The concept of secrecy calls to mind a dyadic interaction: one person hiding a secret from another during a conversation or social interaction. The current work, however, demonstrates that this aspect of secrecy is rather rare. Taking a broader view of secrecy as the intent to conceal information, which only sometimes necessitates concealment, yields a new psychology of secrecy. Ten studies dem...

The concept of secrecy calls to mind a dyadic interaction: one person hiding a secret from another during a conversation or social interaction. The current work, however, demonstrates that this aspect of secrecy is rather rare. Taking a broader view of secrecy as the intent to conceal information, which only sometimes necessitates concealment, yields a new psychology of secrecy. Ten studies dem...

We explicitly evaluate the generating functions for joint distributions of pairs of the permutation statistics inv, maj and ch over the symmetric group when both variables are set to −1. We give a combinatorial proof by means of a sign-reversing involution that specializing the variables to −1 in these bimahonian generating functions gives the number of two-colored permutations up to sign.

In light of these trends, this article offers an in-depth exploration of racial and ethnic achievement gap trends and a preliminary examination of different factors that may interact to influence the trends. It offers a comprehensive review of available data on the Black-White and Hispanic-White achievement gaps in reading and mathematics over the last three decades. The achievement gap is meas...

This paper considers the problem of efficiently generating a sequence of secrets with the special property that the knowledge of one or several secrets does not help an adversary to find the other ones. This is achieved through one-way cross-trees, which may be seen as a multidimensional extension of the so-called one-way chains. In a dual way, some applications require the release of one or se...

In this paper, we focus our attention on the problem of assigning initial secrets to users in ad-hoc network (respectively, sensors in a sensor network) so that they can use those secrets to ensure authentication and privacy during their communication. The goal of this assignment is to ensure that any two users can communicate securely with each other even though each user maintains only a smal...

Given n agents each of which has a secret (a fact not known to anybody else), the classical version of the gossip problem is to achieve shared knowledge of all secrets in a minimal number of phone calls. There exist protocols achieving shared knowledge in 2(n−2) calls: when the protocol terminates everybody knows all the secrets. We generalize that problem and focus on higher-order shared knowl...

The paper challenges the prevalent paradigm that differentiates between the management of a core competence and commodity processes. A case study is conducted to examine the strategic planning and management of a call center to illustrate that a commodity process, such as handling customers’ complaints and enquiries, can be transformed into a core competence, if a clear strategic intent is arti...