Core Notions Research Articles

Stability and optimal double auction design for a two-sided market

We investigate the stability of internet platform trading mechanisms using the notion of ex-ante incentive compatible core defined by Forges et al. (2002) in the context of an exchange economy. A mechanism can be blocked by a single buyer and seller pair if they can find an interim incentive-compatible trading mechanism that gives them higher ex-ante expected utilities. Standard double auction mechanisms like the trade reduction mechanism and McAfee double auction mechanism may not be single-buyer–single-seller (SBSS) ex-ante stable. We characterize interim incentive-compatible, interim individually-rational, symmetric and revenue-maximizing mechanisms that are SBSS ex-ante stable using methods in Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983).

Beyond postcolonial heteronomy: Kurdish question, decolonisation, and the relational time of democratic confederalism

Abdullah Öcalan’s theory of democratic confederalism, emerging from the Kurdish anti-colonial struggle against the states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, diverges from a postcolonial framework by centring on social ecology. This paper argues that Öcalan’s approach signifies a rejection of the ‘heteronomy’ of postcolonial theory’s ‘dualist imaginary’, which reduces the interactive agencies shaping societies’ transformation to those implicated in the West–Rest binary. This binarism perpetuates a ‘ruptured’ understanding of non-Western political histories and a dualist notion of ‘unevenness’ that either neglects ‘inter-subaltern’ hierarchical relations – including colonial ones – or distorts their historical and agential roots. Öcalan’s theory, addressing the Kurdish condition as a constellation of fragmented ‘inter-subaltern’ colonies, implies a rejection of heteronomy both analytically and normatively. Analytically, it highlights the simultaneous transformation of state institutions and statelessness through intersocietal interactions, illuminating how the ‘unevenness of possibilities’ influences interactive transformations. Normatively, it aims to address the ‘uneven possibilities’ for ‘interactive’ political ‘doing’ and ‘alterations’, empowering suppressed ‘otherness’ through ‘interactive autonomy’. These proposals promote a relational and interactive understanding of time, framed around the core notion of ‘time as possibility’, which is crucial for advancing a relational international ontology and a decolonising perspective beyond the obstacle of heteronomy.

Semiotic Analysis Of Film Paskal According To The Islamic Principles Of Syed Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas' Thinking And Its Impact On Linguistic Content/ التحليل السيميائي لفلم باسكال في ضوء أصول الفكر الإسلامي لسيد محمد نقيب العطاس أثرها في المحتوى اللغوي

Films have a significant impact on the Muslim community in Malaysia due to their content; watching the film affects them with an understanding of Islam or otherwise based on its content, and watching the film also assists Arabic language students in learning language studies from the film, such as analyzing the linguistic knowledge found in the film. This study sought to uncover Said Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas' core notions about the nature of knowledge from an Islamic perspective by applying them to the film Paskal and showing the Islamization of the Malay language used in the film. The current study depended on the descriptive analytical technique, where the semiotic tool was employed when studying the film's content to obtain deeper Islamic notions from the perspective of Al-Attas. The most significant finding from this study's conclusion is that the Malay film contains numerous scenarios that illustrate the seven Islamic ideals from Sayd Muhammad Naquib Al-Attas's perspective: religion, humanity, science and knowledge, wisdom, justice, literature, college and university. In addition, the term Islamization of the Malay language refers to using Islamic Arabic terminology in Malay. In this film, loanwords in Arabic are used often, totaling 28 words, and two Malay terms that convey Islamic connotations.

On Foucault’s Legacy: Governmentality, Critique and Subjectivation as Conceptual Tools for Understanding Neoliberalism

The text addresses Foucault’s critical understanding of neoliberalism as a new contemporary governmentality strategy for the conduction of people’s lives. A major aspect of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism relies on his understanding of the neoliberal homo oeconomicus as dependent on subjectivation processes related to self-assumed values and standards oriented by the competitive economic market. Our hypothesis is that governmentality, critique and subjectivation are the core notions that shaped Foucault’s understanding of neoliberalism and form the legacy of his seminal analysis. Contrary to critics who affirm that Foucault flirted or even became fascinated with neoliberalism, we argue that he offered critical tools for its understanding in a critique that is not to be confused with denunciation, however. Accordingly, we discuss Foucault’s conception of critique and relate his analysis of neoliberalism to his notions of governmentality and subjectivation. Finally, we briefly point out how some contemporary critics of the neoliberal order have appropriated and developed Foucault’s conceptual tools in their own understanding of it. We conclude that although Foucault did not propose a comprehensive theory of neoliberalism, he offered important critical insights for the understanding of it in our times.

