This article explores in conversation with some of the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer the question of how the experience of the dislocation of time and the visitation of “the ghosts of the past” (also in contexts marked by historical injustices) is related to responsible ethical action. The question is also posed as to how the reconfiguration of the relationship of past, present and future fun...

We consider a single link loss system where the arrival rates are determined by prices. We examine two economic models, one where prices are set to maximize revenue, and the other where prices are set to maximize total social welfare.

We consider the problem of estimating link quality in an ad-hoc wireless mesh. We argue that estimating links well requires combining information from the network, link, and physical layers. We propose narrow, protocolindependent interfaces for the layers, which in total provide four bits of information: 1 from the physical layer, 1 from the link layer, and 2 from the network layer. We present ...

Several classic tilings, including rhombuses and dominoes, possess height functions which allow us to 1) prove ergodicity and polynomial mixing times for Markov chains based on local moves, 2) use coupling from the past to sample perfectly random tilings, 3) map the statistics of random tilings at large scales to physical models of random surfaces, and and 4) are related to the “arctic circle” ...

The purpose of this paper is to construct perfect samplers for length-interacting Arak–Clifford–Surgailis polygonal Markov fields in the plane with nodes of order 2 (V-shaped nodes). This is achieved by providing for the polygonal fields a hard core marked point process representation with individual points carrying polygonal loops as their marks, so that the coupling from the past and clan of ...

On Applications of Simulated Annealing to Cryptology

A carousel is an automated storage and retrieval system which consists of a circular disk with a large number of shelves and drawers along its circumference. The disk can rotate either direction past a picker who has a list of items that have to be collected from n different drawers. In this paper, we assume that locations of the n items are independent and have a continous non-uniform distribu...

The English tenses are often claimed to be deictic, i.e. to make reference to the utterance time and localize some state of affairs relative to it. For instance, the simple past is proposed to convey that the eventuality described in its scope took place at some contextually given time in the past of the utterance time. Let us call the time with respect to which the tenses locate their eventual...

I study the impact of East-West internal migration in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall on wages and unemployment rates in West German local labor markets. Because migrants’ choice of destination is likely to be correlated with local labor market conditions, I instrument migration ‡ows into each western labor market with the distance to each of the East German regions sending migrants a...

We provide an extension of the perfect sampling algorithm of Fill (1998) to general chains, and describe how use of bounding processes can ease computational burden. Along the way, we unearth a simple connection between the Coupling From The Past (CFTP) algorithm originated by Propp and Wilson (1996) and our extension of Fill's algorithm.