The FCC’s proposed net neutrality policy change in 2014 was met with widespread public controversy and outrage. The FCC recently released to the public millions of comments that it received about the issue. It is abundantly clear that the vast majority of citizens prefer to have net neutrality intact, but what exactly are the people saying? What are their main arguments and reasons for wanting ...

An earlier paper showed that the homozygosity (of a population or sample) was a good statistic for testing departures from selective neutrality in the direction of heterozygote advantage or disadvantage. It is here shown that homozygosity is also influenced by the presence of deleterious alleles and by other departures from neutrality, but at a lower order of magnitude of effect if the selectio...

Solving efficiently complex problems using metaheuristics, and in particular local search algorithms, requires incorporating knowledge about the problem to solve. In this paper, the permutation flowshop problem is studied. It is well known that in such problems, several solutions may have the same fitness value. As this neutrality property is an important issue, it should be taken into account ...

We report experimental data and theoretical analysis of Coulomb drag between two closely positioned graphene monolayers in a weak magnetic field. Close enough to the neutrality point, the coexistence of electrons and holes in each layer leads to a dramatic increase of the drag resistivity. Away from charge neutrality, we observe nonzero Hall drag. The observed phenomena are explained by decoupl...

The graph coloring problem is often investigated in the literature. Many insights about many neighboring solutions with the same fitness value are raised but as far as we know, no deep analysis of this neutrality has ever been conducted in the literature. In this paper, we quantify the neutrality of some hard instances of the graph coloring problem. This neutrality property has to be detected a...

With recent developments in machine learning technology, the predictions by systems incorporating machine learning can now have a significant impact on the lives and activities of individuals. In some cases, predictions made by machine learning can result unexpectedly in unfair treatments to individuals. For example, if the results are highly dependent on personal attributes, such as gender or ...

Supporters of net neutrality have often argued that more competition among Internet service providers (ISPs) is beneficial for an open Internet and that the market power of the ISPs lies at the heart of the net neutrality debate. However, the joint effects of the competition among ISPs and among content providers (CPs) have yet to be examined. We study the critical linkage between ISP competiti...

We revisit the neutrality requirement in social choice theory. We propose a weakening of the standard neutrality condition, by allowing for different procedural treatment for different alternatives while entailing that alternatives enjoy same ex-ante possibility to be chosen. We compare these two conditions theoretically and computationally. Furthermore, we explore social choice problems in whi...

This paper focuses on the dilemma that humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) face in their efforts to gain access to populations caught up in current wars. Narrow and broad concepts of humanitarian protection are discussed and it is argued that despite high levels of professionalism, the space for humanitarian action has constricted sharply since the events surrounding the attacks ...

Biological systems, from macromolecules to whole organisms, are robust if they continue to function, survive, or reproduce when faced with mutations, environmental change, and internal noise. I focus here on biological systems that are robust to mutations and ask whether such systems are more or less evolvable, in the sense that they can acquire novel properties. The more robust a system is, th...