Search

The success of software projects is inseparable from the effective scheduling of multi-skilled human resources. In software development, employees' personality traits often affect the performance of their work. Additionally, software developers are usually multi-tasking, which makes software development tasks preemptive. In view of this, we investigate the preemptive software project scheduling problem considering personality traits (PSPSP-PT), which aims at assigning employees with different skills and personality traits to suitable tasks and determining the start time of each task with the consideration of preemption, multi-skill, and precedence relations such that the total cost of the project is minimized. We formulate a mixed-integer linear programming model for the PSPSP-PT and design a dual priority rules-based heuristic (DPRH). Based on a benchmark dataset that is generated using a full factorial design, computational experiments are conducted to analyze the performance of our DPRH. Comparative analysis with existing algorithms reveals that our DPRH is competitive in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectifs : Dans le cadre de cette recherche, l'objectif est d'explorer en profondeur le véritable fondement de certaines techniques légales et ce, en creusant les différentes raisons qui ont poussé les législateurs à les établir. La doctrine a souvent analysé ces techniques sous un angle différent, celui de la personne dont le droit est atteint. Or, dans ces différentes situations, il existe une autre personne qui, et sans une raison claire, en tire profit. La loi met en œuvre un arsenal de techniques juridiques au service d’un confort légal au profit de certaines personnes ou certaines catégories. Quelles sont, dès lors, les raisons qui justifient cette attitude du législateur face à des personnes qui n’éprouvent pas un besoin particulier de protection ? Ces raisons diffèrent selon les techniques utilisées. Si certaines d’entre elles, contribuent à mettre fin à une situation déterminée, d’autres aident à faire démarrer une situation. Méthodologie : Analyse analytique, critique et comparative. Cette approche nous a permis d'examiner en profondeur la réglementation et de l'évaluer par rapport à ses raisons d’être. Résultats : Cette recherche a permis de proposer une nouvelle façon d’expliquer les phénomènes juridiques par référence à leurs raisons d’être. Originalité : Cette étude pionnière non seulement en droit qatarien mais aussi en droit comparé, présente une nouvelle analyse de certaines techniques juridiques. L'approche économique du droit, visant à éclairer les phénomènes juridiques à travers une perspective économique, est certainement bénéfique pour une meilleure compréhension.

Copyright of Journal of Islamic & Religious Studies / Majallah-yi ʿUlūm-i Islāmiyyah va Dīniyyah is the property of University of Haripur, Pakistan and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

İnsan mülk edinmeye eğimli olduğu ilk zamanlardan itibaren eşya üzerinde hakimiyet kurmaya başlamıştır. Zamanla eşya üzerinde tanınan bu yetkilere sınırlar getirme ihtiyacı doğmuş, bu ihtiyaç fiilen uygulamaya dönüşmüş ve mülkiyet hakkında bazı sınırlandırmalara gidilmiştir. Bu mülkiyet kısıtlamalarından biri de şüf‘a hakkıdır. Şüf‘a hakkı veya buna benzer uygulamalar, tarihte farklı toplumlarda çeşitli şekillerde görülmüştür. Nitekim incelemekte olduğumuz eser, tarihi sürece de temas ederek İslâm hukukunda şüf‘a konusunu ana hatlarıyla ele almaktadır. Eser, yüksek lisans düzeyinde birkaç tez çalışması ve Ali Şafak tarafından kaleme alınan muhtasar hacimli kitap haricinde bu konuda yazılmış ilk müstakil ve kapsamlı Türkçe kitap olarak kabul edilebilir. Kitapta ayrıca konuya ilişkin meseleler, genellikle Hanefî, Şâfiî, Malikî ve Hanbelî mezheplerinin görüşlerine yer verilmek suretiyle işlenmiştir.

The success of software projects is inseparable from the effective scheduling of multi-skilled human resources. In software development, employees’ personality traits often affect the performance of their work. Additionally, software developers are usually multi-tasking, which makes software development tasks preemptive. In view of this, we investigate the preemptive software project scheduling problem considering personality traits (PSPSP-PT), which aims at assigning employees with different skills and personality traits to suitable tasks and determining the start time of each task with the consideration of preemption, multi-skill, and precedence relations such that the total cost of the project is minimized. We formulate a mixed-integer linear programming model for the PSPSP-PT and design a dual priority rules-based heuristic (DPRH). Based on a benchmark dataset that is generated using a full factorial design, computational experiments are conducted to analyze the performance of our DPRH. Comparative analysis with existing algorithms reveals that our DPRH is competitive in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

