A Comprehensive Study of the Enhanced Distributed Control Access (EDCA) Function

This technical report presents a comprehensive study of the Enhanced Distributed Control Access (EDCA) function defined in IEEE 802.11e. All the three factors are considered. They are: contention window size (CW), arbitration inter-frame space (AIFS), and transmission opportunity limit (TXOP). We first propose a discrete Markov chain model to describe the channel activities governed by EDCA. Then we evaluate the individual as well as joint effects of each factor on the throughput and QoS performance. We obtain several insightful observations showing that judiciously using the EDCA service differentiation mechanism is important to achieve maximum bandwidth utilization and user-specified QoS performance. Guided by our theoretical study, we devise a general QoS framework that provides QoS in an optimal way. The means of realizing the framework in a specific network is yet to be studied

Offshore Offerings by Foreign Entities: How Far Will the SEC Reach to Regulate?

Many countries\u27 regulatory regimes, including that of the United States, traditionally require registration of all investment services offers or securities sales to their citizens. Many have claimed that the Internet will make such financial regulation obsolete. With the advent of the new technology, regulatory bodies across the globe have been forced to redefine what constitutes an offer to purchase securities within their borders. They have come up with a variety of models for regulating cross-border capital flows. Even countries with similar legal traditions such as Britain, the US, and Australia have taken different approaches

Evaluation of How Public Disgrace Affects Instagram Influencers\u27 Personal Brand Sentiment

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a public, negative incident (public disgrace) affects the general sentiment of Instagram influencers with respect to an influencer’s following size. The proposed theoretical model, a quasi-experiment, consists of the sentiment score as the dependent variable, timing of the incident (pre or post), following size (high or moderate), and whether the influencer faced the incident or not as the independent variables. The approach is to identify the sentiments for the comments scraped per influencer analyzed and assess if there is a significant difference in average comment sentiment between following sizes. After a difference in differences analysis, the results indicate that an influencer with a high following is more adversely affected by a public, negative incident than an influencer with a moderate following. Both managerial and commercial implications for Instagram influencer marketing are provided. The findings demonstrate that influencers who face public, negative incidents can have significant repercussions for the brands involved

Gitano Legal Codes: Social Change, NGO\u27s, and External Legal Systems\u27 Influence on Governance of Spanish Roma Communities

Gitanos are the Roma, otherwise known as Gypsies, of Spain that are predominantly concentrated in the southern province of Andaluda. Although the Roma are Europe\u27s largest transnational minority, very little efforts have been made to understand their legal systems. Additionally, due to their long histories of oppression in Europe and internal legal codes that discourage sharing details of their legal systems with outsiders, their legal systems are particularly difficult to understand and for the most part, remain enigmatic and misunderstood. This Article analyzes the historical factors affecting the development of the Gitano legal system by using a horizontal axis metaphor, and the present-day effects of other legal jurisdictions and social factors on the Gitano legal system through a vertical axis metaphor. Through this analysis, the author offers suggestions as to how Gitanos may gain representation of their legal system without compromising tenets of their legal codes, and hopes that a similar mode of analysis may be applied to both Roma and other stateless communities. Critical analysis is crucial in brainstorming for solutions in dealing with the Roma\u27s dire social situations, often described as Europe\u27s worst human rights abuse. Spain is in a unique position to lead efforts in this arena because of the relatively more assimilated social situations of Gitanos compared to other Roma. Also, as an established European Union member with the largest population of Roma in Western Europe, Spain also stands in a position to influence European Union policy towards all Roma of European Union states. This is particularly important as Eastern European states with high Roma populations are now slowly entering the European Union

Prompting is not a substitute for probability measurements in large language models

Prompting is now a dominant method for evaluating the linguistic knowledge of large language models (LLMs). While other methods directly read out models' probability distributions over strings, prompting requires models to access this internal information by processing linguistic input, thereby implicitly testing a new type of emergent ability: metalinguistic judgment. In this study, we compare metalinguistic prompting and direct probability measurements as ways of measuring models' linguistic knowledge. Broadly, we find that LLMs' metalinguistic judgments are inferior to quantities directly derived from representations. Furthermore, consistency gets worse as the prompt query diverges from direct measurements of next-word probabilities. Our findings suggest that negative results relying on metalinguistic prompts cannot be taken as conclusive evidence that an LLM lacks a particular linguistic generalization. Our results also highlight the value that is lost with the move to closed APIs where access to probability distributions is limited.Comment: Camera-ready version for EMNLP 202

Simulation of cargo VOC emissions from petroleum tankers in transit in Canadian waters

The emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from petroleum product tankers potentially represent a significant source of VOCs in port cities. Emission factors are used to estimate the produced VOCs. VOC emissions from transit operations were simulated using a two part model of heat and mass transfer. Using local meteorological data of air temperatures, solar radiation and wind speed, the heat transfer within the tank was modeled. Results showed that bulk cargo temperature remained relatively steady at 25–28°C, the oil surface oscillated diurnally by 1–2°C, and the deck temperature oscillates diurnally by 15–20°C. The solar insolation had the largest effect on the tank temperatures. VOC emissions for two crude oils and gasoline, two tank configurations, and two meteorological conditions were estimated using a model derived from a mass balance on the tank and the obtained temperature profile. Only 3 of 8 scenarios had pressure increases large enough to cause venting of VOC. C2-C5 compounds constituted the majority of VOCs released from crude oils and ethanol made up the majority of the VOCs released from the gasoline carrying barge. The calculated daily emission factors for crude oil and gasoline (barge) were 10 mg/L/day and 135 mg/L/day respectively

A Rate–Distortion view of human pragmatic reasoning

What computational principles underlie human pragmatic reasoning? A prominent approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework, which formulates pragmatic reasoning as probabilistic speakers and listeners recursively reasoning about each other. While RSA enjoys broad empirical support, it is not yet clear whether the dynamics of such recursive reasoning may be governed by a general optimization principle. Here, we present a novel analysis of the RSA framework that addresses this question. First, we show that RSA recursion implements an alternating maximization for optimizing a tradeoff between expected utility and communicative effort. On that basis, we study the dynamics of RSA recursion and disconfirm the conjecture that expected utility is guaranteed to improve with recursion depth. Second, we show that RSA can be grounded in Rate-Distortion theory, while maintaining a similar ability to account for human behavior and avoiding a bias of RSA toward random utterance production. This work furthers the mathematical understanding of RSA models, and suggests that general information-theoretic principles may give rise to human pragmatic reasoning