Hierarchy Of Rules Research Articles

Voting rules, manipulability and social homogeneity ∗

To what extent are some voting rules more vulnerable tostrategic manipulation than others? In order to answer thisquestion, representations are developed for the coalitionalmanipulability of eight voting rules under various assumptionsconcerning the likelihood that given voters' preferenceprofiles are observed on three alternatives. Of particularinterest is the impact that social homogeneity (defined as thetendency of voters' preference to be similar) has on themanipulability of voting rules. The results we obtain showthat the hierarchy of the voting rules that results from ourcomputations can crucially depend on the degree of socialhomogeneity. However, it turns out that, whatever the degreeof homogeneity, the Hare method (or two-stage plurality)minimizes susceptibility to strategic manipulation bycoalitions of voters in three-candidate elections.

The Athenian amnesty and the ‘scrutiny of the laws’

AbstractThe ‘scrutiny of all the laws’ that Andocides invokes in his defenceOn the Mysteriesis usually interpreted as a recodification with the aim of barring prosecution for the crimes of civil conflict. This article advances four theses against that traditional reading: (1) In Andocides' argument the Scrutiny was designed for a more practicable purpose, not to pardon crimes unpunished but to quash any further action against formeratimoi, those penalized under the old regime but restored to rights in 403. In context, coming close upon the summary of Patrocleides' decree, ‘all the laws’ means all laws affectingatimoi. (2) The other evidence from inscriptions and literary testimony, for the Athenian Amnesty and similar agreements, supports this reading: the oath that closed the covenants,mê mnêsikakein, functions as a rule of estoppel or ‘no reprise’; it was not in itself a pledge of ‘political forgiveness’. In regard to the Scrutiny, as in Patrocleides' decree, the oath means that old penalties, now cancelled, can never again be enforced. (3) The Scrutiny itself was a reauthorization of the old laws for summary arrest and other standard remedies againstatimoiwho trespass or violate their restrictions. As a corollary to this re-enactment, the statute of limitations was introduced, ‘to apply the laws from Eucleides’: the rules punishing the disfranchised cannot be used against those whose liabilities were incurred before 403. (4) Teisamenus' decree for new legislation was prior to this revision; it is not the decree that Andocides read to the court as a document of the Scrutiny. An ancient editor simply inserted the wrong document. Teisamenus envisioned no alteration of the ‘Solonian Code’; the decree for Scrutiny was an unforeseen but necessary correction. These measures were successive reforms sorting out the new hierarchy of rules, a process whose complexity is attested in Diocles' law.

A hierarchical tag-graph search scheme with layered grammar rules for spontaneous speech understanding

It has always been difficult for language understanding systems to handle spontaneous speech with satisfactory robustness, primarily due to such problems as the fragments, disfluencies, out-of-vocabulary words, and ill-formed sentence structures. Also, the search schemes used are usually not flexible enough in accepting different input linguistic units, and great efforts are therefore required when they are used with different acoustic front ends in different tasks, specially in multi-modal and multi-lingual systems. In this paper, a new hierarchical tag-graph-based search scheme for spontaneous speech understanding is proposed. This scheme is based on a layered hierarchy of grammar rules, and therefore can integrate all the statistical and rule-based knowledge including acoustic scores, language model scores and grammar rules into the search process. More robust speech understanding is thus achievable. In addition, this scheme can accept graphs of different linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, characters, words, spotted keywords, or phrases as the input, thus compatible to different acoustic front ends and multi-modal and multi-lingual applications can be easily developed. This search scheme has been successfully applied to a multi-domain, multi-modal dialogue system.

