Idealness of k-wise intersecting families

A clutter is k-wise intersecting if every k members have a common element, yet no element belongs to all members. We conjecture that, for some integer k ≥ 4, every k-wise intersecting clutter is non-ideal. As evidence for our conjecture, we prove it for k = 4 for the class of binary clutters. Two key ingredients for our proof are Jaeger’s 8-flow theorem for graphs, and Seymour’s characterization of the binary matroids with the sums of circuits property. As further evidence for our conjecture, we also note that it follows from an unpublished conjecture of Seymour from 1975. We also discuss connections to the chromatic number of a clutter, projective geometries over the two-element field, uniform cycle covers in graphs, and quarter-integral packings of value two in ideal clutters

Clean clutters and dyadic fractional packings

A vector is dyadic if each of its entries is a dyadic rational number, i.e., an integer multiple of 1 2k for some nonnegative integer k. We prove that every clean clutter with a covering number of at least two has a dyadic fractional packing of value two. This result is best possible for there exist clean clutters with a covering number of three and no dyadic fractional packing of value three. Examples of clean clutters include ideal clutters, binary clutters, and clutters without an intersecting minor. Our proof is constructive and leads naturally to an albeit exponential algorithm. We improve the running time to quasi-polynomial in the rank of the input, and to polynomial in the binary cas

Mixed Integer Linear Programming Formulation Techniques

A wide range of problems can be modeled as Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MIP) problems using standard formulation techniques. However, in some cases the resulting MIP can be either too weak or too large to be effectively solved by state of the art solvers. In this survey we review advanced MIP formulation techniques that result in stronger and/or smaller formulations for a wide class of problems

Women in a Man’s World: An Examination of Women’s Leadership Work in the ‘Extremely Gendered’ Organisation of Men’s Football in England.

Framed by the theory of ‘extremely gendered’ organisations, this thesis explores women's access to and experiences of leadership in men's professional club football and football governing bodies in England in the 'new' football era (late 1980s – present). Informed by feminist approaches to Constructivist Grounded Theory, I employed a qualitatively driven multimethod approach to data collection and analysis. First, I conducted archival research at the National Football Museum to gather data on the types of leadership roles women have held in football in the new era. I further collected data from the gender pay gap reports of football organisations to gain insight into current gender inequalities. Finally, I conducted biographic interviews with twenty-three women who have worked in football leadership. My findings demonstrate that, despite occupying a significant number of leadership roles in football, women's access to the most powerful roles has been limited in the new football era. Specifically, women's leadership work has been largely peripheral to the core organisational function. Applying the theory of 'extremely gendered' organisations, I argue that core roles – roles with direct influence over and access to male footballers and the field of play– are the most symbolically important to preserving football's masculine character. Thus, having women in core leadership roles threatens men's 'natural' claim to football. I further contend that women’s acceptance in football leadership is conditional upon cultivating an ideal worker/ideal woman identity. Applying the concept of the ideal worker, I find that women are granted entry if they have insider status, i.e., they share the same racial, class, and professional characteristics as men in football. Moreover, I find that motherhood is incompatible with the boundaryless work cultures of football. Thus, women must remain childfree or minimise the impact of motherhood on their careers to keep their senior positions. Women must also perform 'respectable business femininity' to ensure their seniority. Crucially, I argue that the pressure to perform under the glow of the sportlight harms women. However, I also find that women use their positions to defend and challenge football from within. By considering agency as a social practice, I argue that women perform agentive acts of 'tempered radicalism' to quietly resist and challenge the extremely gendered regime of football. However, I find that this is additional physical and emotional labour for women. Nonetheless, women's reasons for leaving football are not always linked to the pressures of being a woman in a man's world. Instead, women are compelled to leave football to pursue an authentic life, free from the corruption and greed that has come to characterise the football industry. In this regard, leaving football was the ultimate act of agency. I conclude that gender equality efforts must move beyond numerical measures of equality to address the peripheral and conditional positioning of women in football leadership. I argue that this requires a reimaging of the football industry, a reimagining that fundamentally disrupts the masculine blueprint upon which football was designed and rids football of its unscrupulous reputation

