Truth Contests and Talking Corpses

In diverse fictions from the second century Roman Empire, two parties with competing claims to truth hold a formal contest in a public place where, after a series of abrupt reversals, the issue is finally decided by the evidence of a dead, mutilated, or resurrected body. We can ask these corpses to tell us about the ways Roman society constructed truth. Furthermore, can we learn from the abrupt reversals in these narratives anything about the way Romans experienced shifts in truth-paradigms in “real life”? (This is, of course, a question of paramount importance for appreciating the religious change propelled by Christianity)

9th Annual National HR in Hospitality Conference & Expo

[Excerpt] As a graduate student at The School of Hotel Administration, I had the pleasure of attending the 9th Annual National HR in Hospitality Conference & Expo. The conference was held at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada from March 16-18 and attracted HR and labor and employment relations professionals from all sectors of the industry. It was a great opportunity to network with and learn from key industry leaders such as Robert Mellwig, EVP of Really Cool People at Destination Hotels, Alan Momeyer, VP of HR at Loews Corporation, and Ellen Dubois du Bellay, SVP of Learning and Talent Management at Four Seasons. In a keynote address, Chris Hunsberger, EVP of Global HR for Four Seasons, discussed the importance of innovation in HR

Appreciation of the Sustainability of the Tourism Industry in Cyprus

Because of their specific features (isolation, important sea shores, difficult access, scattering, limited natural resources, prone to cultural disasters, large imports, etc.) islands and small island states need to be protected. They represent case studies regarding sustainable tourism, just like arid zones and mountainous regions. This article takes Cyprus as an example to assess positive and negative aspects which, from a tourist point of view, characterize each of the traditional pillars of sustainability: social, environmental and economic, including patrimonial and cultural. The appraisal as described is largely positive.Cyprus; Sustainability; Tourism; Social; Economic; Environmental; Island

Concentration inequalities for order statistics

This note describes non-asymptotic variance and tail bounds for order statistics of samples of independent identically distributed random variables. Those bounds are checked to be asymptotically tight when the sampling distribution belongs to a maximum domain of attraction. If the sampling distribution has non-decreasing hazard rate (this includes the Gaussian distribution), we derive an exponential Efron-Stein inequality for order statistics: an inequality connecting the logarithmic moment generating function of centered order statistics with exponential moments of Efron-Stein (jackknife) estimates of variance. We use this general connection to derive variance and tail bounds for order statistics of Gaussian sample. Those bounds are not within the scope of the Tsirelson-Ibragimov-Sudakov Gaussian concentration inequality. Proofs are elementary and combine R\'enyi's representation of order statistics and the so-called entropy approach to concentration inequalities popularized by M. Ledoux.Comment: 13 page

Tail index estimation, concentration and adaptivity

This paper presents an adaptive version of the Hill estimator based on Lespki's model selection method. This simple data-driven index selection method is shown to satisfy an oracle inequality and is checked to achieve the lower bound recently derived by Carpentier and Kim. In order to establish the oracle inequality, we derive non-asymptotic variance bounds and concentration inequalities for Hill estimators. These concentration inequalities are derived from Talagrand's concentration inequality for smooth functions of independent exponentially distributed random variables combined with three tools of Extreme Value Theory: the quantile transform, Karamata's representation of slowly varying functions, and R\'enyi's characterisation of the order statistics of exponential samples. The performance of this computationally and conceptually simple method is illustrated using Monte-Carlo simulations

The influence of psychological resilience on the relation between automatic stimulus evaluation and attentional breadth for surprised faces

The broaden-and-build theory relates positive emotions to resilience and cognitive broadening. The theory proposes that the broadening effects underly the relation between positive emotions and resilience, suggesting that resilient people can benefit more from positive emotions at the level of cognitive functioning. Research has investigated the influence of positive emotions on attentional broadening, but the stimulus in the target of attention may also influence attentional breadth, depending on affective stimulus evaluation. Surprised faces are particularly interesting as they are valence ambiguous, therefore, we investigated the relation between affective evaluation-using an affective priming task-and attentional breadth for surprised faces, and how this relation is influenced by resilience. Results show that more positive evaluations are related to more attentional broadening at high levels of resilience, while this relation is reversed at low levels. This indicates that resilient individuals can benefit more from attending to positively evaluated stimuli at the level of attentional broadening

Effects of positive mood on attentional breadth for emotional stimuli

Although earlier studies have related positive emotions to affentional broadening, recent findings point out the complexity of this relation and show that these broadening effects interact with factors such as characteristics of the information that is presented. Besides stimuli characteristics, individual characteristics such as the presence of depressive symptoms could also influence the broadening effects as depressive symptoms have previously been related to a more narrow attentional scope. Therefore, the aim of this study was to further investigate the affentional broadening effects of positive emotions, testing whether this is influenced by the emotional valence of the information presented and secondly, how the presence of depressive symptoms might interact with this relationship. We used a performance based measure to assess fluctuations in affentional broadening for positive, neutral, and negative stimuli. We assessed the presence and severity of depressive symptoms in an unselected study sample and tested whether these symptoms moderate the relationship between induced positive mood and affentional breadth for emotional information. Results showed no direct relation between positive mood and affentional breadth, regardless of the emotional valence of the stimuli. However, the presence of depressive symptoms moderated this relationship in such a way that among low levels of depressive symptoms, positive mood was related to attentional broadening specifically when positive information was presented, while at high levels of depressive symptoms this relation was reversed. The current findings suggest that both stimuli characteristics, individual characteristics and their interplay should be taken into account when investigating the broadening effects of positve emotions

FESTivE: an information system method to improve product designers and environmental experts information exchanges

Effective collaboration between product designers and environmental experts is an important driver for the ecodesign practice in industry. This paper investigates the principal functions required for such an e ective collaboration and aims at facilitating them. Product designers should be able to integrate the environmental parameters into their activities, and to exchange information dynamically with the environmental expert whenever needed during the design process. Therefore, the IT system should be in itself dynamic and exible to the integration of new concepts (knowledge, software). Recent developments in Model Driven Engineering (MDE) are showing some interesting results to gain exibility and dynamism in the IT system. Combining software interoperability using model federation based on MDE with the speci city of ecodesign practice in industry this paper proposes the FESTivE method for Federate EcodeSign Tool modEls. Experimented in two different industrial contexts the practical feasibility of FESTivE has been validated with practitioners. Results on the e ects of using FESTivE in industry shows that product designers and environmental experts are more equipped to anticipate and to respond to each other's needs at each stage of the design process of product or service