Adding laziness in BnB-ADOPT+

In distributed constraint optimization, agents executing BnB-ADOPT+ react eagerly to cost changes: they send non-redundant COST messages to their parents as soon as they receive new messages. We have observed that a lazier reaction (not sending COST messages until a condition is met) substantially decrements the number of messages sent and causes only a small variation in ENCCCs. This approach combines nicely with soft arc consistency maintenance during search. We provide experimental evidence of the benefits of this approach on several benchmarks.This research has been supported by the following grants: CUHK413808, CUHK413710 and CUHK413713 from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong SAR, the CSIC / RGC Joint Research Scheme grants S-HK003/12 and 2011HK0017, TIN2013-45732-C4-4-P from Spanish MINECO, and Generalitat de Catalunya SGR- 2014-118Peer Reviewe

Problems of Bank Lending in Bulgaria: Information Asymmetry and Institutional Learning

Why are there such severe problems in lending in the transition countries? This research took a microeconomic and institutional look at part of the problem. We conducted interviews in Bulgaria and Hungary and sought answers to two questions. First, how do banks making "normal" loans insure that they were making "good" loans? Second, how do banks get their money back on loans that have turned bad? Clearly, weaknesses at either stage could explain both past loan failures and present reluctance to lend. The bankers we spoke to reported significant difficulties at both stages of the credit process. First, the bankers reported difficulties in accumulating the information to evaluate borrowers and their projects. The bankers also reported problems with encouraging borrowers to repay and difficulties with seizing collateral, and using legal action in collecting bad debts. Although many of the problems are universal problems of bank lending, many seemed specific to transition economies in general and Bulgaria in particular. We identified specific problems with obtaining and using the evidence about borrowers that might have been available. Bulgarian bankers were often less than fully effective in collecting all available information, or in considering later how they could improve their methods of evaluating clients. One method that more banks might usefully adopt is systematic review of loan losses and the incorporation of lessons learned into the training of new loan officers. In addition, there were serious difficulties in sharing information about borrowers among bankers and between bankers and other firms. Some relaxation of bank secrecy would be appropriate. We also identified policy areas where improvement appears appropriate. Reputation can be effective in ensuring that borrowers fulfill their contracts. However, there is a general lack of credit reporting institutions to share information about credit-worthiness; this need to be remedied. The heavy reliance on collateral imposes high costs on borrowers and lenders. For collateral to work properly, banks must be able to perfect the collateral and to dispose of it quickly. Finally, fraud against banks was common, but typically went unpunished; prosecutors were apparently not interested in such cases. Bankers and prosecutors must make the prosecution of bank fraud a priority. We base our findings on the 24 banking interviews we conducted in Bulgaria. We also conducted 12 interviews in Hungary. Bankers were surprisingly candid in describing most of their problems.

