1,460 research outputs found
Why not be a desertist?: Three arguments for desert and against luck egalitarianism
Many philosophers believe that luck egalitarianism captures “desert-like” intuitions about justice. Some even think that luck egalitariansm distributes goods in accordance with desert. In this paper, we argue that this is wrong. Desertism conflicts with luck egalitarianism in three important contexts, and, in these contexts, desertism renders the proper moral judgment. First, compared to desertism, luck egalitarianism is sometimes too stingy: it fails to justly compensate people for their socially valuable contributions—when those contributions arose from “option luck”. Second, luck egalitarianism is sometimes too restrictive: it fails to justly compensate people who make a social contribution when that contribution arose from “brute luck”. Third, luck egalitarianism is too limited in scope: it cannot diagnose economic injustice arising independently of comparative levels of justice. The lesson of this paper is that luck egalitarians should consider supplementing their theory with desert considerations. Or, even better, consider desertism as a superior alternative to their theory
Prior and Likelihood Choices for Bayesian Matrix Factorisation on Small Datasets
In this paper, we study the effects of different prior and likelihood choices
for Bayesian matrix factorisation, focusing on small datasets. These choices
can greatly influence the predictive performance of the methods. We identify
four groups of approaches: Gaussian-likelihood with real-valued priors,
nonnegative priors, semi-nonnegative models, and finally Poisson-likelihood
approaches. For each group we review several models from the literature,
considering sixteen in total, and discuss the relations between different
priors and matrix norms. We extensively compare these methods on eight
real-world datasets across three application areas, giving both inter- and
intra-group comparisons. We measure convergence runtime speed, cross-validation
performance, sparse and noisy prediction performance, and model selection
robustness. We offer several insights into the trade-offs between prior and
likelihood choices for Bayesian matrix factorisation on small datasets - such
as that Poisson models give poor predictions, and that nonnegative models are
more constrained than real-valued ones
Many, many more intrinsically knotted graphs
We list more than 200 new examples of minor minimal intrinsically knotted
graphs and describe many more that are intrinsically knotted and likely minor
minimal.Comment: 19 pages, 16 figures, Appendi
Land Use Changes in Europe. Processes of Change, Environmental Transformations and Future Patterns
Patterns of land use in Europe owe much to the boundaries set by the natural environment. The alterations imposed by man are still ultimately constrained by natural limitations of which climate pays a major role. Possible global climatic change, therefore, is likely to have a major effect on land use patterns and this is the first volume to describe the potential changes against the background of historical land use changes in Europe, the likely future land use patterns and the policy implications that are becoming evident in relation to feasible land use management strategies.
This book covers a wide spectrum of issues: How will the characteristics of the land resource change? What are the implications of these changes on the environment? What policies need to be introduced to encourage sensitivity to environmental supply limitations? What is the scale of response that is needed to address these issues?
The workshop that addressed these topics was sponsored by IIASA in association with the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The Stockholm Environment Institute collaborated in this and took on the main responsibility of producing this volume from the range of contributions at the workshop
College Athletes’ Views on Academics: A Qualitative Assessment of Perceptions of Academic Success
The primary purpose of the current study was to give “voice” to college athletes regarding their views on academics. Given their perspectives, means of promoting their academic achievement were suggested. Research describing athletes’ experiences and the impact of socio-emotional stressors on academic success, especially for those not at a Division I school, is needed. Therefore, a qualitative study exploring the academic experiences of college athletes was conducted. Twelve focus groups of college athletes (N = 62) from six teams were held. Results revealed that college athletes are motivated to achieve by external factors and see grades as an external evaluation of performance. Athletes communicate with one another about grades, but this is generally limited to specific assignments rather than semester-long evaluations. Reaching out to academic support staff early in one’s career was reported as helpful, and academic performance could be improved with better communication with professors and more time management skills. The findings provide tools to develop more effective and tailored support programs for college athletes
Effects of nonmagnetic disorder on the energy of Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states
We study the sensitivity of Yu-Shiba-Rusinov states, bound states that form
around magnetic scatterers in superconductors, to the presence of nonmagnetic
disorder in both two and three dimensional systems. We formulate a scattering
approach to this problem and reduce the effects of disorder to two
contributions: disorder-induced normal reflection and a random phase of the
amplitude for Andreev reflection. We find that both of these are small even
for moderate amounts of disorder. In the dirty limit in which the disorder-
induced mean free path is smaller than the superconducting coherence length,
the variance of the energy of the Yu-Shiba-Rusinov state remains small in the
ratio of the Fermi wavelength and the mean free path. This effect is more
pronounced in three dimensions, where only impurities within a few Fermi
wavelengths of the magnetic scatterer contribute. In two dimensions the energy
variance is larger by a logarithmic factor because impurities contribute up to
a distance of the order of the superconducting coherence length
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