Banks and Venture Capitalists: Are the New Rules Too Tough, Too Weak, or Just Right?

White investing, venture capitalists and bankers encounter similar problems. Deciding which young companies are most likely to flourish can be very hard. Making sure that those companies which receive funds are using their money wisely and in the interests of investors, not those running the companies, can be even harder. In solving those problems, bankers and venture capitalists use similar tools

Prevention and control of contaminants of industrial processes and pesticides in the poultry production chain

The reduction in levels of organochlorine pesticide residues in food of animal origin in the past 30 years has been achieved especially by controlling entrance via the feed chain. A further reduction was achieved by registration and use of less persistent pesticides both for direct treatment of animals and of plant material. The remaining problems (e.g. dioxins and PCB's) are much harder to tackle. They are either of a ubiquitous nature and their impact might be enlarged by the present welfare trend requiring more contact of the animals with their environment, or they are of a sporadic nature making checking and control quite hard to execute. The present public demand for a farm animal production that is in balance with the animals' needs and a residue free product adds even more complications to the system

Prepositions

My work is a conscious engagement with traditions of process art that emphasize making over outcome and the desire to create art that cannot be predetermined. The art objects are primarily a by-product of engagement with my material reality. This is hard to pin down and harder to talk about. Historian Kim Grant’s introduction to the circular and sometimes impenetrable creative process is a good summation of one of the essential problems of my art [school] experience: “The artist’s hard work often takes place without a clearly denied goal, thereby rendering the artist’s labors endless, and any results resistant to external evaluation.”** One kind of evaluation, however, comes out of ideas of endurance and how my body interacts with material. Have I repeated the individual mark to the point of muscle memory? Can my hand work by itself? If my hand isn’t making active decisions, will another internal logic reveal itself? The inverse is to manipulate the whole to ind the granular. Both are correct. Printmaking allows for this multidirectional

ALMOST INTERCONNECTED—How Sweden’s 50 Largest Companies Apply a Systems Approach to Sustainability

A new complex and global society demands new approaches to solving our shared challenges and making businesses thrive. As a result, applying a systems approach is becoming more important for businesses when forming strategies for the future. The Inter Business Index is a measurement tool to understand a company’s holistic value creation, and one part of the index is a specific measurement focused on a company’s ability to adapt a systems approach to core strategy and operations. By qualitative analysis of annual and sustainability reports of Sweden’s 50 biggest companies, looking at how the companies relate to future needs and requirements, their own sense of responsibility and place in the system, ability to analyze complex problems and ability to make strategic priorities thereafter, the index ranks the companies by ability to apply a systems approach. Our findings show that companies are better at analyzing what needs to be done, but are having a hard time prioritizing their actions to fit. In discussion, we argue that short sightedness of profits companies traditionally has might make this process harder, albeit necessary

Epistemic virtues, metavirtues, and computational complexity

I argue that considerations about computational complexity show that all finite agents need characteristics like those that have been called epistemic virtues. The necessity of these virtues follows in part from the nonexistence of shortcuts, or efficient ways of finding shortcuts, to cognitively expensive routines. It follows that agents must possess the capacities – metavirtues –of developing in advance the cognitive virtues they will need when time and memory are at a premium

Managing Consistency and Consensus in Group Decision-Making with Incomplete Fuzzy Preference Relations

Group decision-making is a field of decision theory that has many strengths and benefits. It can solve and simplify the most complex and hard decision problems. In addition, it helps decision-makers know more about the problem under study and their preferences. Group decision-making is much harder and complex than individual decision-making since group members may have different preferences regarding the alternatives, making it difficult to reach a consensus. In this thesis, we deal with three interrelated problems that decision-makers encounter during the process of arriving at a final decision. Our work addresses decision-making using preference relations. The first problem deals with incomplete reciprocal preference relations, where some of the preference degrees are missing. Ideally, the group members are able to provide preferences for all the alternatives, but sometimes they might not be able to discriminate between some of the alternatives, leading to missing values. Two methods are proposed to handle this problem. The first is based on a system of equations and the second relies on goal programming to estimate the missing information. The former is suitable to complete any incomplete preference relation with at leas

Hiding Satisfying Assignments: Two are Better than One

The evaluation of incomplete satisfiability solvers depends critically on the availability of hard satisfiable instances. A plausible source of such instances consists of random k-SAT formulas whose clauses are chosen uniformly from among all clauses satisfying some randomly chosen truth assignment A. Unfortunately, instances generated in this manner tend to be relatively easy and can be solved efficiently by practical heuristics. Roughly speaking, as the formula's density increases, for a number of different algorithms, A acts as a stronger and stronger attractor. Motivated by recent results on the geometry of the space of satisfying truth assignments of random k-SAT and NAE-k-SAT formulas, we introduce a simple twist on this basic model, which appears to dramatically increase its hardness. Namely, in addition to forbidding the clauses violated by the hidden assignment A, we also forbid the clauses violated by its complement, so that both A and complement of A are satisfying. It appears that under this "symmetrization'' the effects of the two attractors largely cancel out, making it much harder for algorithms to find any truth assignment. We give theoretical and experimental evidence supporting this assertion.Comment: Preliminary version appeared in AAAI 200

Hard and soft news: A review of concepts, operationalizations and key findings

Over 30 years, a large body of research on what is often called ‘hard’ and ‘soft news’ has accumulated in communication studies. However, there is no consensus about what hard and soft news exactly is, or how it should be defined or measured. Moreover, the concept has not been clearly differentiated from or systematically related to concepts addressing very similar phenomena – tabloidization and ‘infotainment’. Consequently, the results of various studies are hard to compare and different scientific discourses on related issues remain unconnected. Against this backdrop, this article offers a conceptual analysis of the concept based on studies in English and other languages. We identify key dimensions of the concept and make suggestions for a standardized definition and multi-dimensional measurement of harder and softer news. In doing so, we propose to distinguish thematic, focus and style features as basic dimensions that – in their combination – make up harder and softer types of news