People find unexpected bad news aversive and often brace themselves by predicting the worst. Three experiments examined whether the pessimism is influenced by personal need. Students who differed in financial need learned that a billing error meant that some students would receive an additional bill from their university. Financially needy students were consistently pessimistic in predicting th...

Modern concurrent programming benefits from a large variety of synchronization techniques. These include conventional pessimistic locking, as well as optimistic techniques based on conditional synchronization primitives or transactional memory. Yet, it is unclear which of these approaches better leverage the concurrency inherent to multi-cores. In this paper, we compare the level of concurrency...

This report presents a probabilistic analysis of a family of simple synchronous round-based consensus algorithms aimed at solving the 1-of-n selection problem. In this problem, a set of n nodes are to select one common value among a set of n proposed values. There are two possible outcomes of each node’s selection process: it can decide either to select a value, or to abort. Agreement implies t...

abstract background: historical research has limitations in applying proper and credit-worthy chronology to clarify the data. in this methodology, the application of oral history is one of the ways in which answers to questions addressed by the research theme are elicited. oral history, as a clear and transparent tool, needs to be applied with guidelines for qualitative researchers regarding da...

In the paper a new approach to goal programming is presented: the robust approach, applied so far to a single-objective linear programming. It is a ”pessimistic” approach, meant to find a solution which will be reasonably good even in a bad case, but it is based on the assumption that almost never everything goes bad the decision maker can control and simulate the pessimistic aspect of the deci...