This paper grew out of our bewilderment with the insouciance with which some in the donor community seem ready to abandon accounting for the use of aid. If one listens to the rhetoric surrounding the new approach to aid, one gets the impression that most of the crucial accounting tasks must be swiftly abandoned by donors and left to recipient governments. This paper does not question the underl...

We investigate the emergence of extreme opinion trends in society by employing statistical physics modeling and analysis on polls that inquire about a wide range of issues such as religion, economics, politics, abortion, extramarital sex, books, movies, and electoral vote. The surveys lay out a clear indicator of the rise of extreme views. The precursor is a nonlinear relation between the fract...

People perceive, judge, and behave differently in disasters and in a wide range of other difficult situations depending on their personal characteristics. The power to live, as captured by characteristics that are advantageous for survival in such situations, has thus far been modeled in arbitrary ways. Conceptualizing such characteristics in more objective ways may be helpful for systematic pr...

Abstract The general perception is that the COVID-19 pandemic has been one of biggest challenges for health system. While touching every aspect life, requested a prompt response from system and other structures coordination systems intervene in daily activity. data presented were obtained following application questionnaire to average care staff Pascani Municipal Emergency Hospital, which monit...

Many distributed collective decision-making processes must balance diverse individual preferences with a desire for collective unity. We report here on an extensive session of behavioral experiments on biased voting in networks of individuals. In each of 81 experiments, 36 human subjects arranged in a virtual network were financially motivated to reach global consensus to one of two opposing ch...

This paper tells the story of Jens Glad Balchen (1926-2009), a Norwegian research scientist and engineer who is widely regarded as the father of Engineering Cybernetics in Norway. In 1954, he founded what would later become the Department of Automatic Control at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim. This name was changed to the Department of Engineering Cybernetics in 1972 to refl...

The use of chemicals gradually increased from prehistoric time to the fourth century A.D. when alchemy was introduced. Alchemy was a branch of chemistry that attempted to transform base metals (eg, lead, copper, and zinc) to precious metals (eg, silver and gold) [1]. Alchemists pursued this futile goal with secretive stubbornness for over a thousand years, to the detriment of chemistry as a who...

The stubborn set method is one of the methods that try to relieve the state space explosion problem that occurs in state space generation. Spending some time in looking for \good" stubborn sets can pay oo in the total time spent in generating a reduced state space. This paper shows how the method can exploit tools that solve certain problems of logic programs. The restriction of a deenition of ...

In business-related interactions such as the on-going highstakes FCC spectrum auctions, explicit communication among participants is regarded as collusion, and is therefore illegal. In this paper, we consider the possibility of autonomous agents engaging in implicit negotiation via their tacit interactions. In repeated general-sum games, our testbed for studying this type of interaction, an age...

In this paper, we study how and to what extent a self-organized mobile robot flock can be guided to move in a desired direction by informing some of the individuals within the flock. Specifically, we extend a flocking behavior that was shown to maneuver a swarm of mobile robots as a cohesive group in free space, avoiding obstacles. In its original form, the flock does not have a preferred direc...