an association between diversity and exoticism

Focusing on contemporary Iranian artists and intellectuals, I examine the creation of collective identifications from an internal perspective. Drawing on research on migrant associations and ethnic and racial boundaries in Germany, the ethnographic account alternates between internal relations, member's participation in the transnational field of Iranian artists, and representative activities in the German public sphere. It explains how the members' unequal resources and varying politics of value caused a shift in the association's system of value. From a critique of assimilationism and the promotion of the value of diversity, the group came to largely comply with the system of value prevailing in the German public sphere, sustained by its intersection with the one that shapes the transnational social field of Iranian artists

Robust optimization for resource-constrained project scheduling with uncertain activity durations

The purpose of this paper is to propose models for project scheduling when there is considerable uncertainty in the activity durations, to the extent that the decision maker cannot with confidence associate probabilities with the possible scenarios. Our modeling techniques stem from robust optimization, which is a theoretical framework that enables the decision maker to produce solutions that will have a reasonably good objective value under any likely input data scenario. We develop and implement a scenario-relaxation algorithm and a scenario-relaxationbased heuristic. The first algorithm produces optimal solutions but requires excessive running times even for medium-sized instances; the second algorithm produces high-quality solutions for medium-sized instances and outperforms two benchmark heuristics