Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Overbidding and heterogeneous behavior in contest experiments: a meta-comment on cross-cultural differences

We revisit the analyses by Sheremeta (2013) and Chowdhury and Moffatt (2017), who pool experimental data from 30 Tullock contests to explain the phenomenon of overbidding. The authors find that the overbidding rate is positively related to the number of contestants and has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the relative endowment. We reuse their data and extend the analysis in the direction of cross-cultural differences, focusing on ethno-linguistic-religious fractionalization as a country-level measure. The results suggest an increased explanatory power of the model, with fractionalization negatively relating to overbidding. In addition, the extended model shows that in the one-shot game the overbidding rate is significantly higher than in the case of repeated interactions. We discuss possible interpretations of our findings

The central influencer theorem: spatial voting contests with endogenous coalition formation

We introduce a spatial voting contest without the ‘one person, one vote’ restriction. Players exert costly effort to influence the policy and the outcome is obtained through an adjustment function. Players are heterogeneous in terms of the position in the policy line, disutility function, and the effort cost. In equilibrium, two groups endogenously emerge: players in one group try to implement more leftist policy, while those in the other group try more rightist one. Since the larger group suffers a more severe free-riding problem, the equilibrium policy converges to the center only when the larger group has a cost advantage. We demonstrate how the location of the center (i.e., the steady-state point) can be either median, or a mean of all points, or a mean of the extreme points, depending on the convexities of the utility and cost functions. This reflects some well-known results as special cases. We extend the model to an infinite horizon setting and show that the median outcome can be reached only under certain conditions

Did the COVID-19 pandemic necessarily escalate intimate partner violence? Results from a national-level survey in India

It is inferred that the COVID-19 pandemic may have resulted in a spike in intimate partner violence (IPV). Recent empirical studies in this area provides mixed results from across the world, while analyses on the global south are scarce. In this study we investigate the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on possible physical, emotional, and sexual violence on women by their intimate partners in India. We analyze the household level National Family Health Survey data collected in 707 districts across India during 2019-2021 and compare the pre- and post-pandemic replies to the relevant IPV questions. Unlike some existing studies in other countries that use different measures of IPV, our findings suggest that women are less likely to report incidences of emotional or sexual (but not often physical) violence by their partners after the pandemic induced lockdown. This is driven mainly by the rural areas, and by the states with low gender equality. We conclude by discussing the possible reasons such as the male backlash channel for this result

Identity, communication, and conflict: an experiment

We investigate experimentally the effects of information about native/immigrant identity, and the ability to communicate a self-chosen personal characteristic towards the rival on conflict behavior. In a two-player individual contest with British and Immigrant subjects in the UK we find that neither information about identity nor communicating self-characteristics significantly affect the average level of conflict. Both of those, however, significantly affect players’ strategies, in the sense of the extent they involve conflict over time. Overall, the results indicate that inter-personal communication may help to mitigate high intensity conflicts when the identities are common knowledge among rivals

The lifecycle of affirmative action policies and its effect on effort and sabotage behavior

A main goal of affirmative action (AA) policies is to enable disadvantaged groups to compete with their privileged counterparts. Existing theoretical and empirical research documents that incorporating AA can result in both more egalitarian outcomes and higher exerted efforts. However, the direct behavioral effects of the introduction and removal of such policies are still under-researched. It is also unclear how specific AA policy instruments, for instance, head- start for a disadvantaged group or handicap for the privileged group, affect behavior. We examine these questions in a laboratory experiment in which individuals participate in a real- effort tournament and can sabotage each other. We find that AA does not necessarily result in higher effort. High performers that already experienced an existing AA-free tournament reduce their effort levels after the introduction of the AA policy. There is less sabotage under AA when the tournament started directly with the AA regime. The removal of AA policies, however, significantly intensifies sabotage. Finally, there are no overall systematic differences between handicap and head-start in terms of effort provision or sabotaging behavior

‘Born this way’? Prenatal exposure to testosterone may determine behavior in competition and conflict

Fetal exposure to sex hormones can have long lasting effects on human behavior. The second-to-fourth digit ratio (DR) is considered a putative marker for prenatal exposure to testosterone (vs. estrogens), with higher exposure resulting in lower DR. Even though testosterone is theoretically related to competition, the role of DR in human behavior is debated; and in situations such as bilateral conflict is unknown. We investigate this through a laboratory experiment using a repeated 2-person Tullock contest played in fixed same-gender pairs. Based on a previously obtained large sample of student subjects, we selectively invited participants to the laboratory if their right-hand DR was in the top (High-DR) or bottom (Low-DR) tercile for their gender. Unbeknownst to the subjects, we performed a controlled match of the DR types (Low-Low, Low-High, High-High). This novel methodology allows us to analyze the causal effect of DR on behavior for the first time in the literature. We find that Low-DR (vs. High-DR) males compete more aggressively regardless of the counterpart’s type. For females’ conflict behavior, the counterpart’s type matters more than the decision-maker’s type: Low-DRs are non-significantly more aggressive but everyone is more aggressive against High-DRs. Limitations due to sample size are discussed

Corrections to Hawking-like Radiation for a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Universe

Recently, a Hamilton-Jacobi method beyond semiclassical approximation in black hole physics was developed by \emph{Banerjee} and \emph{Majhi}\cite{beyond0}. In this paper, we generalize their analysis of black holes to the case of Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) universe. It is shown that all the higher order quantum corrections in the single particle action are proportional to the usual semiclassical contribution. The corrections to the Hawking-like temperature and entropy of apparent horizon for FRW universe are also obtained. In the corrected entropy, the area law involves logarithmic area correction together with the standard inverse power of area term.Comment: 10 pages, no figures, comments are welcome; v2: references added and some typoes corrected, to appear in Euro.Phys.J.C; v3:a defect corrected. We thank Dr.Elias Vagenas for pointing out a defect of our pape

Hawking Radiation and Tunneling Mechanism for a New Class of Black Holes in Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet Gravity

We study the Hawking radiation in a new class of black hole solutions in the Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory. The black hole has been argued to have vanishing mass and entropy, but finite Hawking temperature. To check if it really emits radiation, we analyse the Hawking radiation using the original method of quantization of scalar field in the black hole background and the quantum tunneling method, and confirm that it emits radiation at the Hawking temperature. A general formula is derived for the Hawking temperature and backreaction in the tunneling approach. Physical implications of these results are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, v2: Title slightly changed. Motivation and discussions are elaborated, v3: typos corrected to match the published versio