Autonomous control of complex systems: robotic applications

One of the biggest challenges of any control paradigm is being able to handle large complex systems under unforeseen uncertainties. A system may be called complex here if its dimension (order) is too high and its model (if available) is nonlinear, interconnected, and information on the system is uncertain such that classical techniques cannot easily handle the problem. Soft computing, a collection of fuzzy logic, neuro-computing, genetic algorithms and genetic programming, has proven to be a powerful tool for adding autonomy to many complex systems. For such systems the size soft computing control architecture will be nearly infinite. Examples of complex systems are power networks, national air traffic control system, an integrated manufacturing plant, etc. In this paper a new rule base reduction approach is suggested to manage large inference engines. Notions of rule hierarchy and sensor data fusion are introduced and combined to achieve desirable goals. New paradigms using soft computing approaches are utilized to design autonomous controllers for a number of robotic applications at the ACE Center are also presented briefly.

Positioning a company in enterprise collaborations: Vertical integration and make-or-buy decisions

During any strategic development, a firm has to position itself in its supply chain. The decision as to how many activities in the chain to occupy is known as vertical integration and is termed as make-or-buy when an individual activity is considered. Because of its very nature, this category of decisions may be made only within the framework of an extended enterprise. To support such a decision-making process, a model is described that defines all key elements needed to make such critical decisions. More precisely, a set of rules must present all items which have to be defined and valued, and the relationships between them, in order to conclude if an activity must be processed internally (Make) or supplied externally (Buy). This paper details such a hierarchy of rules.

Organisations, institutions, système : types et niveaux de règles

The notion of rules is common to the economics of organization and the economics of institutions. These two fields may find a better relation thanks to clearer conceptual distinctions on one hand, and to a more hierarchised systemic approach on the other hand. This may clarify somewhat debates among institutionalist approaches. The paper first discusses the totalizing theory of working rules of Commons, the distinction between the rules of the spontaneous order and those of the organised order in Hayek, and North's view of institutions as rules of the game for organizations. A critical comparison of these three theories raises different questions : the importance of distinguishing organizational and institutional rules, and of taking into account informal and formal rules and their relations at both levels, the teleological character of the organization, the hierarchy of rules at different levels of society. The paper proposes a synthetic and critical approach in trying to articulate individual and collective actions in a systemic framework where organizations are defined as collective and hierarchised ensembles of specific rules, and institutions as general and social rules with higher durability, directly or indirectly sanctioned by the State. The cohesion of various configurations of rules is contingent, subject to permanent tensions, it evolves. It is an essential source of organizational and institutional change in a given system, and it is the origin of crises.

The state of nature and the evolution of political preferences

ment but have always been a group-living species. Rules have evolved with humans and were never created de novo. Evolved rules have implications for contemporary governance. Human groups have always been in conflict, and rules distinguish between group members and outsiders. These rules have proved remarkably flexible. Some rules regulate private conduct of group members. Although the desirability of these rules today is unclear, I argue that a libertarian regime would have been unstable, which may explain why there are few persons with tastes for libertarian governments. This analysis further explains why utility functions contain elements of envy. Rules of property, contract, and hierarchy are well developed and universal among humans.

Subregional analysis of mnemonic functions of the prefrontal cortex in the rat

Evidence is reviewed to support the idea that in the rat prefrontal cortex there are differential sub-regional functional contributions to cognitive and memory function. It is proposed that the prefrontal cortex in the rat can be fractionated in terms of functions associated with a slightly revised rule model that incorporates a domain-specific and a level-of-processing model. It is proposed that there is a hierarchy of lower order, higher order, and highest order rules that can support different subregions of the rat prefrontal cortex. The lower order rules encompass rules associated with reversal learning. The higher order rules encompass rules associated with the different domains or attributes of working memory and cross-modal set switching. The highest order rules encompass rules associated with temporal order memory and paired associate learning and performance. It appears that there is a correspondence between rats and monkeys and between rats and humans in terms of prefrontal cortex function.