Between want and should : masculinities and neoliberal subjectivity in men enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Social Anthropology, Massey University, Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

This thesis examines constructions of masculinity in the context of a neoliberal university. It draws primarily from the theory of hegemonic masculinity, a theory of masculinity that posits that gender is organised hierarchically with a narrow ‘ideal’ and dominant construction of masculinity in the premier position of power over women, femininity, and other marginalised expressions of masculinity (Connell, 2005). In the Aotearoa New Zealand context, strength, stoicism, heterosexuality, and practicality describe the hegemonic form of masculinity, despite greater fluidity of gender expression in recent years. Concurrently with hegemonic masculinity, dominant ideals of neoliberalism stress personal control, management, and responsibility via a highly individualised understanding of (economic) success. In higher education, deeply financialised discourses shape how institutions offer their qualifications and how students engage with and utilise their education. Narratives around employability and personal returns are dominant as students must emphasise how their education will allow them to best exploit the job market for their personal benefit. Together, the discourses of dominant masculinities and neoliberal higher education profoundly shape the way men navigate university. I carried out semi-structured interviews with six men enrolled in Bachelor of Arts degrees at Massey University in Albany, Aotearoa New Zealand. The interviews were analysed discursively to elucidate the way men construct ideas about their educational choices in line with ideals of masculinity and neoliberalism. The most dominant emergent themes were: conceptualising arts degrees as ‘risks’; the role of interpersonal care; and the containment of men within normative ideas about what they should be doing at university. Together, masculine and neoliberal ideals reveal a profound tension within the lives of participants. They are caught between the expectations of traditional values of masculinity and profit-focussed neoliberal self-management which compel them to make educational choices that satisfy the expectations of both. This results in participants implicitly and explicitly positioning themselves within the ideals of both systems, despite also knowing that their education is outside of the norms of said systems. They use economic and gendered discourses to justify their choices to pursue arts degrees, which redeems and repositions their degrees within normative expectations for education. Despite the challenges of being placed between these ideals, participants show that there are ways to successfully balance the demands of both through conscious efforts to connect masculinity and neoliberal outlooks to their current education and planned futures. The construction of hegemonic masculinity pressures men into behaviours and values related to stable and productive employment futures for the purpose of being able to provide for dependents. This aids in the continuation of the current gender order by guiding men into choosing careers which allow them to gain access to a provider position. To make an employment or education decision that does not readily connect to future stability as a provider is perceived as inherently risky and imperils one’s ability to appear normatively masculine. Although participants view themselves as atypical for their choice of education, contemporary discourses around masculinities provide a flexible and adaptive resource for participants to nonetheless firmly position themselves in ways that highlighted their masculinity. Participants can manage the riskiness their chosen careers present to their gender identity by stressing outcomes from their education that allow them to achieve masculine ideals, for example, favouring a clinical counselling path through psychology due to the expected financial returns. To this end, neoliberal economic discourses around profitability play an important role in the ability for men to justify their study decisions. Actively assessing the ability of their chosen paths to result in financial success enabled participants to circumvent a risk to personal profitability related to arts degrees’ unclear connection to marketable skills. Financialised framing provided by neoliberal values allowed participants to elucidate the educational path most likely to grant good returns and connect these returns to the expected future stability of employment traditionally valued by masculinity. In this way, the areas of crossover between masculinity and neoliberalism provided the most effective justification for their choices to study arts degrees and allowed them to connect their personal desires for ameliorative social action to existing norms around what men should expect from work. For participants, arts degrees carry gendered and economic connotations that needed to be acknowledged and managed in order to highlight the personal possibility for success and maintain connections to norms of masculinity. Participants’ future careers necessitate engagement with interpersonal and emotional labour via care work. As care work has feminine connotations, and femininity is expected to be avoided by men, there was a need to ‘masculinise’ their expected labour to create a distance from appearing feminine. To do this, participants stressed longer term successes and achieving positions of authority to ‘fix’ society, as well as financial returns, to place the care work they would perform within normatively masculine expectations of future successes. This processes of redrawing boundaries around labour and emphasising specific outcomes to stress normative successes illustrates the remarkable flexibility drawn from masculine and neoliberal values for men to position themselves as part of a continuation of the existing gender order. Identifying and redrawing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour for men was an important strategy for participants rationalising their decisions to study an arts degree. Participants were perceptive of the social constructions of arts degrees as ‘frivolous’ or relatively disconnected from contemporary conceptualisations of success. However, they could actively access neoliberal and masculine discourses to assert how their decisions reflected a carefully chosen path with ‘realistic’ achievements. The difference between ‘realistic’ and ‘unrealistic’ employment outcomes from an arts degree were deeply influenced by the ability for participants to construct their education within normative boundaries for financial stability. This meant that participants ideal outcomes from their education were always placed within employment and employability frames that fit within the boundaries of neoliberal and normatively masculine career aspirations. The findings of this research demonstrate that dominant ideas about masculinity and how one should compete in the labour market simultaneously dictate what men should do and expect at university. Men’s goals in university are contained within gendered and economic realities which make educational options that conform to those realities more attractive to pursue than those options that do not. As a result, this thesis speaks to the way men and masculinities change due to contextual pressures, and how these changes can occur without destabilising the overall normative structure of gender and a neoliberal sense of self

