Emergence: A Systems Theory’s Challenge to Ethics

The paper reconstructs Niklas Luhmann’s diagnosis of the dysfunctional character of moral communication in the modern society by emphasizing the emergent character of today’s moral problems. In the systems-theoretic literature, emergence means the irreducibility of the properties of the whole to the characteristics of its parts. Two arguments have been advanced. First, the dysfunctional character of moral communication has been traced back to the emergent character of many moral problems. Moral communication has thus been shown to be not inherently dysfunctional, but rather needful of semantic forms that take account of the emergent properties of the economic and other social systems. Second, these properties highlight the moral aspect of the precariousness of system–environment relations as seen by Luhmann. As a moral problem, this precariousness can be resolved through greater sensitivity of social systems to their environment, social and natural alike. Accordingly, the emergent properties of the economic and other social systems can be captured by recasting the concept of responsibility as the individual-level or organizational-level projection of the environmental sensitivity of these systems.     

Bounding the inefficiency of the C-logit stochastic user equilibrium assignment

Compared with standard logit-based stochastic user equilibrium assignment model, the C-logit model describes route choice behavior in a more realistic way by considering the overlapping effect between routes. This paper investigates the inefficiency upper bounds of this model against the deterministic system optimum and the C-logit stochastic system optimum in terms of the total network travel time. It is found that the commonality factor of overlapping routes significantly affects the inefficiency bound, besides link congestion degree, total demand and the number of feasible routes. If the commonality factor is not considered, the efficiency loss resulting from selfishly stochastic travel behavior will be to large extent underestimated.     

Cobalt doped titanate nanotubes: Synthesis and properties

Cobalt oxide doped titanate nanotubes are synthesized with a simple hydrothermal treatment of mixed Co_3O_4 and TiO_2 powders. The formed tubular nanostructure, chemical composition,and the elemental distribution are analyzed using TEM, BET, FTIR, XRD, and XPS. The electrocatalytic activity towards oxygen evolution reactions and photodegradation against Rhodamine B are investigated. It has been found out that the oxygen evolutions starts at 0.8 V and reaches 0.98 mA ·cm~(–1) at 1.4 V vs. SCE. For photodegradation of Rhodamine B, the concentration decreased to 24% after 1 h irradiation using the sample with a mass percentage of 5% cobalt. The results demonstrate that the cobalt oxide doped titanate nanotubes are good candidates as electrocatalysts and photocatalytic materials.     

Secure pairing with wearable devices by using ambient sound and light

Wearable devices usually work together with smart phones. To ensure only legitimate smart phones can read the data, they must conduct pairing to establish a shared key. Traditional pairing methods require that the pairing devices have a keyboard or screen for user interaction. However, due to the size limitation, keyboards or screens are hard to be installed in the wearable devices. To solve this problem, we propose a novel pairing method by using ambient sound and light. In this new scheme, any pairing request from smart phone will trigger wearable device vibration. Only after users press the confirm key on the device can the pairing process continues. Then pairing devices collect ambient sound and light at the predetermined time and establish a shared key by using the Diffie-Hellman protocol. To protect against potential man-in-the-middle attacks in the key establishment process, an improved interlock protocol with sound and light comparison is conducted to authenticate the key. If both the sound and light collected by the pairing devices are similar enough, the key is accepted. Otherwise, it is rejected. Compared with current context based pairing methods, our scheme does not impose strict synchronization on devices to collect ambient context data. Moreover, our scheme need not collect and exchange contextual information for multiple times to resist offline brute force attacks. The experimental results and security analysis prove the effectiveness of our scheme.     

Two Innovative Coalition Formation Models for Dynamic Task Allocation in Disaster Rescues

This paper addresses the problem of multi-objective coalition formation for task allocation. In disaster rescue, due to the dynamics of environments, heterogeneity and complexity of tasks as well as limited available agents, it is hard for the single-objective and single (task)-to-single (agent) task allocation approaches to handle task allocation in such circumstances. To this end, two multi-objective coalition formation for task allocation models are proposed for disaster rescues in this paper. First, through coalition formation, the proposed models enable agents to cooperatively perform complex tasks that cannot be completed by single agent. In addition, through adjusting the weights of multiple task allocation objectives, the proposed models can employ the linear programming to generate more adaptive task allocation plans, which can satisfy different task allocation requirements in disaster rescue. Finally, through employing the multi-stage task allocation mechanism of the dynamic programming, the proposed models can handle the dynamics of tasks and agents in disaster environments. Experimental results indicate that the proposed models have good performance on coalition formation for task allocation in disaster environments, which can generate suitable task allocation plans according to various objectives of task allocation.     

