Eventually consistent register revisited

In order to converge in the presence of concurrent updates, modern eventually consistent replication systems rely on causality information and operation semantics. It is relatively easy to use semantics of high-level operations on replicated data structures, such as sets, lists, etc. However, it is difficult to exploit semantics of operations on registers, which store opaque data. In existing register designs, concurrent writes are resolved either by the application, or by arbitrating them according to their timestamps. The former is complex and may require user intervention, whereas the latter causes arbitrary updates to be lost. In this work, we identify a register construction that generalizes existing ones by combining runtime causality ordering, to identify concurrent writes, with static data semantics, to resolve them. We propose a simple conflict resolution template based on an application-predefined order on the domain of values. It eliminates or reduces the number of conflicts that need to be resolved by the user or by an explicit application logic. We illustrate some variants of our approach with use cases, and how it generalizes existing designs.This projects was supported in part by: Project Norte01-0145-FEDER-000020 under the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (Norte 2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF); EU FP7 SyncFree project (609551); FCT/MCT projects SwiftComp (PTDC/ EEISCR/ 1837/ 2012) and NOVA LINCS (UID/CEC/04516/2013); and a Google Faculty Research Award 2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Information-theoretic temporal Bell inequality and quantum computation

An information-theoretic temporal Bell inequality is formulated to contrast classical and quantum computations. Any classical algorithm satisfies the inequality, while quantum ones can violate it. Therefore, the violation of the inequality is an immediate consequence of the quantumness in the computation. Furthermore, this approach suggests a notion of temporal nonlocality in quantum computation.Comment: v2: 5 pages, refereces added, discussion slightly revised, main result unchanged. v3: typos correcte

Company ‘Emigration’ and EC Freedom of Establishment: Daily Mail Revisited

Following the ECJ’s recent case law on EC freedom of establishment (the Centros, Überseering and Inspire Art cases), regulatory competition for corporate law within the European Union takes place at an early stage of the incorporation of new companies. In contrast, as regards the ‘moving out’ of companies from the country of incorporation, the ECJ once considered a tax law restriction against the transfer abroad of a company’s administrative seat as compatible with EC freedom of establishment (the Daily Mail case). For years, this decision has been regarded as applicable to all restrictions imposed by countries of incorporation, even the forced liquidation of the ‘emigrating’ company. This paper addresses the question whether EC freedom of establishment really allows Member States to place any limit on the ‘emigration’ of nationally registered companies. It argues that EC freedom of establishment covers the transfer of the administrative seat as well as the transfer of the registered office and, therefore, that the country of incorporation cannot liquidate ‘emigrating’ companies. In addition, it addresses the question whether a new Directive is needed to allow the transfer of a com- pany’s registered office and the identity-preserving company law changes. It argues that such a Directive is necessary to avoid legal uncertainty and to protect the interests of employees, creditors and minority shareholders, among others, who could be detrimentally affected by the ‘emigration’ of national companies

Adding Value to Statistics in the Data Revolution Age

As many statistical offices in accordance with the European Statistical System commitment to Vision 2020, since the second half of 2014 Istat has implemented its internal standardisation and industrialisation process within the framework of a common Business Architecture. Istat modernisation programme aims at building services and infrastructures within a plug-and-play framework to foster innovation, promote reuse and move towards full integration and interoperability of statistical process, consistent with a service-oriented architecture. This is expected to lead to higher effectiveness and productivity by improving the quality of statistical information and reducing the response burden. This paper addresses the strategy adopted by Istat which is focused on exploiting administrative data and new data sources in order to achieve its key goals enhancing value to users. The strategy is based on some priorities that consider services centred on users and stakeholders as well as Linked Open Data, to allow Machine-to-Machine data and metadata integration through definition of common statistical ontologies and semantics

Orthogonalized smoothing for rescaled spike and slab models

Rescaled spike and slab models are a new Bayesian variable selection method for linear regression models. In high dimensional orthogonal settings such models have been shown to possess optimal model selection properties. We review background theory and discuss applications of rescaled spike and slab models to prediction problems involving orthogonal polynomials. We first consider global smoothing and discuss potential weaknesses. Some of these deficiencies are remedied by using local regression. The local regression approach relies on an intimate connection between local weighted regression and weighted generalized ridge regression. An important implication is that one can trace the effective degrees of freedom of a curve as a way to visualize and classify curvature. Several motivating examples are presented.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921708000000192 the IMS Collections (http://www.imstat.org/publications/imscollections.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org