The Nature and Processing of Errors in Interactive Behavior

Understanding the nature of errors in a simple, rule‐based task—programming a VCR—required analyzing the interactions among human cognition, the artifact, and the task. This analysis was guided by least‐effort principles and yielded a control structure that combined a rule hierarchy task‐to‐device with display‐based difference‐reduction. A model based on this analysis was used to trace action protocols collected from participants as they programmed a simulated VCR. Trials that ended without success (the show was not correctly programmed) were interrogated to yield insights regarding problems in acquiring the control structure. For successful trials (the show was correctly programmed), steps that the model would make were categorized as matches to the model; steps that the model would not make were violations of the model. The model was able to trace the vast majority of correct keystrokes and yielded a business‐as‐usual account of the detection and correction of errors. Violations of the model fell into one of two fundamental categories. The model provided insights into certain subcategories of errors; whereas, regularities within other subcategories of error suggested limitations to the model. Although errors were rare when compared to the total number of correct actions, they were important. Errors were made on 4% of the keypresses that, if not detected, would have prevented two‐thirds of the shows from being successfully recorded. A misprogrammed show is a minor annoyance to the user. However, devices with the approximate complexity of a VCR are ubiquitous and have found their way into emergency rooms, airplane cockpits, power plants, and so on. Errors of ignorance may be reduced by training; however, errors in the routine performance of skilled users can only be reduced by design.

The nature and processing of errors in interactive behavior

Understanding the nature of errors in a simple, rule-based task—programming a VCR—required analyzing the interactions among human cognition, the artifact, and the task. This analysis was guided by least-effort principles and yielded a control structure that combined a rule hierarchy task-to-device with display-based difference-reduction. A model based on this analysis was used to trace action protocols collected from participants as they programmed a simulated VCR. Trials that ended without success (the show was not correctly programmed) were interrogated to yield insights regarding problems in acquiring the control structure. For successful trials (the show was correctly programmed), steps that the model would make were categorized as matches to the model; steps that the model would not make were violations of the model. The model was able to trace the vast majority of correct keystrokes and yielded a business-as-usual account of the detection and correction of errors. Violations of the model fell into one of two fundamental categories. The model provided insights into certain subcategories of errors; whereas, regularities within other subcategories of error suggested limitations to the model. Although errors were rare when compared to the total number of correct actions, they were important. Errors were made on 4% of the keypresses that, if not detected, would have prevented two-thirds of the shows from being successfully recorded. A misprogrammed show is a minor annoyance to the user. However, devices with the approximate complexity of a VCR are ubiquitous and have found their way into emergency rooms, airplane cockpits, power plants, and so on. Errors of ignorance may be reduced by training; however, errors in the routine performance of skilled users can only be reduced by design.

The vocabulary and grammar of color patterns

We determine the basic categories and the hierarchy of rules used by humans in judging similarity and matching of color patterns. The categories are: (1) overall color; (2) directionality and orientation; (3) regularity and placement; (4) color purity; (5) complexity and heaviness. These categories form the pattern vocabulary which is governed by the grammar rules. Both the vocabulary and the grammar were obtained as a result of a subjective experiment. Experimental data were interpreted using multidimensional scaling techniques yielding the vocabulary and the hierarchical clustering analysis, yielding the grammar rules. Finally, we give a short overview of the existing techniques that can be used to extract and measure the elements of the vocabulary.

REVIEW: THE CENTRAL ROLE OF UNCERTAINTY REDUCTION IN DETERMINING BEHAVIOUR

AbstractIn complex and stochastic environments the ability to cope with the unexpected is essential for survival. This paper describes a motivational framework founded on the need to reduce uncertainty. It is centred around a merging of classifier systems, taken from the field of artificial intelligence, with the information-primacy approach to animal motivation. It is proposed that in order to deal with uncertainty the animal constructs cognitive models of its environment that are composed of hierarchies of condition-action rules. There is parallel activation of several rules at any given time, and these rules compete to determine behaviour. The rules found to be the best predictors (and may in addition have resulted in reinforcement) gain strength, whilst the less successful rules lose strength over time. Unexpected events trigger the generation of families of new rules which are then subject to environmental selection. The efficient operation of the cognitive model requires the continual reduction of uncertainty, so that information-gathering behaviour forms a substratum upon which other, more obviously goal directed, behaviours occur. High need states can break into this ongoing behaviour and give it a special direction. The framework is related to the inherent variability of behaviour, the failure of certain reinforcement contingencies to control behaviour, and approach/avoidance behaviour towards novel stimuli.