From the earliest times when people were inclined to acquire property, they began to dominate things. Over time, the need to impose limits on these powers granted on goods arose, this need turned into actual practice, and some restrictions were imposed on ownership. One of these ownership restrictions is the preemption right. Preemption right or similar practices have been seen in various forms in different societies throughout history. The work we are examining deals with the issue of preemption in Islamic law by touching on its historical development. Apart from a few master's theses and the concise book by Ali Şafak, the work can be accepted as the first independent and comprehensive one written in Turkish on this subject. The book also deals with the issues related to the subject, generally by including the views of the four schools of Islamic law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We shall concentrate on how the construction and modality system of alternative futures in political discourses are influenced by the construal of past-to-present threats and preemptive politics. Using Dunmire's (2005) proposed framework and further explorations by Cap (2020) on the subject, we approach twenty of Trump's speeches on Iran, from 2017–2020. Our analyses indicated that the construction of alternative futures is modified by the evaluations of Iran's past-to-present status and the politics of preemption. This relationship modifies the speaker's epistemic judgment on the certainty of the privileged future, the cause-effect relation, and the sceptic views on the successful implementation of preemptive measures, resulting in the articulation of the privileged future through probabilistic and dynamic modalities. Moreover, the privileged future is conceptualised as necessary through deontic modality. By contrast, the realisation of the oppositional future is articulated through unmediated modality pinpointing the status that will materialise in light of inaction and negligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent American patent scholarship has begun to explore theintersection of the patent system and guarantees of expressive freedom,noting that patents may impinge on the First Amendment to the FederalConstitution and chill or prohibit protected speech. But guarantees ofexpressive freedom are not limited to the Federal Constitution; they arealso found in state constitutional provisions, some of which offer broaderprotection than that guaranteed in the First Amendment. In this essay Iexamine the relationship between federally issued patents and theguarantees of expressive freedom found in state constitutions. Stateconstitutions vary in their wording and interpretation, so my primaryfocus will be on those states that have viewed their state constitutionalprovisions as extending beyond the protections offered by the federalFirst Amendment. While the Supremacy Clause prevents states fromoverriding federal patent law, I argue here that state constitutionalprovisions can alter, shape, or even prohibit certain types of patentassertions, just as state law may moderate other uses of personal property.The discussion of this interaction highlights several previouslyunexplored aspects of the vertical relationship between federal patentpolicy and state law, and offers an alternative route to vindicatingexpressive rights encumbered by patents.

We study several competitive two-agent scheduling problems with release dates and preemption on a single machine, where the scheduling criterion of the first agent is regular and of the sum-form and the scheduling criterion of the second criterion is regular and of the max-form or the weighted number of tardy jobs. Two variants of the problems are investigated. One is the restricted version, in which the goal is to find a feasible schedule so that the objective value of the first agent is minimized subject to the restriction that the objective value of the second agent does not exceed a given threshold value. The other one is the Pareto version, in which the goal is to find all the Pareto-optimal points and their corresponding Pareto-optimal schedules. We design polynomial-time and pseudo-polynomial-time algorithms for each of the considered problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A question that lies at the very heart of language acquisition research is how children learn semi-regular systems with exceptions (e.g., the English plural rule that yields cats, dogs, etc, with exceptions feet and men). We investigated this question for Hindi ergative ne marking; another semi-regular but exception-filled system. Generally, in the past tense, the subject of two-participant transitive verbs (e.g., Ram broke the cup) is marked with ne, but there are exceptions. How, then, do children learn when ne marking is required, when it is optional, and when it is ungrammatical? Methods: We conducted two studies using (a) acceptability judgment and (b) elicited production methods with children (aged 4-5, 5-6 and 9-10 years) and adults. Results: All age groups showed effects of statistical preemption: the greater the frequency with which a particular verb appears with versus without ne marking on the subject – relative to other verbs – the greater the extent to which participants (a) accepted and (b) produced ne over zero-marked subjects. Both children and adults also showed effects of clause-level semantics, showing greater acceptance of ne over zero-marked subjects for intentional than unintentional actions. Some evidence of semantic effects at the level of the verb was observed in the elicited production task for children and the judgment task for adults. Conclusions: participants mainly learn ergative marking on an input-based verb-by-verb basis (i.e., via statistical preemption; verb-level semantics), but are also sensitive to clause-level semantic considerations (i.e., the intentionality of the action). These findings add to a growing body of work which suggests that children learn semi-regular, exception-filled systems using both statistics and semantics.

Smoke-free policies prevent exposure to secondhand smoke and encourage tobacco cessation. Local smoke-free policies that are more comprehensive than statewide policies are not allowed in states with preemption, including Oklahoma, which has the sixth highest smoking prevalence in the United States. In states with preemption, voluntary smoke-free measures are encouraged, but little research exists on venue owners' and managers' views of such measures, particularly in nightlife businesses such as bars and nightclubs. This article draws from semistructured interviews with 23 Oklahoma bar owners and managers, examining perceived risks and benefits of adopting voluntary smoke-free measures in their venues. No respondents expressed awareness of preemption. Many reported that smoke-free bars and nightclubs were an inevitable societal trend, particularly as younger customers increasingly expected smoke-free venues. Business benefits such as decreased operating and cleaning costs, improved atmosphere, and employee efficiency were more convincing than improved employee health. Concerns that voluntary measures created an uneven playing field among venues competing for customers formed a substantial barrier to voluntary measures. Other barriers included concerns about lost revenue and fear of disloyalty to customers, particularly older smokers. Addressing business benefits and a level playing field may increase support for voluntary smoke-free nightlife measures.