Foundations research in information retrieval inspired by quantum theory

In the information age information is useless unless it can be found and used, search engines in our time thereby form a crucial component of research. For something so crucial, information retrieval (IR), the formal discipline investigating search, can be a confusing area of study. There is an underlying difficulty, with the very definition of information retrieval, and weaknesses in its operational method, which prevent it being called a 'science'. The work in this thesis aims to create a formal definition for search, scientific methods for evaluation and comparison of different search strategies, and methods for dealing with the uncertainty associated with user interactions; so that one has the necessary formal foundation to be able to perceive IR as "search science". The key problems restricting a science of search pertain to the ambiguity in the current way in which search scenarios and concepts are specified. This especially affects evaluation of search systems since according to the traditional retrieval approach, evaluations are not repeatable, and thus not collectively verifiable. This is mainly due to the dependence on the method of user studies currently dominating evaluation methodology. This evaluation problem is related to the problem of not being able to formally define the users in user studies. The problem of defining users relates in turn to one of the main retrieval-specific motivations of the thesis, which can be understood by noticing that uncertainties associated with the interpretation of user interactions are collectively inscribed in a relevance concept, the representation and use of which defines the overall character of a retrieval model. Current research is limited in its understanding of how to best model relevance, a key factor restricting extensive formalization of the IR discipline as a whole. Thus, the problems of defining search systems and search scenarios are the principle issues preventing formal comparisons of systems and scenarios, in turn limiting the strength of experimental evaluation. Alternative models of search are proposed that remove the need for ambiguous relevance concepts and instead by arguing for use of simulation as a normative evaluation strategy for retrieval, some new concepts are introduced that can be employed in judging effectiveness of search systems. Included are techniques for simulating search, techniques for formal user modelling and techniques for generating measures of effectiveness for search models. The problems of evaluation and of defining users are generalized by proposing that they are related to the need for an unified framework for defining arbitrary search concepts, search systems, user models, and evaluation strategies. It is argued that this framework depends on a re-interpretation of the concept of search accommodating the increasingly embedded and implicit nature of search on modern operating systems, internet and networks. The re-interpretation of the concept of search is approached by considering a generalization of the concept of ostensive retrieval producing definitions of search, information need, user and system that (formally) accommodates the perception of search as an abstract process that can be physical and/or computational. The feasibility of both the mathematical formalism and physical conceptualizations of quantum theory (QT) are investigated for the purpose of modelling the this abstract search process as a physical process. Techniques for representing a search process by the Hilbert space formalism in QT are presented from which techniques are proposed for generating measures for effectiveness that combine static information such as term weights, and dynamically changing information such as probabilities of relevance. These techniques are used for deducing methods for modelling information need change. In mapping the 'macro level search' process to 'micro level physics' some generalizations were made to the use and interpretation of basic QT concepts such the wave function description of state and reversible evolution of states corresponding to the first and second postulates of quantum theory respectively. Several ways of expressing relevance (and other retrieval concepts) within the derived framework are proposed arguing that the increase in modelling power by use of QT provides effective ways to characterize this complex concept. Mapping the mathematical formalism of search to that of quantum theory presented insightful perspectives about the nature of search. However, differences between the operational semantics of quantum theory and search restricted the usefulness of the mapping. In trying to resolve these semantic differences, a semi-formal framework was developed that is mid-way between a programmatic language, a state-based language resembling the way QT models states, and a process description language. By using this framework, this thesis attempts to intimately link the theory and practice of information retrieval and the evaluation of the retrieval process. The result is a novel, and useful way for formally discussing, modelling and evaluating search concepts, search systems and search processes

