Towards the Coevolution of Incentives in BitTorrent

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing system that is open to variant behavior at the peer level through modification of the client software. A number of different variants have been released and proposed. Some are successful and become widely used whereas others remain in a small minority or are not used at all. In previous work we explored the performance of a large set of client variants over a number of dimensions by applying Axelrod’s round-robin pairwise tournament approach. However, this approach does not capture the dynamics of client change over time within pairwise tournaments. In this work we extend the tournament approach to include a limited evolutionary step, within the pairwise tournaments, in which peers copy their opponents strategy (client variant) if it outperforms their own and also spontaneously change to the opponents strategy with a low mutation probability. We apply a number of different evolutionary algorithms and compare them with the previous non-evolutionary tournament results. We find that in most cases cooperative (sharing) strategies outperformed free riding strategies. These results are comparable to those previously obtained using the round-robin approach without evolution. We selected this limited form of evolution as a step towards understanding the full coevolutionary dynamics that would result from evolution between a large space of client variants in a shared population rather than just pairs of variants. We conclude with a discussion on how such future work might proceed. © 2015, Budapest Tech Polytechnical Institution. All rights reserved

Juvenile Delinquency and the Transition to Monopoly Capitalism

This paper identifies three macrosociological forces (i.e., the social position of youth, private market relations, and poverty and inequality) that are crucial for understanding delinquency and analyzes how these forces evolved together as part of the historical transformation in the United States to monopoly capitalism. The thesis is that these forces have contributed to delinquency by acting collectively to decrease the capacity of social institutions to maintain informal social control. Implications for policy are also considered

Framing the Game: An Architectonic Analogue for Meta-Theorizing Academic Activities

A radical reformulation is proposed for explaining paradigm fragmentation. The broader topography of academic activities is conceptualized according to an academic game-theoretic analogue (GTA). According to this analogue, scholarly and academic activities reflect a competitive field of play and of plays. Criteria such as attention, compensation, awards, publications, tenure, and mobility become the scarce valued resources distributed in the game based on the plays that players enact. In an effort to reveal the heuristic potential of the theoretical analogy, these threads are traced across a broad array of humanistic and scientific theories and scholarship, including connections among Wittgenstein, Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Goffman, Foucault, Bourdieu and Lyotard

Combating Corruption With African Restorative Justice Tradition: Suggested Steps For Nigeria

Corruption has continued to plague countries across the world, especially those in Africa. Local and international communities have all congregated around the conviction that Western bureaucratic mechanisms can destroy and deter corruption. The heavy criticisms against them indicates failure coming from inherent contradictions and lack of political and moral will to keep corruption practices and actors at bay. African restorative justice is articulated as a viable mechanism for controlling corruption and should not be taken as a second fiddle to Western mechanisms, but suis generis a strategy with great potentials. By using African restorative justice mechanism, Nigeria will not only be cutting down corruption but attacking its root, namely, moral depravity and the aversion of social responsibility

Ethics and the crimes of the powerful

The ethical dimension adds a key tool for the analysis of the crimes of the powerful. This dimension is introduced in the analysis of the present article, which seeks to establish how offenders endowed with resources and power justify their conduct through a selective interpretation of classical Western philosophy

Ethics and the crimes of the powerful

The ethical dimension adds a key tool for the analysis of the crimes of the powerful. This dimension is introduced in the analysis of the present article, which seeks to establish how offenders endowed with resources and power justify their conduct through a selective interpretation of classical Western philosophy

Cosmopolitan presumptions? On Martha Nussbaum and her commentators

This article presents a framework for analysis of discourses on ethical cosmopolitanism, and applies it to Martha Nussbaum's Frontiers of Justice (2006), with comparisons to the views of other authors. After outlining the book's form of ethical cosmopolitanism, the article considers the psychological, philosophical and sociological presumptions, the methodology of abstraction, the implicit audiences, and the programmatic targets and implied strategy of social change. It links and comments on sister papers by Giri, McCloskey, Murphy, Nederveen Pieterse and Truong

