Osafo-Kwaako, Philip, and Robinson, James A.—Political centralization in pre-colonial Africa In this paper we investigate the empirical correlates of political centralization using data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. We specifically investigate the explanatory power of the standard models of Eurasian state formation which emphasize the importance of high population density, inter-stat...

Unionization Structures and Firms’ Incentives for Productivity Enhancing Investments* by Justus Haucap and Christian Wey This paper examines how unionization structures that differ in the degree of wage centralization affect firms' incentives to increase labor productivity. We distinguish three modes of unionization with increasing degree of centralization: (1) “Decentralization” where wages ar...

Wireless LANs are commonplace installations in enterprise environments. Their ease of use and deployment, however, are accompanied by a difficulty in their management and security. Proposed solutions to these problems are based on centralization; in the control plane through centralized authentication and allocation of channels and power levels, and in the data plane through time slotted medium...

Dynamic, partial centralization has received a considerable amount of attention in the distributed problem solving community. As the name implies, this technique works by dynamically identifying portions of a shared problem to centralize in order to speed the problem solving process. Currently, a number of algorithms have been created which employ this simple, yet powerful technique to solve pr...

Measuring the accuracy of diagnostic tests is crucial in many application areas, in particular medicine and health care. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) surface is a useful tool to assess the ability of a diagnostic test to discriminate among three ordered classes or groups. In this paper, nonparametric predictive inference (NPI) for three-group ROC analysis is presented. NPI is a f...

16,105 vowels produced by three speakers of American English were examined using real-time MRI, to provide further insights into tongue shaping and articulatory contrast in stressed and unstressed positions in fluent speech. High front vowels were found to maintain characteristic lingual postures in prosodically weak environments. Non-high vowels were articulated with a more raised dorsum and d...