Review of image processing and artificial intelligence methodologies for apple leaf disease diagnosis

<span lang="EN-US">Apple leaf disease (ALD) potentially affects the apple tree's health by reducing fruit yield and its capability to grow healthy. The prime purpose of the proposed study is to review and assess the strengths and weaknesses associated with the frequently exercised methods of ALD diagnosis using image processing and artificial intelligence (AI). Although these are widely adopted in recent studies, the core notion is to find the pros and cons associated with the practical viability. A desk research methodology is undertaken to carry out proposed review work where a database of recent scientific manuscripts is collected and studied very closely. The existing approaches are reviewed concerning identified problems, adopted solutions, advantages, and limitations. Finally, the paper contributes towards offering insight into potential research gap which will guide the upcoming researchers to make wise decisions for planning their models. The results acquired from this review work show that generalized challenges of ALD are not addressed, less emphasis on illumination variability, reduced target to minimize complexity, lesser evidence towards real-time processing, no evidence towards interpretability, limitation of available dataset, and tradeoff-between image processing and AI.</span>

The rule of law, judicial independence and the right to good administration – myth or reality?

In this paper the author focuses on some core notions linking together judicial independence and good administration through the thread of the rule of law. The rule of law is the golden thread running through all public administration (which includes also the judicial administration) of a state, with the ultimate aim being the common good. This is an ideal to which all modern, so-called democratic, states should aspire. The author looks at the practical meaning of the rule of law and suggests an approach based on a core of eight principles, the so-called Bingham’s “sub-principles”, and adds two more to them. Finally, it is argued that one cannot speak of the rule of law, of fundamental human rights and of good administration as if these were concepts isolated from each other

Unifying SAT-Based Approaches to Maximum Satisfiability Solving

Maximum satisfiability (MaxSAT), employing propositional logic as the declarative language of choice, has turned into a viable approach to solving NP-hard optimization problems arising from artificial intelligence and other real-world settings. A key contributing factor to the success of MaxSAT is the rise of increasingly effective exact solvers that are based on iterative calls to a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver. The three types of SAT-based MaxSAT solving approaches, each with its distinguishing features, implemented in current state-of-the-art MaxSAT solvers are the core-guided, the implicit hitting set (IHS), and the objective-bounding approaches. The objective-bounding approach is based on directly searching over the objective function range by iteratively querying a SAT solver if the MaxSAT instance at hand has a solution under different bounds on the objective. In contrast, both core-guided and IHS are so-called unsatisfiability-based approaches that employ a SAT solver as an unsatisfiable core extractor to determine sources of inconsistencies, but critically differ in how the found unsatisfiable cores are made use of towards finding a provably optimal solution. Furthermore, a variety of different algorithmic variants of the core-guided approach in particular have been proposed and implemented in solvers. It is well-acknowledged that each of the three approaches has its advantages and disadvantages, which is also witnessed by instance and problem-domain specific runtime performance differences (and at times similarities) of MaxSAT solvers implementing variants of the approaches. However, the questions of to what extent the approaches are fundamentally different and how the benefits of the individual methods could be combined in a single algorithmic approach are currently not fully understood. In this work, we approach these questions by developing UniMaxSAT, a general unifying algorithmic framework. Based on the recent notion of abstract cores, UniMaxSAT captures in general core-guided, IHS and objective-bounding computations. The framework offers a unified way of establishing quite generally the correctness of the current approaches. We illustrate this by formally showing that UniMaxSAT can simulate the computations of various algorithmic instantiations of the three types of MaxSAT solving approaches. Furthermore, UniMaxSAT can be instantiated in novel ways giving rise to new algorithmic variants of the approaches. We illustrate this aspect by developing a prototype implementation of an algorithmic variant for MaxSAT based on the framework.