Data-Driven Leader-Follower Output Synchronization for Networked Non-Linear Multi-Agent Systems with Switching Topology and Time-Varying Delays

This paper studies the output synchronization problem for a class of networked non-linear multi-agent systems with switching topology and time-varying delays. To synchronize the outputs, a leader is introduced whose connectivity to the followers varies with time, and a novel data-driven consensus protocol based on model free adaptive control is proposed, where the reference input of each follower is designed to be the time-varying average of the neighboring agents’ outputs. Both the case when the leader is with a prescribed reference input and the case otherwise are considered. The proposed protocol allows for time-varying delays, switching topology, and does not use the agent structure or the dynamics information implicitly or explicitly. Sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the closed-loop stability, and conditions for consensus convergence are obtained, where only a joint spanning tree is required. Numerical simulations and practical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol.     

Contours and Tight Clusters

Nested clusters arise independently in graph partitioning and in the study of contours. We take a step toward unifying these two instances of nested clusters. We show that the graph theoretical tight clusters introduced by Dress, Steel, Moulton and Wu in 2010 are a special case of nested clusters associated to contours.     

An empirical investigation on the risk-return relationship of carbon future market

This paper examines the risk-return relationship for the carbon future market during Phases I, II and III of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). The risk factors derived from the newly developed LSW model, are embedded into a GARCH framework. This new specification is compared with several GARCH-M type models analyzing the risk-return relationship in the carbon market. The results show that the new specification consistently achieves a good fit and possesses superior explanatory power for the European Union Allowance (EUA) data. Some policy suggestions regarding market efficiency are also provided.     

Systemic Design for Applying the Combined Use of SSM and CDA to Social Practices

In this paper, we propose a framework for applying the combined use of soft systems methodology (SSM) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) based on social semiotic systemic functional linguistics to social practices. In the social practice, ‘participation’ mode of Checkland’s SSM is used for ‘problem-solving’ whilst CDA is used to problematize ‘problem-solving’ processes within the practice. During the meta-process of problematization of our research, we used Churchman’s systems approach and its theory of ‘boundary critique’ in order to explore issues such as governance, inequality of power, and social values within the organization examined for this study. In other words, the process-oriented methodology proposed in this paper consists of two processes: that of ‘problem-solving’ based on SSM and of problematization of naturalized discourse from the perspective of CDA and two phases of boundary critique in social practice. A detailed account of a case study of Korean social enterprise is given to demonstrate how our proposed framework of the combined use of SSM and CDA is applied into practice. Reflecting the outcome of the case study, this paper argues that critical social research from systemic inquiry using what we call ‘process-oriented methodology’ is useful to address some of the social and complex issues related to understanding dynamic relation between power and discourse amongst participants in the social enterprise in Korean contexts.     

On implementing the symbolic preprocessing function over Boolean polynomial rings in Gröbner basis algorithms using linear algebra

Some techniques using linear algebra was introduced by Faugère in F4 to speed up the reduction process during Gr?bner basis computations.These techniques can also be used in fast implementations of F5 and some other signature-based Gr?bner basis algorithms.When these techniques are applied,a very important step is constructing matrices from critical pairs and existing polynomials by the Symbolic Preprocessing function(given in F4).Since multiplications of monomials and polynomials are involved in the Symbolic Preprocessing function,this step can be very costly when the number of involved polynomials/monomials is huge.In this paper,multiplications of monomials and polynomials for a Boolean polynomial ring are investigated and a specific method of implementing the Symbolic Preprocessing function over Boolean polynomial rings is reported.Many examples have been tested by using this method,and the experimental data shows that the new method is very efficient.