Hedonic coalition formation games: A new stability notion

Cataloged from PDF version of article.This paper studies hedonic coalition formation games where each player's preferences rely only upon the members of her coalition. A new stability notion under free exit-free entry membership rights, referred to as strong Nash stability, is introduced which is stronger than both core and Nash stabilities studied earlier in the literature. Strong Nash stability has an analogue in non-cooperative games and it is the strongest stability notion appropriate to the context of hedonic coalition formation games. The weak top-choice property is introduced and shown to be sufficient for the existence of a strongly Nash stable partition. It is also shown that descending separable preferences guarantee the existence of a strongly Nash stable partition. Strong Nash stability under different membership rights is also studied. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A connection management protocol for promoting cooperation in Peer-to-Peer networks

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The existence of a high degree of free riding in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks is an important threat that should be addressed while designing P2P protocols. In this paper we propose a connection-based solution that will help to reduce the free riding effects on a P2P network and discourage free riding. Our solution includes a novel P2P connection type and an adaptive connection management protocol that dynamically establishes and adapts a P2P network topology considering the contributions of peers. The aim of the protocol is to bring contributing peers closer to each other on the adapted topology and to push the free riders away from the contributors. In this way contribution is promoted and free riding is discouraged. Unlike some other proposals against free riding, our solution does not require any permanent identification of peers or a security infrastructure for maintaining a global reputation system. It is shown through simulation experiments that there is a significant improvement in performance for contributing peers in a network that applies our protocol. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Out of Home: Social Class in Women’s Writing, 1950–2016

Out of Home: Social Class in Women’s Writing 1950 – 2016 employs an intersectional feminist and critical race theory methodology to examine social class in relation to gendered and racial subjugations in the work of selected French and francophone women authors across diverse regions. This dissertation features Annie Ernaux’s texts in the introduction, and then the colonial societies of French Indonesia and Algeria as depicted by narrators in the position of colonizers in the first two chapters. In the last two chapters, post-colonial or settler societies of Guadeloupian and Québécois texts are shown as depicted by colonized or marginalized narrators. This study focuses on social class and marginalization, and home and exile; as such, it is fundamentally concerned with questions of exclusion and inclusion, and it affirms textual mechanisms of exclusion and elision in regards to class, race, and gender. Often, the texts studied show how these subjugations reinforce one another. Out of Home reveals social class to be mutable rather than static, and associated with home and a sense of self, appearing in conjunction with inequalities of race and gender. Characters might experience social class as mutable, that is, they can move into a higher social class, but struggle with feeling “out of place,” “between classes,” or “out of home.” For the women characters in these texts, agency and ability to articulate and resist social norms that constrain them does not increase during the period studied, but rather decreases, proves to be in vain, or proves to be impossible

System and method for analysis of the upper airway and a respiratory pressure support system

A system for analysis of the upper airway has a sensor arrangement with at least two sensor positions provided along a flow path leading to the mouth and/or nose of a user (4). A relation is derived between sensor signals at the two locations, and this is interpreted to detect at least the presence of upper airway obstructions, and preferably also the location and/or extent of such obstructions. The system is adapted to distinguish between inhalation and exhalation using the acoustic arrangement signals at the first and second locations

Second and third-order nonlinear optical behavior of natural pigment: chlorophyll and crocin

To provide an insight into the microscopic second and third-order nonlinear optical (NLO) behavior of chlorophyll a and crocin, we have computed the electric dipole moments (μ), dispersion-free first hyperpolarizabilities (β), frequency-dependent first and second (γ) hyperpolarizabilities at 1064 nm wavelength area using time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) method. According to ab-initio calculation results, the examined compounds exhibit first and second hyperpolarizabilities with non-zero values, implying second and third-order NLO phenomena