Why are Market Economies Politically Stable? A Theory of Capitalist Cohesion

The present paper documents that political stability is positively associated with the extent of domestic trade. In explaining this regularity, we provide a model where political cohesion is linked to the emergence of a fully functioning market economy. Without market exchange, the welfare of inherently selfish individuals will be mutually independent. As a result, political negotiations, echoing the preferences of the citizens of society, will be dog-eat-dog in nature. Whoever has greater bargaining power will be willing to make decisions that enhance the productivity of his supporters at the expense of other groups in society. If the gains from specialization become sufficiently large, however, a market economy will emerge. From being essentially non-cooperative under self-sufficiency, the political decision making process becomes cooperative in the market economy, as the welfare of individuals will be mutually interdependent due to the exchange of goods

A Non-Convex Relaxation for Fixed-Rank Approximation

This paper considers the problem of finding a low rank matrix from observations of linear combinations of its elements. It is well known that if the problem fulfills a restricted isometry property (RIP), convex relaxations using the nuclear norm typically work well and come with theoretical performance guarantees. On the other hand these formulations suffer from a shrinking bias that can severely degrade the solution in the presence of noise. In this theoretical paper we study an alternative non-convex relaxation that in contrast to the nuclear norm does not penalize the leading singular values and thereby avoids this bias. We show that despite its non-convexity the proposed formulation will in many cases have a single local minimizer if a RIP holds. Our numerical tests show that our approach typically converges to a better solution than nuclear norm based alternatives even in cases when the RIP does not hold

Why are Rich Countries more Politically Cohesive?

We document empirically that rich countries are more politically cohesive than poorer countries. In order to explain this regularity, we provide a model where political cohesion is linked to the emergence of a fully functioning market economy. Without market exchange, the welfare of inherently selfish individuals will be mutually independent. As a result, political negotiations, echoing the preferences of the citizens of society, will be dog-eat-dog in nature. Whoever has greater bargaining power will be willing to make decisions that enhance the productivity of his supporters at the expense of other groups in society. If the gains from specialization become sufficiently large, however, a market economy will emerge. From being essentially non-cohesive under self-sufficiency, the political decision making process becomes cohesive in the market economy, as the welfare of individuals will be mutually interdependent due to the exchange of goods. We refer to this latter state as “capitalist cohesion”.political cohesion; economic growth

Out of Touch? - A Study Of The Technology And Framework That Is Supposedly Killing Music

Since the 1990-s music has become more and more polished, to the point where it is almost too perfect. Are we obsessed with perfection, both in structure and pitch? Auto-tune, playback and excessive compression are tools used in all genres, but most commonly seen in pop music. What is the fascination with everything being perfect and flawless? Is not the human part of music important today? This essay examines the “human touch” in music from different perspectives to establish a conclusion regarding the state of it. There are many factors that affect the human touch and this essay is based on four that I believe to be the main factors. Authenticity and perfection are key factors when discussing “humanity” and the human touch in music. Is music today still authentic, even with all the software manipulation and polishing tools? This essay has used academic works from different musicologist to first establish what authenticity is and how it has developed in the digital era. During the analysis I took a closer look at the most criticized and well known tool during music production, pitch correction. This analysis gives an overview of what can be done using pitch correction software such as Auto-tune, Melodyne and Waves Tune. These programs also provide graphs and curves for further analysis in terms of pitch and modulation. The graphs turned out to be excellent material for spotting track manipulation, without even listening to the track. The result of the main questions point towards pitch-correction and perfection being the logical route of music development and the evolution of technology in general. The framework surrounding authenticity feels dated and hard to apply to new, digital music. Tools that would by the old standard make a performance or recording un-authentic should today be seen with fresh eyes and more as a diverse utensil rather than just a cheat. The human touch proved to be a very hard thing to both fake and remove from music, no matter how much you manipulate it. It is hard to have a subjective opinion regarding the state of authenticity of a track in today’s music, and it is safe to say that most musicians and producers today are not having authenticity in mind when creating or recording music. Perhaps this means that being unaware of authenticity and being genuine is the most honest way of being an authentic musician

Non-Convex Rank/Sparsity Regularization and Local Minima

This paper considers the problem of recovering either a low rank matrix or a sparse vector from observations of linear combinations of the vector or matrix elements. Recent methods replace the non-convex regularization with $\ell_1$ or nuclear norm relaxations. It is well known that this approach can be guaranteed to recover a near optimal solutions if a so called restricted isometry property (RIP) holds. On the other hand it is also known to perform soft thresholding which results in a shrinking bias which can degrade the solution. In this paper we study an alternative non-convex regularization term. This formulation does not penalize elements that are larger than a certain threshold making it much less prone to small solutions. Our main theoretical results show that if a RIP holds then the stationary points are often well separated, in the sense that their differences must be of high cardinality/rank. Thus, with a suitable initial solution the approach is unlikely to fall into a bad local minima. Our numerical tests show that the approach is likely to converge to a better solution than standard $\ell_1$/nuclear-norm relaxation even when starting from trivial initializations. In many cases our results can also be used to verify global optimality of our method

Rotation Averaging and Strong Duality

In this paper we explore the role of duality principles within the problem of rotation averaging, a fundamental task in a wide range of computer vision applications. In its conventional form, rotation averaging is stated as a minimization over multiple rotation constraints. As these constraints are non-convex, this problem is generally considered challenging to solve globally. We show how to circumvent this difficulty through the use of Lagrangian duality. While such an approach is well-known it is normally not guaranteed to provide a tight relaxation. Based on spectral graph theory, we analytically prove that in many cases there is no duality gap unless the noise levels are severe. This allows us to obtain certifiably global solutions to a class of important non-convex problems in polynomial time. We also propose an efficient, scalable algorithm that out-performs general purpose numerical solvers and is able to handle the large problem instances commonly occurring in structure from motion settings. The potential of this proposed method is demonstrated on a number of different problems, consisting of both synthetic and real-world data

A Case Study of the Architecture Business Cycle for an In-Vehicle Software Architecture

This paper presents the theoretical and practical benefits from a case study using a the Architecture Business Cycle to understand the management of software architecture at an automotive manufacturer. The study was done to prepare for architectural changes driven by new technology and in the automotive business environment. Our results show that the architecture business cycle worked well in defining the theoretical context for the study after some modifications; the architecture had to be precisely defined in the interview situation to gain more useful data rather than broad generalisations. Further contributions of the study were a deeper understanding of role of the architecture and it's position among other artefacts in the organisation, and an increased focus on architectural issues in management meetings. The study also indirectly affected a subsequent re-organisation