Remarks on the Levi core

We investigate a few aspects of the notion of Levi core, recently introduced by the authors in Dall’Ara, Mongodi (J l’École Polytech Math 10:1047-1095, 2023): a basic finiteness question, the connection with Kohn’s algorithm, and with Catlin’s property (P).

Finding Optimal Solutions with Neighborly Help

AbstractCan we efficiently compute optimal solutions to instances of a hard problem from optimal solutions to neighbor instances, that is, instances with one local modification? For example, can we efficiently compute an optimal coloring for a graph from optimal colorings for all one-edge-deleted subgraphs? Studying such questions not only gives detailed insight into the structure of the problem itself, but also into the complexity of related problems, most notably, graph theory’s core notion of critical graphs (e.g., graphs whose chromatic number decreases under deletion of an arbitrary edge) and the complexity-theoretic notion of minimality problems (also called criticality problems, e.g., recognizing graphs that become 3-colorable when an arbitrary edge is deleted). We focus on two prototypical graph problems, colorability and vertex cover. For example, we show that it is $$\text {NP}$$ NP -hard to compute an optimal coloring for a graph from optimal colorings for all its one-vertex-deleted subgraphs, and that this remains true even when optimal solutions for all one-edge-deleted subgraphs are given. In contrast, computing an optimal coloring from all (or even just two) one-edge-added supergraphs is in $$\text {P}$$ P . We observe that vertex cover exhibits a remarkably different behavior, demonstrating the power of our model to delineate problems from each other more precisely on a structural level. Moreover, we provide a number of new complexity results for minimality and criticality problems. For example, we prove that Minimal-3-UnColorability is complete for $$\text {DP}$$ DP (differences of $$\text {NP}$$ NP sets), which was previously known only for the more amenable case of deleting vertices rather than edges. For vertex cover, we show that recognizing $$\beta $$ β -vertex-critical graphs is complete for $$\Theta _2^\text {p}$$ Θ 2 p (parallel access to $$\text {NP}$$ NP ), obtaining the first completeness result for a criticality problem for this class.

The Italian Bella Figura – a challenge for politeness theories

Abstract This paper examines the Italian folk concept of bella figura in the framework of politeness-theories and the various binary conceptions it provides for explaining the nature of human communication. BF is a culture-specific understanding of self-projection in everyday discourse: It is both, a cognitive concept concerning the “beautiful” embodiment of self, and a performative concept concerning the active “figuring out” of a bella figura in order to avoid its contrary, the brutta figura. Thus, the figura-concept represents a pragmatic principle for acting in line with socially accepted norms setting out a reference frame for judging social endeavours according to a culture-inherent value system. Accordingly, affinities can be assumed between the figura-concept and the sociopragmatic core notions ‘face’ and ‘politeness’. A comparison of the figura-concept with the respective first- and second-order conceptions of the two, reflects a cultural version of ‘impression management’ conceiving an image of self which coincides with Goffman’s, but not at all with Brown and Levinson’s face-concept. This makes it difficult to identify figura in relation to politeness. Connections and disconnections are discussed alongside the paradigmatic binary scales and the positive/negative value-attributes. Finally, the findings are verified by comparing the use of the respective expressions as evaluation tools.

In search of animal normativity: a framework for studying social norms in non-human animals.

Social norms - rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community - are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of 'culture' to become organised around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation.

Uncertainty in humanities network visualization

Network visualization is one of the most widely used tools in digital humanities research. The idea of uncertain or “fuzzy” data is also a core notion in digital humanities research. Yet network visualizations in digital humanities do not always prominently represent uncertainty. In this article, we present a mathematical and logical model of uncertainty as a range of values which can be used in network visualizations. We review some of the principles for visualizing uncertainty of different kinds, visual variables that can be used for representing uncertainty, and how these variables have been used to represent different data types in visualizations drawn from a range of non-humanities fields like climate science and bioinformatics. We then provide examples of two diagrams: one in which the variables displaying degrees of uncertainty are integrated/pinto the graph and one in which glyphs are added to represent data certainty and uncertainty. Finally, we discuss how probabilistic data and what-if scenarios could be used to expand the representation of uncertainty in humanities network visualizations.

