analysis conventions. Challenging Smalley’s nationalist model, the central thesis of this paper is to present an alternative path, a polycentric model, to better understand Thailand’s multilingualism. There is a lack of adequate evidence within and across Thailand to show the existence of a universal and coherent hierarchy connecting different layers of language users. As such, this paper argues that Smalley’s universal hierarchy/dominance model has to compete with alternative models termed a ‘multiarchy’ or ‘multiarchies’ (a portmanteau of “multiple hierarchies”) where parallel language hierarchies co-exist with the orthodox one. Keywords: globalization; English; language use; multilingualism; Thailand

3D hierarchical optimization for multi-view depth map coding

Depth data has a widespread use since the popularity of high-resolution 3D sensors. In multi-view sequences, depth information is used to supplement the color data of each view. This article proposes a joint encoding of multiple depth maps with a unique representation. Color and depth images of each view are segmented independently and combined in an optimal Rate-Distortion fashion. The resulting partitions are projected to a reference view where a coherent hierarchy for the multiple views is built. A Rate-Distortionoptimization is applied to obtain the final segmentation choosing nodes of the hierarchy. The consistent segmentation is used to robustly encode depth maps of multiple views obtaining competitive results with HEVC coding standards. Available at: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-017-5409-z

A Homeomorphism Theorem for the Universal Type Space with the Uniform Weak Topology

Kolmogorov’s extension theorem provides a natural mapping from the space of coherent hierarchies of an agent’s first-order, second-order, etc. beliefs to the space of probability measures over the exogenous parameters and the other agents' belief hierarchies. Mertens and Zamir (1985) showed that, if the spaces of belief hierarchies are endowed with the product topology, then this mapping is a homeomorphism. This paper shows that this mapping is also a homeomorphism if the spaces of belief hierarchies are endowed with the uniform weak topology of Chen et al. (2010) or the universal strategic topology of Dekel et al. (2006), both of which ensure that strategic behaviour exhibits desirable continuity properties.

Beyond Harms

Wendt, Gone, and Nagata raise some very important questions about harm in psychotherapy and initiate a valuable dialogue between scholars of potentially harmful therapy and multicultural counseling and psychotherapy. This comment enlarges upon the authors’ view that harms cannot be understood independently of goods by providing an argument that goods have an inherent place in psychotherapy and in multicultural viewpoints. The goods of psychotherapy (e.g., justice, respect) are ordinary and widely endorsed rather than esoteric or objectionable. Identifying these goods makes it possible to organize them into a coherent hierarchy that enables an integration of the primarily individual goods of standard psychotherapy and the primarily communal goods of a multicultural perspective. This can facilitate a mutually informative and enriching dialogue between scholars from these two domains. The hope is to encourage a more open discussion of the goods of psychotherapy, thereby fostering a more reflective, progressive discipline.

Conceived in doubt: religion and politics in the new American nation

Americans have long acknowledged a deep connection between evangelical religion and democracy in the early days of the republic. This is a widely accepted narrative that is maintained as a matter of fact and tradition-and in spite of evangelicalism's more authoritarian and reactionary aspects. In Conceived in Doubt, Amanda Porterfield challenges this standard interpretation of evangelicalism's relation to democracy and describes the intertwined relationship between religion and partisan politics that emerged in the formative era of the early republic. In the 1790s, religious doubt became common in the young republic as the culture shifted from mere skepticism toward darker expressions of suspicion and fear. But by the end of that decade, Porterfield shows, economic instability, disruption of traditional forms of community, rampant ambition, and greed for land worked to undermine heady optimism about American political and religious independence. Evangelicals managed and manipulated doubt, reaching out to disenfranchised citizens as well as to those seeking political influence, blaming religious skeptics for immorality and social distress, and demanding affirmation of biblical authority as the foundation of the new American national identity. As the fledgling nation took shape, evangelicals organized aggressively, exploiting the fissures of partisan politics by offering a coherent hierarchy in which God was king and governance righteous. By laying out this narrative, Porterfield demolishes the idea that evangelical growth in the early republic was the cheerful product of enthusiasm for democracy, and she creates for us a very different narrative of influence and ideals in the young republic.

The Third European Energy Liberalization Package: Does Functional and Legal Unbundling in the Gas Storage Sector Go Too Far?

The third European gas liberalization package (the 3rd Package) is intended to facilitate access to gas storage through the introduction of functional and legal unbundling in the storage sector. This article will challenge this new regulatory regime from two perspectives. First, this new regime may change the originally coherent regulatory patterns and regulatory hierarchy in the 1st and 2nd Gas Directive without taking into account the economic rationales. Second, this new regime will lead to three serious concerns, i.e. the cost-effectiveness and clear implementation of the unbundling, and the doctrine of 'rigid unbundling as a last resort, when implementing. In this regard, for remedy purpose, this article provides three legislative suggestions to the 3rd Package. However, in spite of these efforts, the issue of the unclear scope of storage subject to the open access regime and to the functional and legal unbundling remains unresolved in the 2nd Gas Directive and 3rd Package. Thus, to facilitate access to storage, it is suggested that the Commission may have to clarify the scope issue first and consider adopting a more direct approach, i.e., the regulated third party access regime for the storage sector, in the 3rd Package, instead of an indirect approach of further unbundling.

Recognizing protein-protein interfaces with empirical potentials and reduced amino acid alphabets.

