EQUILIBRIUM AGENDA FORMATION

We develop a definition of equilibrium for agenda formation in general voting settings. The definition is independent of any protocol. We show that the set of equilibrium outcomes for any Pareto efficient voting rule is uniquely determined. We also show that for such voting rules, if preferences are strict then the set of equilibrium outcomes coincides with that of the outcomes generated by considering all full agendas for voting by successive elimination and show that the set of equilibrium outcomes corresponds with the Banks set. We also examine the implications in several other settings.Agenda ; Equilibrium ; Voting

Equilibrium Agenda Formation

We develop a definition of equilibrium for agenda formation in general voting settings. The definition is independent of any protocol. We show that the set of equilibrium outcomes for any Pareto efficient voting rule is uniquely determined, and in fact coincides with that of the outcomes generated by considering all full agendas. Under voting by successive elimination (or amendment), the set of equilibrium outcomes corresponds with the Banks set. We also examine the implications in several specific settings and show that studying equilibrium agendas can lead to sharp predictions, in contrast with well-known ``chaos'' theorems.agenda, equilibrium, voting, agenda formation

Biomineral repair of Abalone shell apertures

The shell of the gastropod mollusc, abalone, is comprised of nacre with an outer prismatic layer that is composed of either calcite or aragonite or both, depending on the species. A striking characteristic of the abalone shell is the row of apertures along the dorsal margin. As the organism and shell grow, new apertures are formed and the preceding ones are filled in. Detailed investigations, using electron backscatter diffraction, of the infill in three species of abalone: Haliotis asinina, Haliotis gigantea and Haliotis rufescens reveals that, like the shell, the infill is composed mainly of nacre with an outer prismatic layer. The infill prismatic layer has identical mineralogy as the original shell prismatic layer. In H. asinina and H. gigantea, the prismatic layer of the shell and infill are made of aragonite while in H. rufescens both are composed of calcite. Abalone builds the infill material with the same high level of biological control, replicating the structure, mineralogy and crystallographic orientation as for the shell. The infill of abalone apertures presents us with insight into what is, effectively, shell repair

The implications of COP21 for our future climate

Rising CO2 in the atmosphere is the main cause of anthropogenic climate change, and the data shows a clear increase in global temperature of about 1 °C since pre-industrial levels. Changes in climate extremes are also occurring, with observed increases in the frequency of heat waves, in intense precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) in many places, and in sea level and storm surges. A changing climate with rising extremes has associated risks for food production and other health-related impacts. In order to limit climate change well below 2 °C, our carbon emissions must rapidly follow a decreasing trajectory to near zero

Climate change social learning sandbox

The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) through its theme on Decision Making has since 2010 been exploring what communication and learning approaches might be appropriate in this new and constantly changing context. Jointly held workshops highlighted that for problems like climate change and development it is not sufficient to direct experts to evaluate the issue and advise policymakers or affected people how to respond. Instead, we need ongoing, flexible, consultative processes that develop a collective understanding and response. develop a collective understanding and response. One of the outcomes of the workshops was the establishment of a Sandbox as a mechanism to sustain work on the ideas and activities around Climate Change Social Learning (CCSL) that had surfaced during the workshop

Anyone know where I can cash in my white privilege points?

What does white privilege look like? This interactive session will allow audience members to voice their opinions of what it means to be White. While many White people do not have a clear understanding of their privilege, White privilege is prevalent in our everyday lives. This misunderstanding leads us towards systematic racism and to institutions where White Power is encouraged. This session will work towards helping audience members understand White privilege, gain an understanding of how white supremacy affects the perception of White privilege, and most importantly, what they should do with this privilege

Diagnosing hydrological limitations of a land surface model: application of JULES to a deep-groundwater chalk basin

Land surface models (LSMs) are prospective starting points to develop a global hyper-resolution model of the terrestrial water, energy, and biogeochemical cycles. However, there are some fundamental limitations of LSMs related to how meaningfully hydrological fluxes and stores are represented. A diagnostic approach to model evaluation and improvement is taken here that exploits hydrological expert knowledge to detect LSM inadequacies through consideration of the major behavioural functions of a hydrological system: overall water balance, vertical water redistribution in the unsaturated zone, temporal water redistribution, and spatial water redistribution over the catchment's groundwater and surface-water systems. Three types of information are utilized to improve the model's hydrology: (a) observations, (b) information about expected response from regionalized data, and (c) information from an independent physics-based model. The study considers the JULES (Joint UK Land Environmental Simulator) LSM applied to a deep-groundwater chalk catchment in the UK. The diagnosed hydrological limitations and the proposed ways to address them are indicative of the challenges faced while transitioning to a global high resolution model of the water cycle

On Galilean invariance and nonlinearity in electrodynamics and quantum mechanics

Recent experimental results on slow light heighten interest in nonlinear Maxwell theories. We obtain Galilei covariant equations for electromagnetism by allowing special nonlinearities in the constitutive equations only, keeping Maxwell's equations unchanged. Combining these with linear or nonlinear Schroedinger equations, e.g. as proposed by Doebner and Goldin, yields a Galilean quantum electrodynamics.Comment: 12 pages, added e-mail addresses of the authors, and corrected a misprint in formula (2.10

The happy families of social learning – mapping the complex domains of learning and social change

Various broad fields are connected with social learning and are effectively playing as related families. This Learning Brief outlines research fields related to social learning

FREDOM: Fairness Domain Adaptation Approach to Semantic Scene Understanding

Although Domain Adaptation in Semantic Scene Segmentation has shown impressive improvement in recent years, the fairness concerns in the domain adaptation have yet to be well defined and addressed. In addition, fairness is one of the most critical aspects when deploying the segmentation models into human-related real-world applications, e.g., autonomous driving, as any unfair predictions could influence human safety. In this paper, we propose a novel Fairness Domain Adaptation (FREDOM) approach to semantic scene segmentation. In particular, from the proposed formulated fairness objective, a new adaptation framework will be introduced based on the fair treatment of class distributions. Moreover, to generally model the context of structural dependency, a new conditional structural constraint is introduced to impose the consistency of predicted segmentation. Thanks to the proposed Conditional Structure Network, the self-attention mechanism has sufficiently modeled the structural information of segmentation. Through the ablation studies, the proposed method has shown the performance improvement of the segmentation models and promoted fairness in the model predictions. The experimental results on the two standard benchmarks, i.e., SYNTHIA $\to$ Cityscapes and GTA5 $\to$ Cityscapes, have shown that our method achieved State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance.Comment: Accepted to CVPR'2