Letter to Hazel Johnson regarding newsletter advertising, April 8, 1983

A letter from Pamela Robinson to Hazel Johnson providing information on SCALL\u27s advertising policy for their newsletter

Counting fixed points and rooted closed walks of the singular map x↦xxnx \mapsto x^{x^n} modulo powers of a prime

The "self-power" map $x \mapsto x^x$ modulo $m$ and its generalized form $x \mapsto x^{x^n}$ modulo $m$ are of considerable interest for both theoretical reasons and for potential applications to cryptography. In this paper, we use $p$-adic methods, primarily $p$-adic interpolation, Hensel's lemma, and lifting singular points modulo $p$, to count fixed points and rooted closed walks of equations related to these maps when $m$ is a prime power. In particular, we introduce a new technique for lifting singular solutions of several congruences in several unknowns using the left kernel of the Jacobian matrix.Comment: 18 pages. Version 2 shortens proofs, reduces redundancy, and introduces new technique for counting rooted closed walks. Version 3 updates title to agree with journal publicatio

Attribution Style and Depressive Symptoms Among African American Women

Homelessness is a major social problem in the United States and this nation has the largest number of homeless women. Minority women appear to be more affected than other individuals. Specifically, they are more vulnerable, impoverished, and disenfranchised than all other groups in the nation. These factors affect their emotional well-being and ability to move toward and achieve sustainability. Particularly, African-American women are disproportionately represented in the homeless population, yet they have not been adequately examined in research studies and there are minimal empirical studies that focus on homeless African-American women. Beck\u27s cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and Weiner\u27s attribution theory provided the theoretical foundation for this study. The purpose of this quantitative research was to investigate whether the length of time African-American women are homeless and their attribution style are associated with symptoms of depression. The data were obtained by administering a demographic questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), and the Attributional Style Questionnaire-revised (ASQ-revised) to 70 African-American women living in a shelter and 2 transitional living centers in Charlotte, North Carolina. Data were analyzed using hierarchical multiple regression. The findings revealed no significant relationship between length of time homeless and depression or between attribution style and length of time homeless. There were no moderation effects. However, there was a significant positive relationship between attribution style and depression. The implications for positive social change include influencing polices pertaining to managing depressive symptoms of homeless African-American women to increase their chances of becoming re-housed

Shutdown-seeking AI

We propose developing AIs whose only final goal is being shut down. We argue that this approach to AI safety has three benefits: (i) it could potentially be implemented in reinforcement learning, (ii) it avoids some dangerous instrumental convergence dynamics, and (iii) it creates trip wires for monitoring dangerous capabilities. We also argue that the proposal can overcome a key challenge raised by Soares et al. (2015), that shutdown-seeking AIs will manipulate humans into shutting them down. We conclude by comparing our approach with Soares et al.'s corrigibility framework