This paper establishes a relationship between optimal scheduling problems with the minimum schedule length and the problems of finding optimal (strict) colorings of mixed graph vertices, i.e., assigning a minimal set of ordered colors to the vertices V = { , ..., } of a mixed graph G = (V, A, E) so that the vertices and incident to an edge [ , ] ∈ E will have different colors and the color of the vertex in an arc ( , ) ∈ A will be not greater (smaller) than that of the vertex . As shown below, any optimal coloring problem for the vertices of a mixed graph G can be represented as the problem GcMPT |[pij], pmtn|Cmax of constructing a makespan-optimal schedule for processing a partially ordered set of jobs with integer durations pij of their operations with possible preemptions. In contrast to classical scheduling problems, executing an operation in the problem GcMPT |[pij], pmtn|Cmax may require several machines and, besides the two types of precedence relations defined on the set of operations, unit-time operations of a given subset must be executed simultaneously. The problem GcMPT |[pij], pmtn|Cmax is pseudopolynomially reduced to the problem of finding an optimal coloring of the vertices of a mixed graph G (the input data of the scheduling problem). Due to the assertions proved, the results obtained for the problem GcMPT |[pij], pmtn|Cmax have analogs for the corresponding optimal coloring problems for the vertices of a mixed graph G, and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A question that lies at the very heart of language acquisition research is how children learn semi-regular systems with exceptions (e.g., the English plural rule that yields cats, dogs, etc, with exceptions feet and men). We investigated this question for Hindi ergative ne marking; another semi-regular but exception-filled system. Generally, in the past tense, the subject of two-participant transitive verbs (e.g., Ram broke the cup) is marked with ne, but there are exceptions. How, then, do children learn when ne marking is required, when it is optional, and when it is ungrammatical? Methods: We conducted two studies using (a) acceptability judgment and (b) elicited production methods with children (aged 4-5, 5-6 and 9-10 years) and adults. Results: All age groups showed effects of statistical preemption: the greater the frequency with which a particular verb appears with versus without ne marking on the subject – relative to other verbs – the greater the extent to which participants (a) accepted and (b) produced ne over zero-marked subjects. Both children and adults also showed effects of clause-level semantics, showing greater acceptance of ne over zero-marked subjects for intentional than unintentional actions. Some evidence of semantic effects at the level of the verb was observed in the elicited production task for children and the judgment task for adults. Conclusions: participants mainly learn ergative marking on an input-based verb-by-verb basis (i.e., via statistical preemption; verb-level semantics), but are also sensitive to clause-level semantic considerations (i.e., the intentionality of the action). These findings add to a growing body of work which suggests that children learn semi-regular, exception-filled systems using both statistics and semantics.

Singular causation queries require an assessment of whethera singular co-occurrence of two events c and e was causal orsimply coincidental. The current study builds on our previ-ous research (Stephan & Waldmann, 2018) in which we pro-posed a computational model of singular causation judgments.The model highlights that singular causation judgments needto take into account the power of the target cause C and ofalternative causes A, as well as the possibility of preemption.What was missing was a detailed model allowing us to esti-mate the probability of preemption of a target cause by thealternative causes. The present research fills this gap by elab-orating the temporal assumptions that might enter assessmentsof singular causation. We focus on assumptions about tempo-ral precedence between target and alternative causes, with aspecific focus on assumptions about causal latency. We reportthe results of two new experiments supporting the model.

Within the United States, states are the source of remedies for most legal wrongs. State law provides remedies for common law torts, statutory violations, and constitutional rights, and state courts are available to parties seeking these remedies. May states also provide remedies for the victims of international human rights violations? With the Supreme Court closing the door on human rights litigation in U.S. federal courts under the Alien Tort Statute, and with plaintiffs therefore turning to state courts and state law to redress violations of international human rights, this question has become especially important. The dominant view among courts and commentators, however, treats human rights remedies as a foreign relations function committed to the federal government. If the federal government decides not to provide these remedies, then, this view holds, states must not provide them either. This Article challenges that position. It argues that states may provide remedies for international human rights, much as they do for torts and civil rights. States provide law and courts for the redress of wrongs as a matter of course, particularly the types of torts that most human rights litigation addresses. Within the federal system, states have independent authority to provide remedies for legal wrongs. State courts and state law therefore play a fundamental role in fulfilling the aspiration that rights entail remedies. Under state law, federal law, and international law, states have a recognized interest in providing redress for human rights violations. And in many cases, a state's interest in providing remedies for human rights violations will outweigh the business or foreign relations costs of human rights litigation that are often invoked to deny remedies. This Article's theory of state remedies for human rights has doctrinal and normative implications. The proper application of various doctrines that may limit access to state courts or the application of state law requires explicit consideration of the state interest in providing remedies for human rights. Normatively, this Article's theory of state remedies for human rights provides a justification for doctrinal changes in order to accommodate that interest.

