Previous correlational research shows that childhood adversity is associated with earlier age of reproduction in humans and other species. Such studies, however, cannot show that stressful conditions cause earlier reproduction. Using the cold-pressor task, we built on previous work to test the idea that acute stress influences human reproductive and marital ideals, and that individual stress re...

Predicate abstraction has become one of the most successful methodologies for proving safety properties of programs. Recently, several abstraction methodologies have been proposed for proving liveness properties. This paper studies “ranking abstraction” where a program is augmented by a non-constraining progress monitor based on a set of ranking functions, and further abstracted by predicate-ab...

the intuitionistic fuzzy set has been applied to game theory very rarely since it was introduced by atanassov in 1983. the aim of this paper is to develop an effective methodology for solving matrix games with payoffs of atanassov’s triangular intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (tifns). in this methodology, the concepts and ranking order relations of atanassov’s tifns are defined. a pair of bi-object...

The character of microblog environments raises challenges for microblog search because relevancy becomes one of the many aspects for ranking documents. We concentrate on merging multiple ranking strategies at postretrieval time for the TREC Microblog task. We compare several state-of-the-art late data fusion methods, and present a new semi-supervised variant that accounts for microblog characte...

This paper describes our approaches and results in NTCIR11 IMine task. In 2014, we participate in subtasks for Chinese/English Subtopic Mining and Chinese Document Ranking. In Subtopic Mining subtask, we mine subtopic candidates from various resources and construct the subtopic hierarchy with several different strategies. In Document Ranking subtask, we rerank the result lists with HITS algorit...

The choice of strategies by bidders who are allowed to communicate in auctions is studied. Using the tools of mechanism design, the possible outcomes of communication between bidders participating in a series of simultaneous first-price auctions are investigated. A variety of mechanisms are incentive compatible when side payments are not allowed. When attention is restricted to mechanisms that ...