The State of Nature and the Evolution of Political Preferences

Analysis of political and legal institutions often proceeds from a of nature argument, where humans are analyzed as if they once existed as solitary individuals with no rules or government. In fact, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and study of related species (e.g., chimpanzees), indicate that humans have never existed as humans in such an environment. Rather, hominids (humans and their direct ancestors) have always been a group living species, and rules and preferences about rules would have evolved along with humans. As hominid brains became more complex, rules would also have become more complex, but there was never a time when humans lived with no rules and no time when rules were in any sense de novo. These evolved rules and preferences for rules have implications for contemporary law and government. Human groups have generally been in conflict, and an important distinction has always been between group members and outsiders. It is useful to distinguish three classes of rules that would have existed in the state of nature. First would have been those defining group membership; these rules seem to be remarkably flexible. Second would have been rules regulating private conduct of individuals within the group. I argue that a libertarian regime, with few such rules, would have been unstable, which may explain why there are few persons with tastes for libertarian governments. Current resistance to libertarianism can be related to rules that would have been useful in evolutionary times, though the issue of the desirability of these rules today is worth further investigation. This analysis can explain why utility functions seem to contain elements of envy. The third class of rules would have been those regulating relationships between individuals within the group essentially, rules of property, contract, and hierarchy. Such rules are well developed and universal among humans. One implication of the argument here is that, while biological forces involving conflict created a value or demand for increased intelligence and group size, supply of energy to support intelligence in the form of first, meat, and later, agriculture were also needed. The analysis also has implications for the willingness of individuals to contribute to public goods, including voting, and for the emphasis on identified rather than statistical individuals in political discourse. It can also explain the role of religion in economic and legal affairs.

A Kripkean Approach to Unknowability and Truth

We consider a language containing partial predicates for subjective knowability and truth. For this language, inductive hierarchy rules are proposed which build up the extension and anti-extension of these partial predicates in stages. The logical interaction between the extension of the truth predicate and the anti-extension of the knowability predicate is investigated.

An intelligent software system for the automatic generation of NC programs from wireframe models of 2-1/2D mechanical parts

The aim of this work is to generate automatically NC part programs for machined components of 2-1/2 dimensions starting from a wireframe CAD model. An IGES post-processor was developed to interface the system to any CAD system, then a conversion program sought to obtain solid modelling geometry from the wireframe model. Subsequently, drawing annotation information was allocated to solid model entities through pattern matching techniques in Prolog. The product model was completed by deriving feature instances according to pre-defined feature templates constructed in Prolog according to a simple model. Operation selection uses the feature model as well as process planning knowledge structured into a hierarchy of Prolog rules processed by a context sensitive inference engine. The resulting operation sequence is communicated to a module that calculates cutting conditions and produces NC code. The system was proved to work satisfactorily with components of an industrial standard.

Reference in Japanese–English Machine Translation

This paper shows the necessity of distinguishing different referential uses of NPs in Machine Translation. We propose a three- way distinction between the generic, referential and ascriptive uses of noun phrases (NPs), and argue that this is the minimum necessary to generate articles and number correctly when translating from Japanese to English. A detailed algorithm is proposed for determining the referentiality of Japanese NPs, based on a defeasible hierarchy of pragmatic rules that are applied top-down, from the clause to the NP. We also sketch the process of generating determiners and number using rules based on the different NP referentialities for a Japanese–English MT system. Using the proposed heuristics has raised the percentage of NPs generated with correct use of articles and number in the Japanese–English MT system ALT-J/E from 65% to 85%.

