The authors look at online tip exchanges as parts of gift economies created by the players and designers of console and online role-playing games in Taiwan. A group of experienced players and tip contributors agreed to be interviewed about the mechanisms and processes of providing free strategy guides on the Internet. Their comments reveal needs for social approval and networking in addition to...

This study examined the processing correlates of aspectual coercion among native and non-native speakers of English. For native English speakers, results suggested that the processing delay associated with aspectual coercion is minimal. Aspectual coercion was perhaps cognitively easy to perform. By contrast, non-native speakers of English from unlike first language (L1) backgrounds differed in ...

Branching Constraint Satisfaction Problems (BCSPs) have been introduced to model dynamic resource allocation subject to constraints and uncertainty. We give BCSPs a formal probability semantics by showing how they can be mapped to a certain class of Bayesian decision networks.

This paper exposes the results of our participation at INEX’07 in the AdHoc track and the comparison of these results with respect to the ones obtained last year. Three runs were submitted to each of the Focused, Relevant In Context and Best In Context tasks, all of them obtained with Garnata, our Information Retrieval System for structured documents. As in the past year, we use a model based o...

Prior research has found mixed evidence for the long-theorized link between religiosity and pro-social behavior. To help overcome this divergence, I hypothesize that pro-social behavior is linked not to religiosity per se, but rather to the salience of religion and religious norms. I report a field experiment that examined when auction participants will respond to an appeal to continue bidding ...

Real-time Decision algorithms are a class of incremental resource-bounded [Horvitz, 89] or anytime [Dean, 93] algorithms for evaluating influence diagrams. We present a test domain for real-time decision algorithms, and the results of experiments with several Real-time Decision Algorithms in this domain. The results demonstrate high performance for two algorithms, a decision-evaluation variant ...

An attack graph represents all known sequences of actions that compromise a system in form of an and-or graph. We assume that each action in the attack graph has a specified cost and probability of success and propose an algorithm for computing an action selection policy minimizing the expected cost of performing an attack. We model the problem as a finite horizon MDP and use forward search wit...

In the realm of philosophy and other theoretical discourses, there are many different paths to the turn from the modern to the postmodern, representing a complex genealogy of diverse and often divergent trails through different disciplines and cultural terrains. One pathway moves through an irrationalist tradition from romanticism to existentialism to French postmodernism via the figures of Nie...

In the last years, customer churn prediction has been very high on the agenda of telecommunications service providers. Among customers predicted as churners, highly influential customers deserve special attention, since their churns can also trigger churns of their peers. The aim of this study is to find good predictors of churn influence in a mobile service network. To this end, a procedure fo...

This article discusses arc reversals in hybrid Bayesian networks with deterministic variables. Hybrid Bayesian networks contain a mix of discrete and continuous chance variables. In a Bayesian network representation, a continuous chance variable is said to be deterministic if its conditional distributions have zero variances. Arc reversals are used in making inferences in hybrid Bayesian networ...