This study aims at clarifying the opinions of different scholars about whether an adjoining neighbor in real estate can benefit from the right of preemption. In addition, it shows the position of the Algerian legislator on this matter. To do so, the study adopts three approaches for three different goals: • For presenting the different opinions and the evidence of each, the descriptive approach is adopted. • In discussing the evidence of the scholars and indicating the most likely plausible of them, the analytical approach is followed. • The comparative approach is used to compare the different views of the Shariaa scholars, on one side; and to compare these views to the Algerian Civil Code and the Real Estate Guidance Laws, n the other side. The main conclusions of the study are summarized in the fact that the scholars are divided into two groups about the preemption for the adjoining neighbor. A group grants this right to the adjoining neighbor. This group includes Hanafis, Ibadhis of the Maghreb, and Shurayh and those who agree with him. The other group, which consists of scholars of other sects, brohibits this right. Whereas the Algerian Civil law adopts an adaptive approach, depending on the type of the real estate

The United States has no national requirement that employers provide paid sick leave (PSL) to their employees, despite the many established public health benefits of PSL access. Many states, and some localities, have passed laws requiring PSL within their jurisdictions. Past studies have shown that these PSL mandates are effective in promoting increased PSL access. However, past studies have not considered two other commonly-used state policy initiatives—PSL preemption and right-to-work laws—that could hypothetically influence employers' decisions to provide PSL. During the past few decades, all possible combinations of these policy interventions can be found in one or more U.S. states. This study estimates the combined associations of these 3 policies with PSL access. The estimates support recent research on the positive effects of PSL mandates, but also suggest that PSL preemption and right-to-work laws may have offsetting effects. Failure to take account of these additional policies may lead to an over-estimate of the effectiveness of PSL mandates.

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court issued an opinion in which five justices voted to overturn Roe v Wade. Even before the final opinion issued, scholars and advocates had begun to consider legal strategies that might mitigate the decision's anticipated harmful consequences. One such strategy involves challenging state restrictions on Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved pregnancy termination drugs on preemption grounds. This article begins by exploring how these challenges might fare—considering both drug-specific restrictions and complete bans on abortion—arguing that there are compelling legal grounds on which courts should conclude that many state restrictions are preempted. Importantly, although these state restrictions have arisen within a larger debate about reproductive health care, this is far from the only area in which states seek to regulate prescription drugs. States have long regulated drugs in ways that diverge from FDA, arguably increasingly so in recent years. Accordingly, the article investigates the implications that preemption challenges in the abortion context may have for other areas of state drug regulation, making the case that the benefits of public health federalism need not be undermined by successful preemption challenges in the abortion arena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The transport sector is responsible for 25% of global CO2 emissions. To reduce emissions in the EU, a shift from the currently 745,000 operating public buses to electric buses (EBs) is expected in the coming years. Large-scale deployments of EBs and the electrification of bus depots will have a considerable impact on the local electric grid, potentially creating network congestion problems and spikes in the local energy load. In this work, we implement an exact, offline, modular multi-variable mixed-integer linear optimization algorithm to minimize the daily power load profile peak and optimally plan an electric bus depot. The algorithm accepts a bus depot schedule as input, and depending on the user input on optimization conditions, accounts for varying time granularity, preemption of the charging phase, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging capabilities and varying fleet size. The primary objective of this work is the analysis of the impact of each of these input conditions on the resulting minimized peak load. The results show that our optimization algorithm can reduce peak load by 83% on average. Time granularity and V2G have the greatest impact on peak reduction, whereas preemption and fleet splitting have the greatest impact on the computational time but an insignificant impact on peak reduction. The results bear relevance for mobility planners to account for innovative fleet management options. Depot infrastructure costs can be minimized by optimally sizing the infrastructure needs, by relying on split-fleet management or V2G options.

Causal queries about singular cases are ubiquitous, yet thequestion of how we assess whether a particular outcome wasactually caused by a specific potential cause turns out to bedifficult to answer. Relying on the causal power approach,Cheng and Novick (2005) proposed a model of causal attribu-tion intended to help answering this question. We challengethis model, both conceptually and empirically. The centralproblem of this model is that it treats the presence of sufficientcauses as necessarily causal in singular causation, and thus ne-glects that causes can be preempted in their efficacy. Also, themodel does not take into account that reasoners incorporateuncertainty about the underlying causal structure and strengthof causes when making causal inferences. We propose a newmeasure of causal attribution and embed it into our structure in-duction model of singular causation (SISC). Two experimentssupport the model.

Dedicated infrastructures are commonly used for urgent computations. However, using dedicated resources is not always affordable due to budget constraints. As a result, utilizing shared infrastructures becomes an alternative solution for urgent computations. Since the infrastructures are meant to serve many users, the urgent jobs may arrive when regular jobs are using the necessary resources. In such a case, it is necessary to preempt the regular jobs so that urgent jobs can be executed immediately. Most conventional methods for job scheduling have focused on reducing the response times and waiting times of all jobs. However, these methods can delay urgent jobs and hinder them from being completed within a stipulated deadline. Furthermore, in heterogeneous systems with coprocessors, preemption becomes more difficult because coprocessors rely on several system software functionalities provided by the host processor. In this paper, we propose a parallel job scheduling method to effectively use shared heterogeneous systems for urgent computations. Our method employs an in-memory process swapping mechanism to preempt jobs running on the coprocessor devices. The results of our simulations show that our method can achieve a significant reduction in the response time and slowdown of regular jobs without substantial delays of urgent jobs.