Resource-aware plan recognition in instrumented environments

This thesis addresses the problem of plan recognition in instrumented environments, which is to infer an agent';s plans by observing its behavior. In instrumented environments such observations are made by physical sensors. This introduces specific challenges, of which the following two are considered in this thesis: - Physical sensors often observe state information instead of actions. As classical plan recognition approaches usually can only deal with action observations, this requires a cumbersome and error-prone inference of executed actions from observed states. - Due to limited physical resources of the environment it is often not possible to run all sensors at the same time, thus sensor selection techniques have to be applied. Current plan recognition approaches are not able to support the environment in selecting relevant subsets of sensors. This thesis proposes a two-stage approach to solve the problems described above. Firstly, a DBN-based plan recognition approach is presented which allows for the explicit representation and consideration of state knowledge. Secondly, a POMDP-based utility model for observation sources is presented which can be used with generic utility-based sensor selection algorithms. Further contributions include the presentation of a software toolkit that realizes plan recognition and sensor selection in instrumented environments, and an empirical evaluation of the validity and performance of the proposed models.Diese Arbeit behandelt das Problem der Planerkennung in instrumentierten Umgebungen. Ziel ist dabei das Erschließen der Pläne des Nutzers anhand der Beobachtung seiner Handlungen. In instrumentierten Umgebungen erfolgt diese Beobachtung über physische Sensoren. Dies wirft spezifische Probleme auf, von denen zwei in dieser Arbeit näher betrachtet werden: - Physische Sensoren beobachten in der Regel Zustände anstelle direkter Nutzeraktionen. Klassische Planerkennungsverfahren basieren jedoch auf der Beobachtung von Aktionen, was bisher eine aufwendige und fehlerträchtige Ableitung von Aktionen aus Zustandsbeobachtungen notwendig macht. - Aufgrund beschränkter Resourcen der Umgebung ist es oft nicht möglich alle Sensoren gleichzeitig zu aktivieren. Aktuelle Planerkennungsverfahren bieten keine Möglichkeit, die Umgebung bei der Auswahl einer relevanten Teilmenge von Sensoren zu unterstützen. Diese Arbeit beschreibt einen zweistufigen Ansatz zur Lösung der genannten Probleme. Zunächst wird ein DBN-basiertes Planerkennungsverfahren vorgestellt, das Zustandswissen explizit repräsentiert und in Schlussfolgerungen berücksichtigt. Dieses Verfahren bildet die Basis für ein POMDP-basiertes Nutzenmodell für Beobachtungsquellen, das für den Zweck der Sensorauswahl genutzt werden kann. Des Weiteren wird ein Toolkit zur Realisierung von Planerkennungs- und Sensorauswahlfunktionen vorgestellt sowie die Gültigkeit und Performanz der vorgestellten Modelle in einer empirischen Studie evaluiert

The life and works of Arthur Foote

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1935. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

The Potosi Mita under Hapsburg administration : the seventeenth century.

The mita was a draft Indian labor system that Viceroy Francisco de Toledo developed in 1573 for the silver industry at Potos(\u27)i (in colonial Upper Peru; current-day Bolivia). For a brief period the mita served, in combination with the introduction of amalgamation technology, stockpiles of previously unrefinable ore and a large capital investment by the mine and mill owners (azogueros) to cause a boom in production. By 1600, however, the stockpiles of ore had been exhausted and the boom had given way to decreasing levels of silver production at Potos(\u27)i. The Indians who were serving in the mita (mitayos) had become more important to the industry, because they were now the principal means of obtaining ore, but their condition had deteriorated. As their own profits fell, the Indians began to flee from Potos(\u27)i and from the provinces that were subject to the mita. Their migration, which was caused by tribute requirements and other labor obligations as well, disrupted the social, economic and political order that the Spanish were trying to impose upon the Indians. Their method of resisting the invaders was passive, but the Indians were neither conquered nor submissive victims of the mita. The group that was caught between the continuing demand for mitayos at Potos(\u27)i and the decreasing number of Indians in the provinces was the caciques (Indian nobles). They were the key to the entire system, because they delivered the Indians to the mines and the mills. At first the caciques were able to meet their quotas by abridging the legal restrictions on the recruitment of the mitayos. But in the early seventeenth century they found themselves fined for the growing number of Indians that they were unable to deliver, and a new form of mita service was founded: service in silver, ostensibly to hire substitutes. By 1630, between one-third and one-half of the total delivery of mitayos to Potos(\u27)i was made in money. The azogueros used some of the silver they received from the caciques for operating funds, rather than to hire laborers. The mita therefore became a capital subsidy as well as forced labor system. The Hapsburg government of colonial Peru opposed the new form of mita service because it was an unauthorized arrangement between the azogueros and the caciques to which it was not a party. The crown\u27s ability to counter the de facto mita was restricted, however, by its isolation in Spain, by the time that was consumed by trans-Atlantic correspondence and by its own bureaucracy. The viceroys who were stationed in Lima were plagued by similar problems, and they depended upon the President of the Audiencia de Charcas and the Corregidor de Potos(\u27)i to administer the mita on a daily basis. A constant interplay of personal and professional jealousies among these officials, the viceroy\u27s reluctance to innovate and the contradictory orders that were issued from Lima and Madrid complicated the government\u27s efforts to reform the mita to the point of near-total ineffectiveness. In 1670, the Viceroy Conde de Lemos determined that the system could not be purged of the azogueros\u27 misuse of mita service in silver and the other abuses that stemmed from it, and he proposed that the system be abolished. The crown was reluctant to accept the loss of revenue that such an act would have entailed, and instead it ordered a total reformation of the mita. That program was executed during the 1680s, under the Viceroy Duque de la Palata. It too failed, because it was based on an untenable premise: that the Toledan mita could be re-established despite 110 years of economic, political and demographic change in Peru

