Adaptive sampling strategies for risk-averse stochastic optimization with constraints

We introduce adaptive sampling methods for risk-neutral and risk-averse stochastic programs with deterministic constraints. In particular, we propose a variant of the stochastic projected gradient method where the sample size used to approximate the reduced gradient is determined a posteriori and updated adaptively. We also propose an SQP-type method based on similar adaptive sampling principles. Both methods lead to a significant reduction in cost. Numerical experiments from finance and engineering illustrate the performance and efficacy of the presented algorithms. The methods here are applicable to a broad class of expectation-based risk measures, however, we focus mainly on expected risk and conditional value-at-risk minimization problems

Slavery and the Enlightenment in Jamaica and the British Empire, 1760–1772: The Afterlife of Tacky’s Rebellion and the Origins of British Abolitionism

How did abolitionism move from the margins of British society to a more central position by 1772? During the 1760s, some Britons came to see West Indian planters as especially vicious and West Indian slavery as particularly immoral. Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760 – the most serious slave revolt in British imperial history – was a galvanizing event showing the moral degradation of West Indian slavery. The horrific repression that followed the revolt shocked a growing humanitarian audience in Britain. They translated slave rebel sufferings into Christian terms. Thus, slave rebels were seen as Christian martyrs, an iconography that aided a developing belief that West Indian slaves were cruelly treated and that something needed to be done to stop the wickedness of planters