China’s Internet governance is not immutable, nor is it dominated by the government, as portrayed by Western scholars. Based on an analysis of Beijing’s Internet governance policies and practices, this paper focuses on the evolution of China’s Internet governance from the non-governmental stage through the government control stage to the multi-actor coordination stage. In terms of governance paradigm, Beijing’s Internet governance is transitioning from one-way management to multi-dimensional governance, from offline management to online and offline integration, and from “prior control” to “panoramic governance.” In terms of governance system, Beijing’s Internet governance has evolved from an ad hoc pattern through problem-solving to a strategic planning paradigm. Internet governance in China has demonstrated three features, namely, pragmatism, state centralism, and preemption. These characteristics have paved the way for the rapid development of China’s Internet but also present many challenges.

Production planning in manufacturing-to-order (MTO) environments has been treated by several researchers as a project scheduling problem, in which customers' orders are assumed to be different projects that rely on several shared resources. Processing several orders at the same time extends this problem to the resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problem (RCMPSP), while only single projects are considered in the relevant literature. A primary issue for this problem is procurement scheduling, which is handled using integrated project scheduling and material ordering (PSMO) models; however, existing PSMO models do not consider inflation-related costs caused by the ordering times for procurement items. In this paper, MTO production planning is modeled as a resource-constrained multi-project scheduling problem integrated with procurement scheduling under inflation. The proposed model reduced the delay by 72.7% on average and also reduced the delay penalties by 54% on average, compared to the current status of the case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unjust distribution of poor health outcomes produced via current United States food systems indicates the need for inclusive and innovative policymaking at the local level. Public health and environmental organizers are seeking to improve food environments from the ground up with locally driven policy initiatives but since 2010 have increasingly met resistance via state-government preemption of local policymaking power. This analysis seeks to understand how political actors on both sides of preemption debates use rhetorical argumentation. In doing so, we offer insights to the meaning-making process specific to food systems. We argue that advocates for local food-system innovations are forwarding understandings of food and community that contradict the policy goals they seek. We offer suggestions for local food and environmental advocates for adjusting their arguments.

The transport sector is responsible for 25% of global CO2 emissions. To reduce emissions in the EU, a shift from the currently 745,000 operating public buses to electric buses (EBs) is expected in the coming years. Large-scale deployments of EBs and the electrification of bus depots will have a considerable impact on the local electric grid, potentially creating network congestion problems and spikes in the local energy load. In this work, we implement an exact, offline, modular multi-variable mixed-integer linear optimization algorithm to minimize the daily power load profile peak and optimally plan an electric bus depot. The algorithm accepts a bus depot schedule as input, and depending on the user input on optimization conditions, accounts for varying time granularity, preemption of the charging phase, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging capabilities and varying fleet size. The primary objective of this work is the analysis of the impact of each of these input conditions on the resulting minimized peak load. The results show that our optimization algorithm can reduce peak load by 83% on average. Time granularity and V2G have the greatest impact on peak reduction, whereas preemption and fleet splitting have the greatest impact on the computational time but an insignificant impact on peak reduction. The results bear relevance for mobility planners to account for innovative fleet management options. Depot infrastructure costs can be minimized by optimally sizing the infrastructure needs, by relying on split-fleet management or V2G options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The factors influencing legislative voting behavior have often been studied. This is especially true regarding antebellum federal preemption legislation. Several conjectures have been posited and evaluated within the literature, with historical analysis suggesting geographic coalitions playing a dominant role. However, more recent empirical research based on a distributive theory of politics casts doubt on this hypothesis (Gailmard and Jenkins Gailmard and Jenkins, Public Choice 175:259–275, 2018). This paper adds to this debate by extending the empirical analysis to include several other potential factors relevant to the decision-making process. These include the ideological disposition of a given legislator, voter preferences, and special interest influences. Our econometric results support the distributive theory model and add additional nuance as well. Specifically, we find that a legislator's ideological disposition and constituent preferences are a strong indicator of voting behavior, as is geographic location (though not in the manner suggested by historical analysis). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weapons technology is a key factor contributing to cultural evolution because it enables humans actively to protect themselves from a variety of natural threats and expand their access to resources. In contrast to non-military technologies, the purpose of which is to subordinate and shape inanimate, non-intentional or trivial, regular states, weapons primarily serve to assert one’s own will against self-determined, intentional and non-trivially acting organisms. This functional idiosyncrasy establishes the basis for a continuous arms race, which begins with the need to anticipate phenotypical and mental abilities of animals and other humans through weapons technology before leading to the anticipation of attack and defence capacities of groups and, ultimately, the anticipation of accumulated intelligence and productive accomplishments of entire political states. The dynamics of development in weapons technology prove that weapons are simultaneously an index and a motor of cultural and cognitive evolution. Weapons reflect the organizational and technical capabilities of cultures, indicating special cognitive capacities bound up with the abstract anticipation of enemies as well as the ability to produce mental models of complex adversarial entities. At the same time, weapons relay intercultural and internal selection pressures by playing a decisive role in the processes of general technological and organizational innovation. This innovation also influences the formation of practices, norms, motives and self-images. As such, weapons technology concretizes an integral principle governing cultural evolution and civilizational history. Author(s): Davor Löffler, John J. McGraw and Niels N. Johannsen Title (English): Weapons in and as History: On the Ontogenerative Function of Materialized Preemption and Intelligence in Weapons Technology Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 68-77 Page Count: 10 Citation (English): Davor Löffler, John J. McGraw and Niels N. Johannsen, “Weapons in and as History: On the Ontogenerative Function of Materialized Preemption and Intelligence in Weapons Technology,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1-2 (Summer - Winter 2019): 68-77.