Retrieving effectively from source memory: Evidence for differentiation and local matching processes

The ability to distinguish between different explanations of human memory abilities continues to be the subject of many ongoing theoretical debates. These debates attempt to account for a growing corpus of empirical phenomena in item-memory judgments, which include the list strength effect, the strength-based mirror effect, and output interference. One of the main theoretical contenders is the Retrieving Effectively from Memory (REM) model. We show that REM, in its current form, has difficulties in accounting for source-memory judgments – a situation that calls for its revision. We propose an extended REM model that assumes a local-matching process for source judgments alongside source differentiation. We report a first evaluation of this model’s predictions using three experiments in which we manipulated the relative source-memory strength of different lists of items. Analogous to item-memory judgments, we observed a null list strength effect and a strength-based mirror effect in the case of source memory. In a second evaluation, which relied on a novel experiment alongside two previously published datasets, we evaluated the model’s predictions regarding the manifestation of output interference in item and lack of it in source memory judgments. Our results showed output interference severely affecting the accuracy of item-memory judgments but having a null or negligible impact when it comes to source-memory judgments. Altogether, these results support REM’s core notion of differentiation (for both item and source information) as well as the concept of local matching proposed by the present extension.

Towards a ‘security-centred’ energy transition: balancing the European Union’s ambitions and geopolitical realities

Abstract The European Union (EU) faces a pressing, multi-level energy crisis propelled by the perfect storm of Russia’s war in Ukraine and rapidly progressing climate change. As a result, the EU is scrambling to ensure it has sufficient energy supplies for the foreseeable future while reinventing its energy strategy in the long term. Since the EU is at a critical juncture for squaring EU energy security with European and international legal commitments, this article surveys this radical shift and its consequences. It analyses new EU-wide crisis-response tools and ad hoc bilateral arrangements with third countries against existing legal commitments. Recent developments are only the beginning of a much larger re-evaluation of core notions of the ‘trade-energy security’ nexus. To decarbonize, the EU must move towards a ‘security-centred’ energy transition, premised on ‘security first, compliance second’. This requires reassessing the notion of ‘protectionism’ in geopolitically sensitive areas and the current division of energy competences between the EU and its Member States.

The $$\kappa $$-core and the $$\kappa $$-balancedness of TU games

AbstractWe consider transferable utility cooperative games with infinitely many players. In particular, we generalize the notions of core and balancedness, and also the Bondareva–Shapley Theorem for infinite TU games with and without restricted cooperation, to the cases where the core consists of $$\kappa $$ κ -additive set functions. Our generalized Bondareva–Shapley Theorem extends previous results by Bondareva (Problemy Kibernetiki 10:119–139, 1963), Shapley (Naval Res Logist Q 14:453–460, 1967), Schmeidler (On balanced games with infinitely many players, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1967), Faigle (Zeitschrift für Oper Res 33(6):405–422, 1989), Kannai (J Math Anal Appl 27:227–240, 1969; The core and balancedness, handbook of game theory with economic applications, North-Holland, 1992), Pintér (Linear Algebra Appl 434(3):688–693, 2011) and Bartl and Pintér (Oper Res Lett 51(2):153–158, 2023).

Core of a convex mixture set and convex functions

We broach the notions of face, core and convex function of a convex mixture set. A version of famous Karush-Kuhn-Tucker theorem is proved. Several examples to illustrate are also given.

Improving Data Processing Speed on Large Datasets in a Hadoop Multi-node Cluster using Enhanced Apriori Algorithm

For large data, data mining methods were used on a Hadoop-based distributed infrastructure, using map reduction paradigm approaches for rapid data processing. Though data mining approaches are established methodologies, the Apriori algorithm provides a specific strategy for increasing data processing performance in big data analytics by applying map reduction. Apriori property is used to increase the efficiency of level-wise creation of frequent itemsets by minimizing the search area. A frequent itemset’s subsets must also be frequent (Apriori property). If an itemset is rarely, then all of its supersets are infrequent as well. We refined the apriori approach by varying the degree of order in locating frequent item sets in large clusters using map reduction programming. Fixed Pass Combined Counting (FPC) and Dynamic Pass Combined Counting (DPC) is a classical algorithm which are used for data processing from the huge datasets but their accuracy is not up to the mark. In this article, updated Apriori algorithms such as multiplied-fixed-pass combined counting (MFPC) and average time-based dynamic combined counting (ATDFC) are used to successfully achieve data processing speed. The proposed approaches are based on traditional Apriori core notions in data mining and will be used in the map-reduce multi-pass phase by ignoring pruning in some passes. The optimized-MFPC and optimized-ATDFC map-reduce framework model algorithms were also presented. The results of the experiments reveal that MFPC and ATDFC are more efficient in terms of execution time than previously outmoded approaches such as Fixed Pass Combined Counting (FPC) and Dynamic Pass Combined Counting (DPC). In a Hadoop multi-node cluster, this paradigm accelerates data processing on big data sets. Previous techniques were stated in terms of reducing execution time by 60–80% through the use of several passes. Because of the omitted trimming operation in data pre-processing, our proposed new approaches will save up to 84–90% of that time.