A Simple Model for the Evolution of Evolution

A simple model of macroevolution is proposed exhibiting both the property of punctuated equilibrium and the dynamics of potentialities for different species to evolve towards increasingly higher complexity. It is based on the phenomenon of fractal evolution which has been shown to constitute a fundamental property of nonlinear discretized systems with one memory- or random-based feedback loop. The latter involves a basic "cognitive" function of each species given by the power of distinction of states within some predefined resolution. The introduction of a realistic background noise limiting the range of the feedback operation yields a pattern signature in fitness space with a distribution of temporal boost/mutation distances according to a randomized devil's staircase function. Introducing a further level in the hierarchy of the system's rules, the possibility of an adaptive evolutionary change of the resolution itself is implemented, thereby providing a time-dependent measure of the species' cognitive abilities: an additional feedback loop makes use of the inevitable intrinsic fluctuations within the fitness landscape to direct the temporal change of the resolution. Feeding back the small adaptive changes of resolution into the essentially directionless variations of the patterns' lifetimes in fitness space effectively leads to a clear tendency towards increasing evolution potentials for each species ("hierarchically emergent fractal evolution").

Fuzzy control of complex systems

One of the biggest challenges of any control paradigm is being able to handle large complex systems. A system may be called large-scale or complex, here, if its dimension (order) is so high and its model (if available) is nonlinear, interconnected with uncertain information flow such that classical techniques of control theory cannot easily handle the system. From a control theoretical point of view, fuzzy logic has been intermixed with all the important aspects of systems theory - modeling, identification, analysis, stability, synthesis, filtering, and estimation. However, the application of fuzzy control to large-scale complex systems is not a trivial task by any means. For such systems the size of the rule base in a typical fuzzy control architecture will be nearly infinite. In this paper an attempt is made to break some new ground on the applications of fuzzy control to complex systems. A new rule base reduction approach is suggested to manage large inference engines. Notions of rule hierarchy and sensor data fusion are introduced and combined to achieve system’s goals. The technique has been implemented on an SGS Thomson W.A.R.P. chip for an inverted pendulum with wine-balancing application.

The King's Many Bodies: The Self-Deconstruction of Law's Hierarchy

The article connects two strands of the recent sociolegal debate: (1) the empirical discovery of new forms of spontaneous law in the course of globalization, and (2) the emergence of deconstructive theories of law that undermine the law's hierarchy. The article puts forward the thesis that law's hierarchy has successfully resisted all old and new attempts at its deconstruction; it breaks, however, under the pressures of globalization that produced a global law without the state, as self-created law of global society that has no institutionalized support whatsoever in international politics and public international law. Consequently, the article criticizes deconstructive theories for their lack of autological analysis. These theories do not take into account the historical conditions of deconstruction. Accordingly, deconstructive analysis of law would have to look for new legal distinctions that are plausible under the new conditions of a doubly fragmented global society. The article sketches the contours of an emerging polycontextural law. I. Deconstructing Systems After deconstruction, what is left of law as a hierarchy of rules, founded on a political constitution, endowed with an institutional identity, based on the distinction between legislation and adjudication and legitimated through democratic representation and constitutional rights? Derrida (1990) uses the conceptual tools of deconstruction to dismantle the political architecture of the legal system: Deconstruction is generally practiced in two ways or two styles, although it most often grafts one to the other. One takes the demonstrative and apparently ahistorical allure of logico-formal paradoxes. The other, more historical or more anamnesic, seems to proceed through readings of texts, meticulous interpretations and genealogies. (Derrida 1990:957, 959) Deconstruction reveals the foundation of law, the origin of its authority, to be a grandiose logico-formal paradox. Law is grounded only on itself, based on an arbitrary violence without ground, la fondation mystique de l'autorite. Nor does the genealogy of legal decisions reveal law's stable identity as a system of valid rules, but only exposes law's recurrent aporias, situations of undecidability with ever shifting unstable differences in changing historical contexts. Law becomes a deconstructed disunity of discursive fragments which at the same time is haunted by the never satisfiable specter of justice.1 At first sight, theory stands in stark contrast to the intentionally obscure language of deconstructivism, which is not willing to reveal its theoretical presuppositions. The contrast holds true for style as well as for substance. While deconstructivism refuses to define a specific method or determine a guiding theoretical intention (Derrida 1988:82), systemism stylizes itself as an orderly theory cultivating conceptual precision and elaborating systematic theory constructs.2 In substance, the theory of law as an autopoietic system stresses law's autonomy, its normative closure, structural determination, dynamic stability, emerging eigenvalues in binary codes and normative programs, and its reflexive identity.3 How does this theory respond to the challenge of deconstruction? Is the radical constructivism of autopoietic law the very counter-program to anti-metaphysical deconstructivism? Second-order theory's first answer to deconstruction, may come as an surprise.4 Instead of reaffirming law as a system of rules, it observes law as a chain of operations that observes other operations under a certain scheme. Thus, it does away with any stable identity of law. Observing systems in its double meaning dissolves the stable order of legal structures into a fluid sequence of differences that acts simultaneously as the subject and the object of legal distinctions and indications. In second-order observation, law loses any fixed identity, any welldefined ontological status (Luhmann 1989). …