Flow shop scheduling problem has a wide application in the manufacturing and has attracted much attention in academic fields. From other point, on time delivery of products and services is a major necessity of companies’ todays; early and tardy delivery times will result additional cost such as holding or penalty costs. In this paper, just-in-time (JIT) flow shop scheduling problem with preemption and machine idle time assumptions is considered in which objective function is minimizing the sum of weighted earliness and tardiness. A new non-linear mathematical model is formulated for this problem and due to high complexity of the problem meta-heuristic approaches have been applied to solve the problem for finding optimal solution. The parameters of algorithms are set by Taguchi method. Each parameter is tested in three levels. By implementation of many problems with different sizes these levels are determined .The proposed model is solved by three meta-heuristic algorithms: genetic algorithm (GA), imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) and hybrid of GA and ICA. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms many test problems have been designed. The Computational results indicate the superiority of the performance of hybrid approach than GA and ICA in finding thebest solution in reasonable computational time.

During the past 25 years, many state governments in the United States have adopted anti-community state preemption laws to preclude local governments from enacting ordinances regulating pesticides. In the absence of local controls, people and property are being adversely effected. The issue accompanying state preemption statutes is whether the laws constitute a reasonable resolution of the positive and negative externalities that accompany pesticide usage. Through a discussion of the tradeoffs involving pesticide preemption, we show that states having divergent agricultural, residential, commercial, and recreational activities might be better served by allowing local governments to govern selected matters involving pesticides. State pesticide preemption laws denigrate local governance and compromise public health and economic well-being. If legislators care about the health of their communities and citizens, they need to repeal preemption laws that prevent appropriate safety regulations by local governments.

Post-Reconstruction Black Codes implemented throughout the South stunted the economic mobility of Black workers and replicated the free labor system of slavery (Nittle, 2021). While these laws were abandoned or outlawed over time (Nittle, 2021; PBS, 2017), the use of contemporary preemption in Southern states acts as a de facto continuation of Black Codes by barring legislation, often from progressive cities and municipalities, that seeks to strengthen rights and protections for Black workers throughout the region. In order to properly understand the unique racial, political, and economic entanglement between twenty- first century preemption and the oppression of Black workers, one must first explore the origins of preemption and the history of Black worker oppression in the South. This examination provides the backdrop for modern attempts to suppress Black workers in states like Alabama and Tennessee. A closer look at the deep political divisions between Southern legislatures and urban municipalities in their states offer arguments, though unfounded and insufficient, in favor of preemption, and outline the challenges worker advocates face when addressing the problem. Despite its challenges, it is critical for organizers to continue fighting preemption using creative strategies and to reaffirm the rights and advancement of Black workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports stadiums are a prime site for the deployment and development of facial recognition technology. They are being used to envision and model a spectator experience governed by the operation of automated surveillance and sensor-based monitoring systems, which promise greater security and enhanced consumption opportunities. This article draws on the planned but postponed rollout of NEC’s NeoFace identification system for the Tokyo Olympics to examine broader trends in the deployment of biometric monitoring systems. Drawing on existing and planned uses of these systems, we focus on the sports stadium as a site for considering how biometric surveillance is introduced, implemented, and normalized. The themes of convergence, preemption, and spatiality are central to the messages presented in the industry’s promotional materials, framing facial recognition technology as an essential component of the contemporary media-stadium. The immense popularity of mega-events and the pleasures of live sports erode the contestability of this framing, drawing attention away from the biases, inaccuracies, privacy concerns, and inequalities perpetuated by highly invasive systems that exercise social control in and beyond the stadium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a preemptive multi-objective multi-mode project scheduling model for resource investment problem is proposed. The first objective function is to minimize the completion time of project (makespan);the second objective function is to minimize the cost of using renewable resources. Non-renewable resources are also considered as parameters in this model. The preemption of activities is allowed at any integer time units, and for each activity, the best execution mode is selected according to the duration and resource. Since this bi-objective problem is the extension of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP), it is NP-hard problem, and therefore, heuristic and metaheuristic methods are required to solve it. In this study, Non-dominated Sorting Genetic AlgorithmII (NSGA-II) and Non-dominated Ranking Genetic Algorithm (NRGA) are used based on results of Pareto solution set.We also present a heuristic method for two approaches of serial schedule generation scheme (S-SGS) and parallel schedule generation scheme (P-SGS) in the developed algorithm in order to optimize the scheduling of the activities.The input parameters of the algorithm are tuned with Response Surface Methodology (RSM). Finally, the algorithms are implemented on some numerical test problems, and their effectiveness is evaluated.

