APPAM members do a lot of what might be called “applied social science research.” They use scientific methods to describe problems of concern to public policy, to explore their causes, and to estimate the effects of existing policies. This laudable commitment to empiricism, however, often inhibits analysts from taking the next step that is logically required of policy thinking: asking “What if....

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

Today an important challenge is opening: designing public spaces by taking into account the augmented meaning carried by “new digital citizen and users”. New ways of digital communication, a broader network of digital information and the open data naturally transform also the physical space into something new we can call “phygital” (Momentum 2012). The usual way to read urban spaces could be im...

Why is this book in English? An insider can offer several answers, such as these: 1. Because the Editorial Group insisted that all papers be in English. 2. Because English is the native language of the book's honoree. 3. Because all of the authors can write in English, and some can write only in English. 4. Because Mouton can sell more copies of an all-English book than of a plurilingual book. ...

One of the most important resources we need today is electricity to carry out comfortably our day-to-day activities. While many nations in the world are abundantly enjoying this resource, more than 1.2 billion people do not have access to electricity. Most of these people are from developing nations typically from Africa and India. They happen to be poor and living in remote villages and mounta...

In this article we study the stable marriage game induced by the men-proposing GaleShapley algorithm. Our setting is standard: all the lists are complete and the matching mechanism is the men-proposing Gale-Shapley algorithm. It is well known that in this setting, men cannot cheat, but women can. In fact, Teo, Sethuraman and Tan [TST01], show that there is a polynomial time algorithm to obtain,...

It's hard to imagine a software agent that could cause physical harm to anyone -it's only software, after all. But what if that software is controlling an electrical appliance, say a coffee maker? Could a control failure cause the coffee maker to overheat and start a fire? We hope not; the coffee maker should in any case have passed an Underwriters' Laboratory test to assure that it won't start...

Given a stream of data, a typical approach in streaming algorithms is to design a sophisticated algorithm with small memory that computes a specific statistic over the streaming data. Usually, if one wants to compute a different statistic after the stream is gone, it is impossible. But what if we want to compute a different statistic after the fact? In this paper, we consider the following fasc...