11,299 research outputs found
Judgment Aggregation with Abstentions under Voters' Hierarchy
International audienceSimilar to Arrow’s impossibility theorem for preference aggregation, judgment aggregation has also an intrinsic impossibility for generating consistent group judgment from individual judgments. Removing some of the pre-assumed conditions would mitigate the problem but may still lead to too restrictive solutions. It was proved that if completeness is removed but other plausible conditions are kept, the only possible aggregation functions are oligarchic, which means that the group judgment is purely determined by a certain subset of participating judges. Instead of further challenging the other conditions, this paper investigates how the judgment from each individual judge affects the group judgment in an oligarchic environment. We explore a set of intuitively demanded conditions under abstentions and design a feasible judgment aggregation rule based on the agents’ hierarchy. We show this proposed aggregation rule satisfies the desirable conditions. More importantly, this rule is oligarchic with respect to a subset of agenda instead of the whole agenda due to its literal-based characteristics
High Redshift Quasars and Star Formation in the Early Universe
In order to derive information on the star formation history in the early
universe we observed 6 high-redshift (z=3.4) quasars in the near-infrared to
measure the relative iron and \mgii emission strengths. A detailed comparison
of the resulting spectra with those of low-redshift quasars show essentially
the same FeII/MgII emission ratios and very similar continuum and line spectral
properties, indicating a lack of evolution of the relative iron to magnesium
abundance of the gas since z=3.4 in bright quasars. On the basis of current
chemical evolution scenarios of galaxies, where magnesium is produced in
massive stars ending in type II SNe, while iron is formed predominantly in SNe
of type Ia with a delay of ~1 Gyr and assuming as cosmological parameters H_o =
72 km/s Mpc, Omega_M = 0.3, and Omega_Lambda = 0.7$, we conclude that major
star formation activity in the host galaxies of our z=3.4 quasars must have
started already at an epoch corresponding to z_f ~= 10, when the age of the
universe was less than 0.5 Gyrs.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, ApJ in pres
Tunability of Critical Casimir Interactions by Boundary Conditions
We experimentally demonstrate that critical Casimir forces in colloidal
systems can be continuously tuned by the choice of boundary conditions. The
interaction potential of a colloidal particle in a mixture of water and
2,6-lutidine has been measured above a substrate with a gradient in its
preferential adsorption properties for the mixture's components. We find that
the interaction potentials at constant temperature but different positions
relative to the gradient continuously change from attraction to repulsion. This
demonstrates that critical Casimir forces respond not only to minute
temperature changes but also to small changes in the surface properties.Comment: 4 figures;
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0295-5075/88/2/26001/epl_88_2_26001.htm
Towards an Ontological Modelling of Preference Relations
Preference relations are intensively studied in Economics,
but they are also approached in AI, Knowledge Representation, and
Conceptual Modelling, as they provide a key concept in a variety of
domains of application. In this paper, we propose an ontological foundation
of preference relations to formalise their essential aspects across
domains. Firstly, we shall discuss what is the ontological status of the
relata of a preference relation. Secondly, we investigate the place of preference
relations within a rich taxonomy of relations (e.g. we ask whether
they are internal or external, essential or contingent, descriptive or nondescriptive
relations). Finally, we provide an ontological modelling of
preference relation as a module of a foundational (or upper) ontology
(viz. OntoUML).
The aim of this paper is to provide a sharable foundational theory of
preference relation that foster interoperability across the heterogeneous
domains of application of preference relations
An analytic approach to number counts of weak-lensing peak detections
We develop and apply an analytic method to predict peak counts in
weak-lensing surveys. It is based on the theory of Gaussian random fields and
suitable to quantify the level of spurious detections caused by chance
projections of large-scale structures as well as the shape and shot noise
contributed by the background galaxies. We compare our method to peak counts
obtained from numerical ray-tracing simulations and find good agreement at the
expected level. The number of peak detections depends substantially on the
shape and size of the filter applied to the gravitational shear field. Our main
results are that weak-lensing peak counts are dominated by spurious detections
up to signal-to-noise ratios of 3--5 and that most filters yield only a few
detections per square degree above this level, while a filter optimised for
suppressing large-scale structure noise returns up to an order of magnitude
more.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, submitted to A&
Spreading in narrow channels
We study a lattice model for the spreading of fluid films, which are a few
molecular layers thick, in narrow channels with inert lateral walls. We focus
on systems connected to two particle reservoirs at different chemical
potentials, considering an attractive substrate potential at the bottom,
confining side walls, and hard-core repulsive fluid-fluid interactions. Using
kinetic Monte Carlo simulations we find a diffusive behavior. The corresponding
diffusion coefficient depends on the density and is bounded from below by the
free one-dimensional diffusion coefficient, valid for an inert bottom wall.
These numerical results are rationalized within the corresponding continuum
limit.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figure
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