A Critical Review of Consumer Protection Online Shopping, False Advertising, and Legal Protection

Objective: The main objective of consumer legal protection is to increase awareness, ability and independence of consumers to protect themselves and create a sense of responsibility for business actors in running their business. Theoretical Framework: The problem and purpose of the study is to identify the possibilities of problem consumer protection online shopping, false advertising, and legal protection. This article explores the evolution of common law and legislation in response to fraudulent, dishonest, or misleading internet advertising, as well as the prevalence of such practices. Method: This research is a legal study that is descriptive qualitative. The data collection technique used in this research is documentation. The approach used in this study is a juridical approach. The data analysis technique used is Miles and Hiberman. The validity technique used in this study is source triangulation. Result and Conclusion: This paper describes the muslim consumer legal protection paradigm in online transactions and assesses Indonesia's regulatory environment. Researchers found in normative legal studies that the e-commerce agreement is separate from the core notion of the agreement provided in the UNCITRAL Model Law on e-Commerce and the UNCITRAL Model Law on e-Signature. Online commerce is similar to regular trade agreements, except it uses electronic media. We discovered that improving human resources—professional competence, academic competence, resilience, methods, and excellent attitudes and values—solves the legal protection against consumers issue. E-commerce contracts must follow fair trade practices and the law. We also note that the present rules and regulations on information and electronic transactions for consumer protection have failed to safeguard consumers because numerous infractions still result in consumer losses. Research Implications: Implementation of these goals necessitates updating the law of consumer legal protection. This implementation is important so that online buying and selling transactions are recognized as legal and accountable electronic transactions. the object of the transaction may not conflict with laws and regulations, decency and public order. Originality/value: It contributed to activation of the rule of law in the form of legal protection for consumers in buying and selling agreements via the internet.

A Logical Analysis of Instrumentality Judgments: Means-End Relations in the Context of Experience and Expectations

This article proposes the use of temporal logic for an analysis of instrumentality inspired by the work of G.H. von Wright. The first part of the article contains the philosophical foundations. We discuss von Wright’s general theory of agency and his account of instrumentality. Moreover, we propose several refinements to this framework via rigorous definitions of the core notions involved. In the second part, we develop a logical system called Temporal Logic of Action and Expectations (textsf{TLAE}). The logic is inspired by a fragment of propositional dynamic logic based on indeterministic time. The system is proven to be weakly complete relative to its given semantics. We then employ textsf{TLAE} to formalise and analyse the instrumentality relations defined in the first part of the paper. Last, we point out philosophical implications and possible extensions of our work.

Cook Wilson on judgement

ABSTRACT John Cook Wilson is increasingly recognized as an important predecessor of ordinary language philosophy. He emphasizes the authority of ordinary language in philosophical theorizing. At the same time, however, he circumscribes the limits of that authority and identifies cases in which it threatens to mislead us. My aim is to consider in detail one case where, according to Cook Wilson, ordinary language has mislead philosophical theorizing. Judgement was one of the core notions of the logic, epistemology, and philosophy of mind of Cook Wilson’s time. Cook Wilson rejects this notion, in the form developed by his contemporaries, in part because it is based on a problematic analogy between ordinary language and the thoughts expressed in that language. Cook Wilson’s discussion of judgement also highlights the extent to which Cook Wilson was critical of, but also responsive to, his contemporaries. In addition, variants of the language-thought analogy Cook Wilson opposes continue to feature in twenty-first century epistemology and philosophy of mind. Cook Wilson’s criticism of the analogy thus raises questions about recent work as well as the theories of his contemporaries.