10,006 research outputs found

    A Smooth Transition from Powerlessness to Absolute Power

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    We study the phase transition of the coalitional manipulation problem for generalized scoring rules. Previously it has been shown that, under some conditions on the distribution of votes, if the number of manipulators is o(n)o(\sqrt{n}), where nn is the number of voters, then the probability that a random profile is manipulable by the coalition goes to zero as the number of voters goes to infinity, whereas if the number of manipulators is ω(n)\omega(\sqrt{n}), then the probability that a random profile is manipulable goes to one. Here we consider the critical window, where a coalition has size cnc\sqrt{n}, and we show that as cc goes from zero to infinity, the limiting probability that a random profile is manipulable goes from zero to one in a smooth fashion, i.e., there is a smooth phase transition between the two regimes. This result analytically validates recent empirical results, and suggests that deciding the coalitional manipulation problem may be of limited computational hardness in practice.Comment: 22 pages; v2 contains minor changes and corrections; v3 contains minor changes after comments of reviewer

    Inside the whale and outside: context problems

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    What is Globalisation and What is Not?: A Political Economy Perspective

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    Despite the widespread use of the concept there is neither a consistent theoretical construction nor a clear definition of globalisation. Although the debate between pro and anti globalisation scholars and activists is interesting, it largely fails to address globalisation as a fundamental structural transformation of modern capitalism from a historical perspective and tends to reduce it to a re-articulation of the old debate on states versus markets. The first aim of this paper is to provide a clearer definition of globalisation which will be helpful in assessing the validity of various arguments surrounding the concept of globalisation, including whether such a process exists. Then an alternative interpretation of globalisation viewed from a political economy perspective will be introduced. It will be argued that internationalisation in the form of increased trade and foreign direct investment is the nature of capitalist accumulation process, thus, cannot be impeded. This accumulation process necessarily creates its own ideological climate to facilitate acceptance of the doctrine and to justify the economic and social problems it creates. Finally it will argue that there is a globalisation tendency since increased internationalisation inevitably weakens the role of nation states by transferring some of their functions to newly created supranational states that are created by the dynamics of this internationalisation process.Globalisation; Political Economy; International Trade Organizations

    The anorexic body: a feminist and sociological perspective on anorexia nervosa

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    This thesis attempts a sociological and feminist analysis of anorexia nervosa. Anorexia is an illness which affects predominantly women, and its incidence is greatest among middle-class young women in Western countries. Its strong bias along class and gender lines suggests that such an approach to the illness could prove fruitful. The thesis argues that analysis of anorexia demands a clear understanding of the sociology of the body. The sociology of the body sees the body as constructed in social life: understandings of the body vary temporally and culturally, and reflect the categories of their culture. It is suggested that anorexia nervosa represents an attempted transformation of the concept of the feminine body in contemporary culture. Anorexic women aim to transcend appetite, and to allow no intrusions into the body, constructing an anorexic body which is closed, separate and inviolable. Since this transformation is individuated and privatised, however, it cannot ultimately succeed in overturning a system of social meanings. The thesis concludes that individual solutions to anorexia will not lead to the end of the illness as a social phenomenon in the lives of women. Only collective feminist action can reconstruct the degraded contemporary concept of woman. The argument is pursued firstly through a discussion of the initial use of the term `anorexia nervosa' in the late nineteenth century by Gull and Lasegue. The treatment of anorexia as a modern disease is discussed, and the claim that anorexia has always existed but has not been recognised is refuted. Psychiatric and feminist accounts of anorexia are then considered. The former see anorexia as a purely individual phenomenon, and the limitations of this position are discussed. Feminist analyses of anorexia, in seeing it as deeply intertwined with women's social position in a patriarchal culture, are argued to advance understanding of the illness, while still retaining individualist elements. The next section analyses the ways in which anorexic women themselves explain their illness. This leads on to a discussion of the notion of the body as concept. After a theoretical outline, several body-concepts are analysed and placed in their social and historical contexts. Contemporary understandings of the body as an individuated possession are then discussed, with particular focus on the concept of the feminine body as passive object. Objectification, discipline and chaos are argued to be the central meanings of the feminine body in contemporary culture. Analysis of the issues of abortion and rape seek to make this theoretical point clearer. A detailed analysis of anorexic practices looks at how these meanings are transformed in anorexia. It is suggested that anorexic women try to construct an inviolate anorexic body which is completely under their control through a complexly ritualised eating pattern. The precarious nature of this control points to the limitations of individual `solutions' to social problems

    Understanding contemporary globalization from a political economist perspective

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    This paper presents an alternative interpretation of globalization, viewing it from a political economy perspective. Its central argument is that internationalization in the form of increased trade and foreign direct investment is the nature of capitalist accumulation process, thus, cannot be impeded. This accumulation process necessarily creates its own ideological climate to facilitate acceptance of the doctrine and to justify the economic and social problems it creates. It concludes that there is a globalization tendency since increased internationalization inevitably weakens the role of nation states by transferring some of their functions to newly created supranational states that are fostered by the dynamics of this internationalization process

    Art, Sensation and the Edges of Thought

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    This thesis explores the relationship between art, sensation and thought. It begins from the contention that thought has a tendency to identify and subordinate the artwork according to what it already knows and how it is already capable of thinking. For an artwork to overcome this tendency it needs to express and trigger processes that lie outside of thought's normative procedures of recognition and identification. It is argued that only in this way can the artwork creatively bring something new into thought. Correspondingly, thought needs to develop ways of thinking in relation to the artwork that potentialise rather than close off its creatively fugitive aspects. The written element is a thinking through of themes and ideas central to the artwork. It consists of three chapters which correspond to areas relevant to the art practice: beauty, the sublime, and the relation between sound and vision in the audio-visual. Each looks at the limitations of identity thinking and asks how an artwork might overcome it, and examines the potential for immanent modalities of thinking, asking what these may enable us to do. The key thinkers that inform this study are Deleuze and Guattari, Kant, and Massumi. The artwork involves using film, video, photography and sound to aim at bringing more intense and yet fluidly open modes of engagement with scenarios otherwise overlooked and at the edges of perception. It is in this way that the habitual responses of thought might become overtaken by modalities of 'sensory thinking' more capable of relating not only with the indeterminacy of the artwork as an event but also, in more general terms, to 'life' as it is lived
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