Aboriginal entrepreneurs in the market economy : an exploration of alternative Aboriginal development

This thesis analyzes the influence of Aboriginal traditional values on Aboriginal economic activities and explores the possibilities of an alternative development of Canadian Aboriginal society. It argues that alternative Aboriginal development is possible in a way that emphasizes various social relations. Arguing that the development of Aboriginal society should follow Western society's path, researchers have hardly discussed alternative tradition-based Aboriginal development until the 1990s.The newer discussion for alternative Aboriginal development with respect for their tradition is still in its infancy. In order to identify if and how Aboriginal traditions can be included in their economy and in their society's development, this study conducted interviews with Aboriginal individual entrepreneurs in Quebec and Ontario. This thesis identifies that traditional values such as collectivity, reciprocity, being ecological, non-competitiveness, and respect or concern for different generations influence their business in the form of facilitating formation of social behaviors including: contributions to a First Nation community; close and collective relationship building among workers; providing ecological services or products; modest marketing; and operation takes into consideration influence on elders and the youth. The relatively distinct business activities of Aboriginal entrepreneurs suggest that Aboriginal peoples are involved in the mainstream market economy but in a distinct and more social way. The interviewed Aboriginal entrepreneurs are maintaining social activities while managing their businesses in the market economy. Therefore, Aboriginal development that reflects their traditions is possible with an emphasis on social relations over economic relations

Liminal Resistances: Local Subjections in my Story, Vidheyan, and the God of Small Things

This project investigates various ways in which resistance is explored by Kamala Das, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Arundhati Roy in My Story, Vidheyan, and The God of Small Things respec-tively. “Liminal Resistances: Local Subjections in My Story, Vidheyan, and The God of Small Things” aims to examine the workings and creative subversions of hegemonic discourses of caste, class, gender and color within the local milieu of Kerala, India. By exploring the theoreti-cal apparatuses employed in three diverse texts set in Kerala, this project identifies: firstly, Das’s subversion of Nair Kerala’s sense of gendered and casted normativity in My Story; secondly, Adoor’s depiction of the notion of home that enables self-recognition between the exploited and tyrant ensuring both suppression and libratory self-formation for classed subjects in Vidheyan; and finally, Roy’s portrayal of the conceptual category of whiteness within Kerala as being nei-ther uniformly subservient nor stable as depicted in The God of Small Things. It is hoped that by identifying and exploring the theoretical nuances of resistances in these generically diverse texts—autobiography, film, and fiction-- all set within the local realms of Kerala, this project will contribute a new scholarship in postcolonial studies that will recognize and problematize local instances of subversions and their representations within the Indian subcontinent

TRIZ Future Conference 2004

TRIZ the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving is a living science and a practical methodology: millions of patents have been examined to look for principles of innovation and patterns of excellence. Large and small companies are using TRIZ to solve problems and to develop strategies for future technologies. The TRIZ Future Conference is the annual meeting of the European TRIZ Association, with contributions from everywhere in the world. The aims of the 2004 edition are the integration of TRIZ with other methodologies and the dissemination of systematic innovation practices even through SMEs: a broad spectrum of subjects in several fields debated with experts, practitioners and TRIZ newcomers