Imperial Lines, Indigenous Lands: Transforming Territorialities of the Río de la Plata, 1680-1805

In the 1750s, and again in the 1780s, Portugal and Spain commissioned mapping expeditions to draw a border between Brazil and Spanish South America. The two Iberian courts hoped to resolve long-standing disputes over territorial possession through the latest cartographic technologies, yet their proposed division ran through lands controlled by autonomous indigenous communities. This dissertation explores the relationship between the subsequent mapping expeditions and interethnic relations in the Río de la Plata region – Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, and the far south of Brazil. Recent work on the history of cartography shows that maps were powerful tools of imperial governance, while scholarship on interethnic borderlands in the Americas suggests that imperial borderlines had little to no impact on native peoples until the nineteenth century. I contribute to this discussion by arguing that mapped lines were significant in certain eighteenth-century borderlands, but mainly because native peoples appropriated them for their own purposes. I draw upon manuscript materials from twenty-six archives in seven countries, and use Geographic Information Systems (GIS), to demonstrate the centrality of independent indigenous communities to the entire bordermaking process. At the time of the mapping expeditions, native peoples known as Charrúas and Minuanes were the principal arbiters of the Río de la Plata’s rural interior, restricting Iberian and Jesuit-Guaraní settlers to its perimeter. Given their limited territorial reach, Portuguese and Spanish diplomats turned to mapmaking as a means to claim native lands without having to claim native peoples as vassals. The mapping expeditions transformed imperial interethnic policies and engendered responses from Charrúas and Minuanes, who exploited Iberian bordermaking to expand kinship ties, establish commercial networks, and gain refuge in times of duress. These shifting territorial dynamics enabled some communities and caciques to expand their networks of power, while exposing others to capture and dislocation. Those who had prospered through the development of an operative borderline nonetheless found themselves debilitated when it began to dissolve in the early nineteenth century.Doctor of Philosoph

1882-01-26

The Old Commonwealth was a weekly newspaper published in Harrisonburg, Va., between 1865 and 1884

A study of the phonological and syntactic processes in the standardisation of Limbum

PN6519.L56, ISO 639-3 : lmp, Limbum languag

Sol Plaatje’s Shakespeare : translation and transition to modernity

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis examines Plaatje's two surviving translations of Shakespeare -- Diphoshophosho (The Comedy Errors) and Dintshontsho Tsa Bo-Juliuse Kesara (Julius Caesar). Translation is the major concept with which I approach the Plaatje-Shakespeare relationship. Adopting the notion of translation as transformation, the thesis illustrates how Plaatje appropriated, manipulated and adapted Shakespeare's dramas for his own social, political and cultural agenda. Largely, this agenda entails the preservation of Setswana language and culture, by recording and contextualising its proverbs, metaphors and vocabulary through an "appropriate orthography". These literary (linguistic schemes are part of Plaatje's major political ideal of a democratic, multi-cultural, and tolerant society. Modern South Africa is a fulfilment of Plaatje's vision. Despite Plaatje's noble aims, the power of these translations is yet to be fully explored by scholars and educators. The thesis concludes by asking whether these translations have a place within the general context of mother tongue education