Minds, objects, and persons – narratives of perpetrators of violent crime

Submitted in accordance with the partial requirements for the degree of Masters in Community Based Counselling Psychology in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Witwatersrand, 2017Although research on violence has gained momentum over the last 3 decades, very little work on situational factors involved in violent enactments has been undertaken in South Africa. As a means to address this limitation, the aim of this project was to better understand the phenomenology of violence. Embedded in a psychosocial approach, the study subjected data collected through three staggered semi-structured interviews with nineteen incarcerated perpetrators of violent crime to a twostage secondary data analysis using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. The first phase, aimed to provide a broad general phenomenological reading of these fifty-seven interviews. Thereafter, a more strategic and theory driven analysis was performed, building on the broader reports of the phenomenology of violence and the perceived situational factors. The evidence suggests that neoliberal policies and ideology may have a significant role in production of violent crime in the South African context, informing not only the behavioural repertoire of its constituency, but, also coming to shape the way in which perpetrators make meaning of their lifeworld and perpetration of violent crime. The analysis also found that impairments in mentalization appeared to play a role as a situational determinant in violent enactments, and interestingly it appeared to be influenced by a number of other relevant situational factors (e.g. the presence and use of illicit substances, peer and social presence and pressure, indicators of a possible threat to their wellbeing, the presence of gangsters, the presence of indicators of conspicuous consumption, as well as, indicators of the presence of moral disengagement). As such, this study provides strong support for further research aimed at understanding the ways in which violence comes to be produced by the structural processes of neoliberalism, it’s influence on the subjectivity of individuals in neoliberalized contexts, and its arguably corrosive effect on marginalized communities by way of its divestment, as well as, its arguably negative sociocultural impact. The project’s overall contribution to psychosocial approaches to violence lies in its demonstration of the value of bridging theories that span work on moral disengagement, conspicuous consumption, neoliberalism, mentalization theory, phenomenology, and violence.XL201

The "Imbecile" Institution and the Limits of Public Engagement: Art Museums and Structural Barriers to Public Value Engagement

As sites for the promotion and contestation of ideas of beauty, subjecthood, and citizenship, art museums play an important governance role in liberal democracy. They are also a major source of expenditure for local governments, yet they often seem only marginally committed to contributing to the public good. While citizen participation in the arts has demonstrable public benefits, the art museum does not prioritize the kinds of services and activities that build public value. Instead, it caters to a small, liberal elite that in North America is shrinking both as a percentage of the overall population and in terms of real numbers. My research examines the structural barriers preventing art museums from adapting to their changing environments to create public value. I compare available evidence of the public value of arts participation as identified in the UK’s Art and Humanities Research Council’s Cultural Value Project (2016) with data and evidence from North American art museums. I pay particular attention to the experiences and opinions of the art museum’s “front-line” workers, those who have daily contact with the public, through a survey with members of Canadian Art Gallery Educators and case studies at four Canadian art museums. I identify barriers to public value creation, including but not limited to: the composition of boards of trustees, hierarchical command-and-control organizational structures and functional departmentalization, staff demographics, the concept of artistic “excellence,” and the peer assessment process. I argue, on the evidence compiled, that the art museum is what Veblen (1914) referred to as an “imbecile” institution: one which, once entrenched, perpetuates its power so successfully that it seems eternal, inevitable, and right, even as it disserves the public. I also argue that to build public value, the art museum must dramatically restructure and re-orientate towards a radically democratic mission in which citizen participation and the educational function are prioritized. Finally, I contend that this can only be achieved by policy makers at all levels of government taking bolder steps to develop the art museum as an “agonistic” institution, discouraging the centralization of culture, and requiring greater diversity (both cultural and professional) on art museum boards, in managerial and creative positions, and in the assessment committees that evaluate the organizations

The "Imbecile" Institution and the Limits of Public Engagement: Art Museums and Structural Barriers to Public Value Engagement

As sites for the promotion and contestation of ideas of beauty, subjecthood, and citizenship, art museums play an important governance role in liberal democracy. They are also a major source of expenditure for local governments, yet they often seem only marginally committed to contributing to the public good. While citizen participation in the arts has demonstrable public benefits, the art museum does not prioritize the kinds of services and activities that build public value. Instead, it caters to a small, liberal elite that in North America is shrinking both as a percentage of the overall population and in terms of real numbers. My research examines the structural barriers preventing art museums from adapting to their changing environments to create public value. I compare available evidence of the public value of arts participation as identified in the UK’s Art and Humanities Research Council’s Cultural Value Project (2016) with data and evidence from North American art museums. I pay particular attention to the experiences and opinions of the art museum’s “front-line” workers, those who have daily contact with the public, through a survey with members of Canadian Art Gallery Educators and case studies at four Canadian art museums. I identify barriers to public value creation, including but not limited to: the composition of boards of trustees, hierarchical command-and-control organizational structures and functional departmentalization, staff demographics, the concept of artistic “excellence,” and the peer assessment process. I argue, on the evidence compiled, that the art museum is what Veblen (1914) referred to as an “imbecile” institution: one which, once entrenched, perpetuates its power so successfully that it seems eternal, inevitable, and right, even as it disserves the public. I also argue that to build public value, the art museum must dramatically restructure and re-orientate towards a radically democratic mission in which citizen participation and the educational function are prioritized. Finally, I contend that this can only be achieved by policy makers at all levels of government taking bolder steps to develop the art museum as an “agonistic” institution, discouraging the centralization of culture, and requiring greater diversity (both cultural and professional) on art museum boards, in managerial and creative positions, and in the assessment committees that evaluate the organizations