3,374 research outputs found
Swap Bribery
In voting theory, bribery is a form of manipulative behavior in which an
external actor (the briber) offers to pay the voters to change their votes in
order to get her preferred candidate elected. We investigate a model of bribery
where the price of each vote depends on the amount of change that the voter is
asked to implement. Specifically, in our model the briber can change a voter's
preference list by paying for a sequence of swaps of consecutive candidates.
Each swap may have a different price; the price of a bribery is the sum of the
prices of all swaps that it involves. We prove complexity results for this
model, which we call swap bribery, for a broad class of election systems,
including variants of approval and k-approval, Borda, Copeland, and maximin.Comment: 17 page
The Carina-Near Moving Group
We identify a group of ~20 co-moving, mostly southern hemisphere, ~200 Myr
old stars near Earth. Of the stars likely to be members of this Carina-Near
Moving Group, in either its nucleus (~30 pc from Earth) or surrounding stream,
all but 3 are plausible members of a multiple star system. The nucleus is
(coincidentally) located quite close to the nucleus of the AB Doradus moving
group notwithstanding that the two groups have substantially different ages and
Galactic space motions, UVW.Comment: 9 pages, 1 table, 2 figures. Accepted in ApJ
Awareness of Meningococcal disease among travelers from the United Kingdom to the meningitis belt in Africa
Meningococcal disease causes considerable morbidity and has a high case-fatality rate. In the United Kingdom, the meningococcal quadrivalent vaccine is recommended for travelers visiting the meningitis belt of Africa. We analyzed 302 responses to a cross-sectional study conducted in 2010 of travelers who had visited the meningitis belt recently or were shortly due to travel there. Using the results of an online questionnaire, we assessed knowledge and understanding of meningococcal disease and likelihood of uptake of meningococcal immunization before travel. Meningococcal vaccine uptake was 30.1%. Although global scores in the questionnaire did not correlate with vaccine uptake, knowledge of the meningitis belt and knowledge of certain key symptoms or signs were statistically associated with high vaccine uptake. We conclude that improved education of travelers may improve vaccine uptake before travel to the meningitis belt in Africa
A Covariant Approach To Ashtekar's Canonical Gravity
A Lorentz and general co-ordinate co-variant form of canonical gravity, using
Ashtekar's variables, is investigated. A co-variant treatment due to Crnkovic
and Witten is used, in which a point in phase space represents a solution of
the equations of motion and a symplectic functional two form is constructed
which is Lorentz and general co-ordinate invariant. The subtleties and
difficulties due to the complex nature of Ashtekar's variables are addressed
and resolved.Comment: 18 pages, Plain Te
Randomisation and Derandomisation in Descriptive Complexity Theory
We study probabilistic complexity classes and questions of derandomisation
from a logical point of view. For each logic L we introduce a new logic BPL,
bounded error probabilistic L, which is defined from L in a similar way as the
complexity class BPP, bounded error probabilistic polynomial time, is defined
from PTIME. Our main focus lies on questions of derandomisation, and we prove
that there is a query which is definable in BPFO, the probabilistic version of
first-order logic, but not in Cinf, finite variable infinitary logic with
counting. This implies that many of the standard logics of finite model theory,
like transitive closure logic and fixed-point logic, both with and without
counting, cannot be derandomised. Similarly, we present a query on ordered
structures which is definable in BPFO but not in monadic second-order logic,
and a query on additive structures which is definable in BPFO but not in FO.
The latter of these queries shows that certain uniform variants of AC0
(bounded-depth polynomial sized circuits) cannot be derandomised. These results
are in contrast to the general belief that most standard complexity classes can
be derandomised. Finally, we note that BPIFP+C, the probabilistic version of
fixed-point logic with counting, captures the complexity class BPP, even on
unordered structures
On k-Column Sparse Packing Programs
We consider the class of packing integer programs (PIPs) that are column
sparse, i.e. there is a specified upper bound k on the number of constraints
that each variable appears in. We give an (ek+o(k))-approximation algorithm for
k-column sparse PIPs, improving on recent results of and
. We also show that the integrality gap of our linear programming
relaxation is at least 2k-1; it is known that k-column sparse PIPs are
-hard to approximate. We also extend our result (at the loss
of a small constant factor) to the more general case of maximizing a submodular
objective over k-column sparse packing constraints.Comment: 19 pages, v3: additional detail
A note on anti-coordination and social interactions
This note confirms a conjecture of [Bramoull\'{e}, Anti-coordination and
social interactions, Games and Economic Behavior, 58, 2007: 30-49]. The
problem, which we name the maximum independent cut problem, is a restricted
version of the MAX-CUT problem, requiring one side of the cut to be an
independent set. We show that the maximum independent cut problem does not
admit any polynomial time algorithm with approximation ratio better than
, where is the number of nodes, and arbitrarily
small, unless P=NP. For the rather special case where each node has a degree of
at most four, the problem is still MAXSNP-hard.Comment: 7 page
Know Your Neighborhood: A Detailed Model Atmosphere Analysis of Nearby White Dwarfs
We present improved atmospheric parameters of nearby white dwarfs lying
within 20 pc of the Sun. The aim of the current study is to obtain the best
statistical model of the least-biased sample of the white dwarf population. A
homogeneous analysis of the local population is performed combining detailed
spectroscopic and photometric analyses based on improved model atmosphere
calculations for various spectral types including DA, DB, DC, DQ, and DZ stars.
The spectroscopic technique is applied to all stars in our sample for which
optical spectra are available. Photometric energy distributions, when
available, are also combined to trigonometric parallax measurements to derive
effective temperatures, stellar radii, as well as atmospheric compositions. A
revised catalog of white dwarfs in the solar neighborhood is presented. We
provide, for the first time, a comprehensive analysis of the mass distribution
and the chemical distribution of white dwarf stars in a volume-limited sample.Comment: 104 pages, 22 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in the
Astrophysical Journal Supplemen
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