George Ritzer's The McDonaldization of Society has generated an unprecedented number of sales and scholarly interest, as demonstrated by highly impressive sales figures, new editions of the book, and the growing critical literature dedicated to the phenomenon of which this book is a part (see also Alfino, Caputo and Wynard 1998 and Kincheloe and Shelton, forthcoming). Ritzer's popularization of...

This paper has three main objectives: (a) Discuss the formal analogy between some important symmetry-invariance arguments used in physics, probability and statistics. Specifically, we will focus on Noether’s theorem in physics, the maximum entropy principle in probability theory, and de Finetti-type theorems in Bayesian statistics; (b) Discuss the epistemological and ontological implications of...

We revisit the well-studied problem of constructing strategyproof approximation mechanisms for facility location games, but offer a fundamentally new perspective by considering risk averse designers. Specifically, we are interested in the tradeoff between a randomized strategyproof mechanism’s approximation ratio, and its variance (which has long served as a proxy for risk). When there is just ...

This research studies the performing and Commitment of religious behavior and customs among high-school students and the effective factors involved in Zanjan. The research method is documenting and survey. For gathering data, we use questionnaire in the paper. The statistical methods applied here are Pearson coefficient correlation, and   multivariate variables as well. About 376 samples were...

Results are proven on an inequality in max algebra and applied to theorems on the diagonal similarity scaling of matrices. Thus the set of all solutions to several scaling problems is obtained. Also introduced is the “full term rank” scaling of a matrix to a matrix with prescribed row and column maxima with the additional requirement that all the maxima are attained at entries each from a diffe...

How often humans communicate with each other? What are the mechanisms that explain how human actions are distributed over time? Here we answer these questions by studying the time interval between calls and SMS messages in an anonymized, large mobile network, with 3.1 million users, over 200 million phone calls and 300 million SMS messages,spanning 70 GigaBytes. Our first contribution is the Tr...

We compute the number of summands in q-averages of norms needed to approximate an Euclidean norm. It turns out that these numbers depend on the norm involved essentially only through the maximal ratio of the norm and the Euclidean norm. Particular attention is given to the case q = ∞ (in which the average is replaced with the maxima). This is closely connected with the behavior of certain famil...

We establish a log-supermodularity property for probability distributions on binary patterns observed at the tips of a tree that are generated under any 2–state Markov process. We illustrate the applicability of this result in phylogenetics by deriving an inequality relevant to estimating expected future phylogenetic diversity under a model of species extinction. In a further application of the...

We define a generalized variant of the satisfiability problem (SAT) where each “clause” is an or -list of inequalities in n variables. The inequality satisfiability problem (I-SAT) is to find whether there exists a feasible point in <n that satisfies at least one inequality in each “clause”. We show that I-SAT is harder than SAT in that I-SAT is NP-complete even when restricted to contain only ...