Perspectives on Preference Aggregation

For centuries, the mathematical aggregation of preferences by groups, organizations or society has received keen interdisciplinary attention. Extensive 20th century theoretical work in Economics and Political Science highlighted that competing notions of “rational social choice” intrinsically contradict each other. This led some researchers to consider coherent “democratic decision making” a mathematical impossibility. Recent empirical work in Psychology qualifies that view. This nontechnical review sketches a quantitative research paradigm for the behavioral investigation of mathematical social choice rules on real ballot, experimental choice, or attitudinal survey data. The paper poses a series of open questions. Some classical work sometimes makes assumptions about voter preferences that are descriptively invalid. Do such technical assumptions lead the theory astray? How can empirical work inform the formulation of meaningful theoretical primitives? Classical “impossibility results” leverage the fact that certain desirable mathematical properties logically cannot hold universally in all conceivable electorates. Do these properties nonetheless hold in empirical distributions of preferences? Will future behavioral analyses continue to contradict the expectations of established theory? Under what conditions and why do competing consensus methods yield identical outcomes?

Discrimination and Aggregative Patterns among and between populations of Entamoeba spp.

Kin recognition facilitates the evolution of cooperation in animals, but its relevance in microorganisms and their behavior toward relatives remains unclear. The Entamoeba lineage constitutes an ideal model to determine the behavioral and signaling cues needed for aggregative preference. Chemical cues have been reported for E. histolytica but not E. dispar, suggesting cell-communication between con-specifics and behavioral differences with relevance for disease. Entamoeba varieties have been reported as ‘morphologically undistinguishable’. Two strains of E. invadens have been isolated from different hosts (VK-1: NS - Varanus komodoensis and IP1- serpentes) but were classified within the same ‘species’. Trophozoites of each strain aggregate only with members of their own variety, suggesting they are able to associate based on behavioral and chemical communication. Adaptations to different environments and horizontal gene exchange could have influenced diversification of each lineage. Measurable aggregation and behavioral cues in fluorescence micrographs of Entamoeba varieties suggest that these characteristics should be included in phylogenetic studies

Effective Assessment in Art and Design : writing learning outcomes and assessment criteria in art and design

This document has been written to help teachers in art and design who are writing project briefs or unit outlines in learning outcomes form for the first time. It is not meant to be prescriptive but rather a general guide that attempts to clarify the purposes of outcome-led learning and identify some of the pitfalls you might encounter. You will find that the most successful examples of outcome-led learning come from competency-based learning where it is relatively straightforward for students to provide evidence of their learning because the outcomes are almost always skills oriented. Increasingly, universities are adopting the learning outcomes approach (student-centred) in preference to the aims and objectives approach (teacher-centred). Many examples now exist of text-based subjects working with learning outcomes. One of the major challenges for them is to take the term 'understanding' and redefine it in terms of more specific measurable cognitive (thinking) outcomes. In art and design our challenge is greater because we work with rather more ambiguous terms such as 'creativity', 'imagination', 'originality' etc as well as 'understanding'. A significant challenge for you then will be to articulate learning outcomes in a way which promotes these important cognitive attributes but at the same time provides some useful methods of measuring their achievement

An Extended Stable Marriage Problem Algorithm for Clone Detection

Code cloning negatively affects industrial software and threatens intellectual property. This paper presents a novel approach to detecting cloned software by using a bijective matching technique. The proposed approach focuses on increasing the range of similarity measures and thus enhancing the precision of the detection. This is achieved by extending a well-known stable-marriage problem (SMP) and demonstrating how matches between code fragments of different files can be expressed. A prototype of the proposed approach is provided using a proper scenario, which shows a noticeable improvement in several features of clone detection such as scalability and accuracy.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 6 table

A canonical theory of dynamic decision-making

Decision-making behavior is studied in many very different fields, from medicine and eco- nomics to psychology and neuroscience, with major contributions from mathematics and statistics, computer science, AI, and other technical disciplines. However the conceptual- ization of what decision-making is and methods for studying it vary greatly and this has resulted in fragmentation of the field. A theory that can accommodate various perspectives may facilitate interdisciplinary working. We present such a theory in which decision-making is articulated as a set of canonical functions that are sufficiently general to accommodate diverse viewpoints, yet sufficiently precise that they can be instantiated in different ways for specific theoretical or practical purposes. The canons cover the whole decision cycle, from the framing of a decision based on the goals, beliefs, and background knowledge of the decision-maker to the formulation of decision options, establishing preferences over them, and making commitments. Commitments can lead to the initiation of new decisions and any step in the cycle can incorporate reasoning about previous decisions and the rationales for them, and lead to revising or abandoning existing commitments. The theory situates decision-making with respect to other high-level cognitive capabilities like problem solving, planning, and collaborative decision-making. The canonical approach is assessed in three domains: cognitive and neuropsychology, artificial intelligence, and decision engineering

Dealing with Interaction Between Bipolar Multiple Criteria Preferences in PROMETHEE Methods

In this paper, we consider the bipolar approach to Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). In particular we aggregate positive and negative preferences by means of the bipolar PROMETHEE method. To elicit preferences we consider Robust Ordinal Regression (ROR) that has been recently proposed to derive robust conclusions through the use of the concepts of possible and necessary preferences. It permits to take into account the whole set of preference parameters compatible with the preference information provided by the Decision Maker (DM)