1,720,990 research outputs found

    Collaborative Procrastination

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    The problem of inconsistent planning in decision making, which leads to undesirable effects such as procrastination, has been studied in the behavioral-economics literature, and more recently in the context of computational behavioral models. Individuals, however, do not function in isolation, and successful projects most often rely on team work. Team performance does not depend only on the skills of the individual team members, but also on other collective factors, such as team spirit and cohesion. It is not an uncommon situation (for instance, experienced by the authors while working on this paper) that a hard-working individual has the capacity to give a good example to her team-mates and motivate them to work harder. In this paper we adopt the model of Kleinberg and Oren (EC'14) on time-inconsistent planning, and extend it to account for the influence of procrastination within the members of a team. Our first contribution is to model collaborative work so that the relative progress of the team members, with respect to their respective subtasks, motivates (or discourages) them to work harder. We compare the total cost of completing a team project when the team members communicate with each other about their progress, with the corresponding cost when they work in isolation. Our main result is a tight bound on the ratio of these two costs, under mild assumptions. We also show that communication can either increase or decrease the total cost. We also consider the problem of assigning subtasks to team members, with the objective of minimizing the negative effects of collaborative procrastination. We show that whereas a simple problem of forming teams of two members can be solved in polynomial time, the problem of assigning n tasks to n agents is NP-hard

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Practical Expander Decomposition

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    The expander decomposition of a graph decomposes the set of vertices into clusters such that the induced subgraph of each cluster is a subgraph with high conductance, and there is only a small number of inter-cluster edges. Expander decompositions are at the forefront of recent theoretical developments in the area of efficient graph algorithms and act as a central component in several state-of-the-art graph algorithms for fundamental problems like maximum flow, min-cost flow, Gomory-Hu trees, global min-cut, and more. Despite this crucial role and the existence of theoretically efficient expander decomposition algorithms, little is known on their behavior in practice. In this paper we explore the engineering design space in implementations for computing expander decompositions. We base our implementation on the near-linear time algorithm of Saranurak and Wang [SODA'19], and enhance it with practical optimizations that accelerate its running time in practice and at the same time preserve the theoretical runtime and approximation guarantees. We evaluate our algorithm on real-world graphs with up to tens of millions of edges. We demonstrate significant speedups of up to two orders of magnitude over the only prior implementation. To the best of our knowledge, our implementation is the first to compute expander decompositions at this scale within reasonable time

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

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    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

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    We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used

    Incremental 2-Edge-Connectivity in Directed Graphs

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    We present an algorithm that can update the 2-edge-connected blocks of a directed graph with n vertices through a sequence of m edge insertions in a total of O(m*n) time. After each insertion, we can answer the following queries in asymptotically optimal time: - Test in constant time if two query vertices v and w are 2-edge-connected. Moreover, if v and w are not 2-edge-connected, we can produce in constant time a “witness” of this property, by exhibiting an edge that is contained in all paths from v to w or in all paths from w to v. - Report in O(n) time all the 2-edge-connected blocks of G. This is the first dynamic algorithm for 2-connectivity problems on directed graphs, and it matches the best known bounds for simpler problems, such as incremental transitive closure
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