26 research outputs found
The Wild West is Wild: The Homicide Resource Curse
We uncover interpersonal violence as a dimension and a mechanism of the resource curse. We rely on a historical natural experiment in the United States, in which mineral discoveries occurred at various stages of governmental territorial expansion. "Early" mineral discoveries, before full-fledged rule of law is in place in a county, are associated with higher levels of interpersonal violence, both historically and today. The persistence of this homicide resource curse is partly explained by the low quality of (subsequent) judicial institutions. The specificity of our results to violent crime also suggests that a private order of property rights did emerge on the frontier, but that it was enforced through high levels of interpersonal violence. The results are robust to state-specific effects, to comparing only neighboring counties, and to comparing only discoveries within short time intervals of one another
Parameterized Verification of Safety Properties in Ad Hoc Network Protocols
We summarize the main results proved in recent work on the parameterized
verification of safety properties for ad hoc network protocols. We consider a
model in which the communication topology of a network is represented as a
graph. Nodes represent states of individual processes. Adjacent nodes represent
single-hop neighbors. Processes are finite state automata that communicate via
selective broadcast messages. Reception of a broadcast is restricted to
single-hop neighbors. For this model we consider a decision problem that can be
expressed as the verification of the existence of an initial topology in which
the execution of the protocol can lead to a configuration with at least one
node in a certain state. The decision problem is parametric both on the size
and on the form of the communication topology of the initial configurations. We
draw a complete picture of the decidability and complexity boundaries of this
problem according to various assumptions on the possible topologies.Comment: In Proceedings PACO 2011, arXiv:1108.145
Living in the Garden of Eden: Mineral resources and preferences for redistribution
This paper provides empirical evidence that mineral resources abundance is associated to preferences for redistribution in the United States. We show that individuals living in states with large mineral resources endowment are more opposed to redistribution than others. We take advantage of both the spatial and the temporal distributions of mineral resources discoveries since 1800 to uncover two mechanisms through which mineral resources can foster ones’ opposition to redistribution: either by transmission of values formed in the past, or by the exposure to mineral discoveries during individuals’ life-time. We show that both mechanisms matter to explain respondents’ preferences
Some Theoretical Properties of GANs
International audienceGenerative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a class of generative algorithms that have been shown to produce state-of-the art samples, especially in the domain of image creation. The fundamental principle of GANs is to approximate the unknown distribution of a given data set by optimizing an objective function through an adversarial game between a family of generators and a family of discriminators. In this paper, we offer a better theoretical understanding of GANs by analyzing some of their mathematical and statistical properties. We study the deep connection between the adversarial principle underlying GANs and the Jensen-Shannon divergence, together with some optimality characteristics of the problem. An analysis of the role of the discriminator family via approximation arguments is also provided. In addition, taking a statistical point of view, we study the large sample properties of the estimated distribution and prove in particular a central limit theorem. Some of our results are illustrated with simulated examples
Impact de l’état d’oxydation du platine sur l’oxydation catalytique du CO : Apport de la méthodologie SSITKA-IR
National audienc
Force-Velocity Profile: Imbalance Determination and Effect on Lower Limb Ballistic Performance
International audienc