Chemical reaction dynamics when the Born–Oppenheimer approximation fails Understanding which changes in the electronic wavefunction might be restricted

Whether a reaction is occurring in the gas phase or condensed phase, electronically nonadiabatic effects can become important if the adiabatic reaction coordinate requires a considerable change in the electronic wavefunction. The experiments and analysis presented here seek to make progress on a difficult and important problem, that of developing a back-of-the-envelope method to predict which energetically allowed products are favoured or disfavoured when significant electronic configuration changes are required to access one or all of the possible product channels. By examining the off-diagonal matrix elements responsible for coupling electronic configurations in the initially excited molecule with those of the products, we begin to formulate a hierarchy of what electronic configurations are strongly vs. weakly coupled. Hence, the paper focusses on understanding how an electronic wavefunction is most likely to change during a chemical reaction when it cannot adjust adiabatically during the nuclear dynamics. We begin by analyzing the results of two prior series of experiments in order to develop a hierarchy of propensity rules for electronic configuration changes from reactant to products. Analysis of experimental and computational results on the competition between C–Br fission and C–Cl fission in nOπ*C=O excited Br(CH2)2COCl and on the ππ* photofragmentation channels of nitric acid suggest the following. If the one-electron configuration interaction matrix elements between the reactant electronic configuration and a product electronic configuration are zero, then the reaction is strongly susceptible to nonadiabatic suppression of the reaction rate and/or appearance of nonadiabatic asymptotic products. One must then analyze the remaining two-electron configuration interaction (Forster- and Dexter-type) matrix elements. If the two-electron change required to couple the reactant and product electronic configurations involves simultaneous configuration changes on two spatially/electronically isolated functional groups, then that product channel is strongly disfavoured. We show why this is the case by examining the two-electron integrals for C–Br fission in Br(CH2)2COCl and for the forbidden NO2(12B1)+OH(A″) channel from ππ* excited nitric acid, comparing them to those for the NO2(12B2)+OH(A′) channel where the orbitals involved are localized on the same functional moiety. This hierarchy in electronic coupling motivates the introduction of a ‘restricted adiabatic’ correlation diagram to predict which product channels are electronically accessible. In the final section of this paper we present new results on the photodissociation of N,N-dimethylformamide following πnbπ* excitation at 193 nm, where we test the ideas developed from analysis of the previous work. Our measurement of the photofragment velocity and angular distributions of the dissociation products reveals that dissociation pathway to form HCO +N(CH3)2 results in formation of HCO()+N(CH3)2(A) but not HCO(A) +N(CH3)2(). As both are energetically allowed product channels in the singlet A′ manifold, the selectivity may be analyzed with respect to the required change in electronic configuration to access each asymptotic product channel. To understand the experimental results in the context of the model developed from the prior work, we consider both one-electron and two-electron contributions to the configuration interaction matrix elements between the reactant and product electronic configurations to determine which product channels are most likely to be accessed.