The majority of labor transactions throughout much of history and a significant fraction of such transactions in many developing countries today are "coercive," in the sense that force or the threat of force plays a central role in convincing workers to accept employment or its terms. We propose a tractable principal-agent mode! of coercion, based on the idea that coercive activities by employe...

There were different courses of gender development in China and the West. Traditional Chinese ethical culture, as the guiding principles in dealing with gender relations, laid the foundation of moral character of men and women, and also caused the formation of the feudal ethics of women in ancient China. This paper discussed the ancient origins of Chinese traditional female gender role in two p...

on the theoretical aspects and have tended to attribute a privileged role to Louis Pasteur. The majority of French historians have simply analysed the "Pasteurization" of French medicine and implicitly assumed the validity of this analysis for western medicine and the overall importance of the French hygienist movement, the role of the "go-betweens" of Pasteurism's influence on Pasteurian "know...

The limitations of traditional academic knowledge exchange systems such as conferences and peer-reviewed journals result in discipline-based scholarship that is feudal in nature and can only dissipate as cross-disciplinary research expands. The next evolutionary step is democratic online knowledge exchange, run by the academic many rather than the publishing-oligarchic few. Using sociotechnical...

The early modern period is crucial for the development of modern structures of political organization and their legitimation: this seems to be a truism after so much research emphasis on national history, and rather less on comparative research. In nearly all political units the power of the centre was enhanced, marginalizing the regions and localities. Although there were specific differences ...

Pre-Confucian China Although there is evidence of advanced civilization in China in very ancient times, actual recorded history begins with the Shang dynasty, in the fourteenth century B.C.E. Available evidence indicates that this was an advanced civilization. For example, art from this period is quite sophisticated, even according to modern standards. This dynasty ended with the invasion by mo...

Objectives: The objectives of the study was to describe how people who face partner violence against women, either as volunteers or as professionals in their everyday work, explain violence against women in intimate relationships and their suggestions for preventive activities. Methods: Twenty men and twenty women were strategically selected for five focus-group discussions. The interviews were...

In this paper we explore one type of commons town and village greens which are an important feature of the rural and, increasingly, the urban, English landscape. Greens are an ancient form of commons, but they are increasingly recognised as having contemporary significance, particularly because of their potential to act as a reservoir for natural resources and their enjoyment. They are, in othe...

In his now (in)famous pamphlet "Conspiracy as Governance" JULIAN ASSANGE (JA) argues about the need for leaking as an efficient way to destroy "unjust" groups as the neo-feudalistic ones luring the conspiracy theory leaning hacker community into his belief system. Eventually, JA used a biologistic argument on the benefits and drawbacks that uncontrolled leaking might pose for "just" and "unjust...

We introduce FeUdal Networks (FuNs): a novel architecture for hierarchical reinforcement learning. Our approach is inspired by the feudal reinforcement learning proposal of Dayan and Hinton, and gains power and efficacy by decoupling end-to-end learning across multiple levels – allowing it to utilise different resolutions of time. Our framework employs a Manager module and a Worker module. The ...