How Much Is That In Dollars?: Costly International Downsizing

Economic downturns can lead companies doing business internationally to cut costs by reducing staff and/or closing subsidiaries. Efficiency in downsizing can put people and capital to their most effective use. This exercise educates students about country differences in labor termination practices, costs, legal requirements for downsizing, and other issues

Secret Key Agreement from Correlated Data, with No Prior Information

A fundamental question that has been studied in cryptography and in information theory is whether two parties can communicate confidentially using exclusively an open channel. We consider the model in which the two parties hold inputs that are correlated in a certain sense. This model has been studied extensively in information theory, and communication protocols have been designed which exploit the correlation to extract from the inputs a shared secret key. However, all the existing protocols are not universal in the sense that they require that the two parties also know some attributes of the correlation. In other words, they require that each party knows something about the other party's input. We present a protocol that does not require any prior additional information. It uses space-bounded Kolmogorov complexity to measure correlation and it allows the two legal parties to obtain a common key that looks random to an eavesdropper that observes the communication and is restricted to use a bounded amount of space for the attack. Thus the protocol achieves complexity-theoretical security, but it does not use any unproven result from computational complexity. On the negative side, the protocol is not efficient in the sense that the computation of the two legal parties uses more space than the space allowed to the adversary.Comment: Several small errors have been fixed and the presentation has been improved, following the reviewers' observation

The saddest affair I have witnessed in the War : A Battlefield Study of the Battle of the Crater, 30 July 1864

Between the 15th and the 201h of March 2015, a metal detecting survey of the Battle of the Crater was conducted to access the status of the cultural resources connected with the engagement and to examine how far did Union troops advance from the mouth of the Crater. The survey was conducted by a join team of scholars, volunteers, and students. Dr. Mandzy, who holds a PhD in History and an MA in Anthropology, served as the project\u27s PI. Dr. Fitzpatrick, a historian from Morehead State University and Dr. Michelle Sivilich, an anthropologist at Gulf Archaeology Research, also took part in the project. Critical assistance to the project was provided by Daniel Sivilich, one of the founders of modern battlefield archaeology. Five undergraduate and one graduate student from Morehead State University participated in this survey, as did eight members of Battlefield Restoration and Archaeological Volunteer Organization (BRA VO)

The RGB No-Signalling Game

Introducing the simplest of all No-Signalling Games: the RGB Game where two verifiers interrogate two provers, Alice and Bob, far enough from each other that communication between them is too slow to be possible. Each prover may be independently queried one of three possible colours: Red, Green or Blue. Let a be the colour announced to Alice and b be announced to Bob. To win the game they must reply colours x (resp. y) such that a != x != y != b. This work focuses on this new game mainly as a pedagogical tool for its simplicity but also because it triggered us to introduce a new set of definitions for reductions among multi-party probability distributions and related non-locality classes. We show that a particular winning strategy for the RGB Game is equivalent to the PR-Box of Popescu-Rohrlich and thus No-Signalling. Moreover, we use this example to define No-Signalling in a new useful way, as the intersection of two natural classes of multi-party probability distributions called one-way signalling. We exhibit a quantum strategy able to beat the classical local maximum winning probability of 8/9 shifting it up to 11/12. Optimality of this quantum strategy is demonstrated using the standard tool of semidefinite programming

Separating Incremental and Non-Incremental Bottom-Up Compilation

The aim of a compiler is, given a function represented in some language, to generate an equivalent representation in a target language L. In bottom-up (BU) compilation of functions given as CNF formulas, constructing the new representation requires compiling several subformulas in L. The compiler starts by compiling the clauses in L and iteratively constructs representations for new subformulas using an "Apply" operator that performs conjunction in L, until all clauses are combined into one representation. In principle, BU compilation can generate representations for any subformulas and conjoin them in any way. But an attractive strategy from a practical point of view is to augment one main representation - which we call the core - by conjoining to it the clauses one at a time. We refer to this strategy as incremental BU compilation. We prove that, for known relevant languages L for BU compilation, there is a class of CNF formulas that admit BU compilations to L that generate only polynomial-size intermediate representations, while their incremental BU compilations all generate an exponential-size core

Music City

Born in England, John Conquest followed the piper to Austin and launched his journal Music City Texas in 1989 to document the burgeoning live performance industry—especially the alt-country and singer-songwriter genres. A token of his respect for West Texas acts is found in the first issue: Jo Carol Pierce on the cover, Dossier #1 devoted to Charlene Hancock, editorial mentions of RC Banks, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Ponty Bone, Joe Ely, Jesse Taylor, Angela Strehli, Flatlanders and Texana Dames.In 1997 the journal, distributed by subscription and through record stores, was renamed 3rd Coast Music. Except for special print editions, after 2013 3rd Coast Music was published in electronic PDF form. Conquest was respected widely as a straight-talking promoter, perceptive if ascerbic music critic and historian

On OBDD-Based Algorithms and Proof Systems That Dynamically Change Order of Variables

In 2004 Atserias, Kolaitis and Vardi proposed OBDD-based propositional proof systems that prove unsatisfiability of a CNF formula by deduction of identically false OBDD from OBDDs representing clauses of the initial formula. All OBDDs in such proofs have the same order of variables. We initiate the study of OBDD based proof systems that additionally contain a rule that allows to change the order in OBDDs. At first we consider a proof system OBDD(and, reordering) that uses the conjunction (join) rule and the rule that allows to change the order. We exponentially separate this proof system from OBDD(and)-proof system that uses only the conjunction rule. We prove two exponential lower bounds on the size of OBDD(and, reordering)-refutations of Tseitin formulas and the pigeonhole principle. The first lower bound was previously unknown even for OBDD(and)-proofs and the second one extends the result of Tveretina et al. from OBDD(and) to OBDD(and, reordering). In 2004 Pan and Vardi proposed an approach to the propositional satisfiability problem based on OBDDs and symbolic quantifier elimination (we denote algorithms based on this approach as OBDD(and, exists)-algorithms. We notice that there exists an OBDD(and, exists)-algorithm that solves satisfiable and unsatisfiable Tseitin formulas in polynomial time. In contrast, we show that there exist formulas representing systems of linear equations over F_2 that are hard for OBDD(and, exists, reordering)-algorithms. Our hard instances are satisfiable formulas representing systems of linear equations over F_2 that correspond to some checksum matrices of error correcting codes