Datacenters are evolving to host heterogeneous workloads on shared clusters to reduce the operational cost and achieve higher resource utilization. However, it is challenging to schedule heterogeneous workloads with diverse resource requirements and QoS constraints. On one hand, latency-critical jobs need to be scheduled as soon as they are submitted to avoid any queuing delays. On the other hand, best-effort long jobs should be allowed to occupy the cluster when there are idle resources to improve cluster utilization. The challenge lies in how to minimize the queuing delays of short jobs while maximizing cluster utilization. In this article, we propose and develop BIG-C, a container-based resource management framework for data-intensive cluster computing. The key design is to leverage lightweight virtualization, a.k.a, containers, to make tasks preemptable in cluster scheduling. We devise two types of preemption strategies: immediate and graceful preemptions and show their effectiveness and tradeoffs with loosely-coupled MapReduce workloads as well as iterative, in-memory Spark workloads. Based on the mechanisms for task preemption, we further develop job-level and task-level preemptive policies as well as a preemptive fair share cluster scheduler. Our implementation on Yarn and evaluation with synthetic and production workloads show that low job latency and high resource utilization can be both attained when scheduling heterogeneous workloads on a contended cluster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Causal queries about singular cases, which inquire whether specific events were causally connected, are prevalent in daily life and important in professional disciplines such as the law, medicine, or engineering. Because causal links cannot be directly observed, singular causation judgments require an assessment of whether a co‐occurrence of two events c and e was causal or simply coincidental. How can this decision be made? Building on previous work by Cheng and Novick (2005) and Stephan and Waldmann (2018), we propose a computational model that combines information about the causal strengths of the potential causes with information about their temporal relations to derive answers to singular causation queries. The relative causal strengths of the potential cause factors are relevant because weak causes are more likely to fail to generate effects than strong causes. But even a strong cause factor does not necessarily need to be causal in a singular case because it could have been preempted by an alternative cause. We here show how information about causal strength and about two different temporal parameters, the potential causes' onset times and their causal latencies, can be formalized and integrated into a computational account of singular causation. Four experiments are presented in which we tested the validity of the model. The results showed that people integrate the different types of information as predicted by the new model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ius Novum is the property of Sciendo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Policy PointsPreemption is a legal doctrine whereby a higher level of government may limit or even eliminate the power of a lower level of government to regulate a certain issue. Some state legislatures are using preemption with increasing regularity to thwart local policies that have the potential to reduce health inequities.Despite recent trends, preemption is not inherently adversarial to public health, equity, or good governance but rather reflects its wielder's goals and values. Existing frameworks for assessing preemption fail to reconcile its potential to both advance and hinder health equity.An equity‐first preemption framework can facilitate case‐by‐case assessments of whether preemption is likely to worsen inequities or whether it is an appropriate response to address existing inequities. Robust empirical evidence is needed to develop and operationalize such a framework. Context: Due to the inequitable distribution of various social determinants of health, disparities in health and well‐being are tied to where an individual lives. In the United States, a zip code often better predicts a person's health than their genetic code. As communities seek to redress these inequities, many find that, due to state preemption, their zip code also dictates their ability to pursue more equitable laws through local government action. Preemption is a legal doctrine whereby a higher level of government may limit or even eliminate the power of a lower level of government to regulate a certain issue. Methods: We conducted a literature review to survey existing scholarship about the effects of preemption on public health and health equity using online databases such as PubMed, WestLaw, and Google Scholar. We also cohosted a series of cross‐sector, interdisciplinary research convenings with preemption, public health, and equity experts. Based on our findings, this article reviews the role of law and policy in the genesis of health inequities and highlights how preemption has both created and alleviated such inequities. We demonstrate how a normative framework rooted in redressing health inequities can advance a more just approach to preemption and outline a research agenda to support future action. Findings: Law and policy have been central to creating health inequities, and while those same tools can promote health equity, some state legislatures are using preemption with increasing regularity to thwart local policies that may improve health and equity. Nevertheless, preemption is not inherently adversarial to public health, equity, or good governance. Preemptive federal civil rights laws, for example, have countered government‐sanctioned discrimination. However, existing frameworks for assessing preemption fail to reconcile its potential to both advance and hinder health equity. Conclusions: Shortcomings in existing preemption frameworks demonstrate the need for new approaches to elevate equity as a central consideration in assessing preemption. We propose the development of an equity‐first preemption framework to establish evidence‐based criteria for assessing when preemption will enhance or inhibit equity and a research agenda for developing the evidence necessary to inform and operationalize the framework. An equity‐first reconceptualization of preemption can help ensure that local governments remain places of innovation while allowing states and the federal government to block local actions that are likely to create or perpetuate inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To fully utilize the resources of a main memory database cluster, we additionally take the independent parallelism into account to parallelize multiple pipelines of one query. However, scheduling resources to multiple pipelines is an intractable problem. Traditional static approaches to this problem may lead to a serious waste of resources and suboptimal execution order of pipelines, because it is hard to predict the actual data distribution and fluctuating workloads at compile time. In response, we propose a dynamic scheduling algorithm, List with Filling and Preemption (LFPS), based on two novel techniques. (1) Adaptive filling improves resource utilization by issuing more extra pipelines to adaptively fill idle resource “holes” during execution. (2) Rank-based