BackgroundIn structural genomics, an important goal is the detection and classification of protein–protein interactions, given the structures of the interacting partners. We have developed empirical energy functions to identify native structures of protein–protein complexes among sets of decoy structures. To understand the role of amino acid diversity, we parameterized a series of functions, using a hierarchy of amino acid alphabets of increasing complexity, with 2, 3, 4, 6, and 20 amino acid groups. Compared to previous work, we used the simplest possible functional form, with residue–residue interactions and a stepwise distance-dependence. We used increased computational ressources, however, constructing 290,000 decoys for 219 protein–protein complexes, with a realistic docking protocol where the protein partners are flexible and interact through a molecular mechanics energy function. The energy parameters were optimized to correctly assign as many native complexes as possible. To resolve the multiple minimum problem in parameter space, over 64000 starting parameter guesses were tried for each energy function. The optimized functions were tested by cross validation on subsets of our native and decoy structures, by blind tests on series of native and decoy structures available on the Web, and on models for 13 complexes submitted to the CAPRI structure prediction experiment.ResultsPerformance is similar to several other statistical potentials of the same complexity. For example, the CAPRI target structure is correctly ranked ahead of 90% of its decoys in 6 cases out of 13. The hierarchy of amino acid alphabets leads to a coherent hierarchy of energy functions, with qualitatively similar parameters for similar amino acid types at all levels. Most remarkably, the performance with six amino acid classes is equivalent to that of the most detailed, 20-class energy function.ConclusionThis suggests that six carefully chosen amino acid classes are sufficient to encode specificity in protein–protein interactions, and provide a starting point to develop more complicated energy functions.

Perspectives on self and other in children’s representations of sibling conflict

Seventy-six siblings (3–9 years) were individually interviewed concerning their recent conflicts. Analyses compared goals, requests, and voluntary actions attributed to self and other. Children were adept at describing both own and others’ goals, requests, and actions, and these formed coherent hierarchies in which overarching explicit goals motivated actions and requests attributed to each protagonist. Children also recognised the basic opposition between antagonists’ goals. A majority of explicitly stated goals matched those attributed by both narrators to the same sibling, an agreement rate exceeding that found for requests or actions. Older siblings also focused more on goals of others; their accounts contained more spontaneous explicit goals of others and more complex goal hierarchies for others in comparison both to their reports for self and to the reports of their younger counterparts. The discussion emphasises the development and importance of understanding others’ perspectives on interpersonal conflict.

Growth goals, maturity, and well-being.

In 2 studies (125 college students and 51 adults), 2 forms of growth goals (exploratory and intrinsic) were compared with 2 forms of personality development (social-cognitive maturity and social-emotional well-being). Participants whose narratives of major life goals emphasized conceptual exploration were especially likely to have high levels of maturity (measured as ego development; J. Loevinger, 1976), whereas those whose goals emphasized intrinsic interests (K. M. Sheldon & T. Kasser, 1995) were especially likely to have high levels of well-being. Participants who had coherent hierarchies of growth goals on the levels of major life goals and everyday goals were especially likely to have high levels of personality development. Finally, growth goals accounted for some relationships between age and personality development. Growth goals are discussed in terms of intentional self-development and specific developmental paths.

Thesaurus construction through knowledge representation

Semantic metadata describing subject content plays a vital role in supporting indexing and retrieval in Digital Libraries. Mechanisms used to deliver this metadata include keyword collections, thesauri and classifications. Constructing a large thesaurus, however, is a difficult process which can be facilitated through the application of knowledge representation techniques developed for managing and reasoning about concepts. We describe such a scheme – a Description Logic (DL) – and show through an example how a DL can play a part in the classification construction process, aiding in the production of coherent hierarchies and ensuring that the relationships represented in a thesaurus are sensible.

Coherent beliefs are not always types

For two interacting agents, we construct a space of nature states S and a coherent hierarchy of beliefs ( σ-additive probability measures) of one agent about S, about S and the beliefs of the other agent about S, and so on—a hierarchy that has no σ-additive coherent extension over S and the hierarchies of the other agent. Thus, this hierarchy of beliefs cannot be the description of the beliefs of some type in some Harsanyi [Harsanyi, J.C., 1967–1968. Games with incomplete information played by Bayesian players, parts I, II, and III. Man. Sc. 14, 159–182, 320–334, 486–502] type space. Therefore, the space C of coherent hierarchies over S properly contains the universal space T* of `all possible types' over S. We show how to extract T* out of C in a transfinite process.

Topology-Free Typology of Beliefs

In their seminal paper, Mertens and Zamir (Int. Game Theory14(1985), 1–29) proved the existence of a universal Harsanyi type space which consists of all possible types. Their method of proof depends crucially on topological assumptions. Whether such assumptions are essential to the existence of a universal space remained an open problem. Here we prove that a universal type space does exist even when spaces are defined in pure measure theoretic terms. Heifetz and Samet (mimeo, Tel Aviv University, 1996) showed that coherent hierarchies of beliefs, in the measure theoretic case, do not necessarily describe types. Therefore, the universal space here differs from all previously studied ones, in that it does not necessarily consist of all coherent hierarchies of beliefs.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D80, D82.

The Beltrami spectrum for incompressible fluid flows

Recently V. Yakhot, S. Orszag, and their co-workers have suggested that turbulent flows in various regions of space organize into a coherent hierarchy of weakly interacting superimposed approximate Beltrami flows. A mathematical framework is developed here to study organized Beltrami hierarchies in a systematic fashion. This framework is applied to several important classes of examples with universal Beltrami hierarchies. An analysis of the persistence of such Beltrami hierarchies is also presented for general solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations.