No Internal Regret via Neighborhood Watch

We present an algorithm which attains O(\sqrt{T}) internal (and thus external) regret for finite games with partial monitoring under the local observability condition. Recently, this condition has been shown by (Bartok, Pal, and Szepesvari, 2011) to imply the O(\sqrt{T}) rate for partial monitoring games against an i.i.d. opponent, and the authors conjectured that the same holds for non-stochastic adversaries. Our result is in the affirmative, and it completes the characterization of possible rates for finite partial-monitoring games, an open question stated by (Cesa-Bianchi, Lugosi, and Stoltz, 2006). Our regret guarantees also hold for the more general model of partial monitoring with random signals

Process Cooperativity as a Feedback Metric in Concurrent Message-Passing Languages

Runtime systems for concurrent languages have begun to utilize feedback mechanisms to influence their scheduling behavior as the application proceeds. These feedback mechanisms rely on metrics by which to grade any alterations made to the schedule of the multi-threaded application. As the application\u27s phase shifts, the feedback mechanism is tasked with modifying the scheduler to reduce its overhead and increase the application\u27s efficiency. Cooperativity is a novel possible metric by which to grade a system. In biochemistry the term cooperativity is defined as the increase or decrease in the rate of interaction between a reactant and a protein as the reactant concentration increases. This definition translates well as an information theoretic definition as: the increase or decrease in the rate of interaction between a process and a communication method as the number of processes increase. This work proposes several feedback mechanisms and scheduling algorithms which take advantage of cooperative behavior. It further compares these algorithms to other common mechanisms via a custom extensible runtime system developed to support swappable scheduling mechanisms. A minimalistic language with interesting characteristics, which lend themselves to easier statistical metric accumulation and simulated application implementation, is also introduced

Socioeconomic Status, Gender, and Diet

Health outcomes like morbidities and death relate to socioeconomic status (SES), or the power and prestige related to social classes. Many of such outcomes can also be attributed to diet, which SES and gender have been related to. The current study sought to discover factors relevant to dietary behaviors like ground meat preference and motives like the importance of food price, nutrition, naturalness, and convenience. Does SES predict a preference for ground turkey; the importance of food price; nutrition; and naturalness? Does gender predict the importance of food nutrition, naturalness, or convenience? A survey measured participants’ levels of education and dietary motives, research assistants observed and coded gender, and income levels were based on the supermarket areas’ household incomes. A total of 308 consumers were recruited from supermarkets in northern NJ. The predominant data analytic technique was binary logistic regression. Education predicted the importance of food price (p \u3c .005). Being female predicted the importance of food nutrition (p \u3c .05). Educated persons of heightened SES were less concerned with food price’s importance, which suggested that food price may hinder food habits for the uneducated or impoverished. Furthermore, feminine socialization and reinforcement processes possibly drove the importance of food nutrition for women, perhaps in pursuance of bodily thinness. These findings indicated that SES was related to consumers’ spending capacities and gender socialization processes seem to promote nutrition for women. Implications were discussed and future studies were recommended

Finite volume effects in low-energy neutron-deuteron scattering

We present a lattice calculation of neutron-deuteron scattering at very low energies and investigate in detail the impact of the topological finite-volume corrections. Our calculations are carried out in the framework of pionless effective field theory at leading order in the low-energy expansion. Using lattice sizes and a lattice spacing comparable to those employed in nuclear lattice simulations, we find that the topological volume corrections must be taken into account in order to obtain correct results for the neutron-proton S-wave scattering lengths.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Ambiguous Solicitation: Ambiguous Prescription

We conduct a two-phase laboratory experiment, separated by several weeks. In the first phase, we conduct urn games intended to measure ambiguity aversion on a representative population of undergraduate students. In the second phase, we invite the students back with four different solicitation treatments, varying in the ambiguity of information regarding the task and the payout of the laboratory experiment. We find that those who return do not differ from the overall pool with respect to their ambiguity version. However, no solicitation treatment generates a representative sample. The ambiguous task treatment drives away the ambiguity averse disproportionally, and the detailed task treatment draws in the ambiguity averse disproportionally.laboratory experimental methods, experimental economics, laboratory selection effects