preemption strictly guarantees scheduling the pipelines on the critical path first at run time. Interestingly, the latter facilitates the former filling idle “holes” with best efforts to finish multiple pipelines as soon as possible. We implement LFPS in our prototype database system. Under the workloads of TPC-H, experiments show our work improves the finish time of parallelizable pipelines from one query up to 2.5X than a static approach and 2.1X than a serialized execution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current research paradigm is one of data-driven research. Researchers are beginning to deploy computer facilities to produce and analyze large amounts of data. As requirements for computing power grow, data processing in traditional workstations is always under pressure for efficient resource management. In such an environment, a tremendous amount of data is being processed using parallel computing for efficient and effective research results. HTCondor, as an example, provides computing power for data analysis for researchers. Although such a system works well in a traditional computing cluster environment, we need an efficient methodology to meet the ever-increasing demands of computing using limited resources. In this paper, we propose an approach to integrating clusters that can share their computing power on the basis of a priority policy. Our approach makes it possible to share worker nodes while maintaining the resources allocated to each group. In addition, we have utilized the historical data of user usage in order to analyze problems that have occurred during job execution due to resource sharing and the actual operating results. Our findings can provide a reasonable guideline for limited computing powers shared by multiple scientific groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for multitasking GPUs increases whenever the GPU may be shared by multiple applications, either spatially or temporally. This requires that GPUs can be preempted and switch context to a new application while already executing one. Unlike CPUs, context switching in GPUs is prohibitively expensive due to the large context states to swap out. There have been a number of efforts on reducing the overhead of preemption, through reducing the context sizes or overlapping context switching with execution. All those techniques are reactive approaches, meaning that context switching occurs when the preemption request arrives. In this paper, we propose a dynamic and proactive mechanism to reduce the latency of preemption. We observe that kernel execution is almost always preceded by known commands in both CUDA and OpenCL implementations. Hence, a preemption can be anticipated before the actual request arrives. We study such lead time and develop a prediction scheme to perform an early state saving. When the actual preemption is invoked, an incremental update relative to the previous saved state is performed, much like the conventional checkpointing mechanism. Our design can also choose to drain or checkpointing dynamically and accurately according to the feature of kernels in the runtime. This design effectively reduces the stall time of the preempting kernel due to context switching by 58.6%. Moreover, through careful handling of the saved state, we can also reduce the overall size of saved state by an average of 23.3%, compared with a full context switching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tobacco industry is a major political force in Nevada. The industry dominated state politics through a combination of strategic alliances with the hospitality and gaming industries and campaign contributions. From 1990-2006 the tobacco industry contributed $552,111 to the state political parties and individuals running for state office.In 1975, health groups in Nevada attempted to pass a legislative proposal, AB 17, that would have required smoking and non-smoking sections in all indoor public places. Although weak by today’s standards, the proposed law was progressive for its time. The health group’s proposal was opposed by the Tobacco Institute, which organized the hospitality and gaming industries and law enforcement agencies into an alliance to oppose the law. The Tobacco Institute successfully weakened AB 17, which, as passed, only required smoking sections in state government workplaces and a limited number of indoor public places.In 1991, preemption was introduced in the state when Nevadans for Non-smokers’ Rights, a group seeking smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants made a curious compromise with the tobacco industry in the form of SB 313. SB 313 required restaurants with a seating capacity of 50 or more to have non-smoking sections but the law also explicitly preempted local government from passing stricter laws then the state related to clean indoor air.In 1995, super preemption (preemption of all aspects of tobacco regulation) was introduced in legislation backed by the tobacco industry that was intended to comply with requirements of the Synar Amendment (federal requirement to pass laws restricting the sale of tobacco to minor and report compliance). The tobacco industry convinced the legislature that super preemption was necessary to comply with the Synar Amendment. Preemption was not necessary to comply with Synar but health groups in Nevada were not able to convince the legislature of this fact or garner the legislature’s support for an alternative legislative proposal to comply with Synar that did not include preemption.In 1994 the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) rules that would have mandated smokefree workplaces nationally. As part of its successful effort to block OSHA, the tobacco industry promoted ventilation as the “solution” to IAQ concerns. As part of this effort, the tobacco industry built partnerships with the gaming industry which representing pro-tobacco interests vigorously on the issue and remained allies in subsequent years.In November 1998, the Attorneys General of 46 states, including the Attorney General of Nevada, signed the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) with the five largest tobacco companies. The MSA ended litigation brought by the state Attorney Generals, including Frankie Sue Del Pappa (D) of Nevada, to recover monies spent by the states to treat tobacco related disease as well as obtain some modest restrictions on cigarette marketing. The MSA put Nevada in a situation where the state expected to receive approximately $374 million through 2008, with continuing money into the indefinite future.In 1999, Governor Kenny Guinn and Assembly Democrats agreed on a compromise proposals for the how Nevada would spend its MSA money, with 40% of the money to college scholarships (Millennium scholarship program), 10% for tobacco control, and the remaining for a mix of health related issues. As a result, Nevada spent $4 million a year on tobacco control programming between 2001 and 2008 (30% of the Centers for Disease Control recommended minimum).To oversee MSA money spent on various health issues, including tobacco control, the Task Force for the Fund for a Health Nevada was formed, with members appointed by the Governor and legislative leadership, and included legislators and health experts. The Task Force distributed tobacco control funds through competitive grants. The formation of the Task Force increased Nevada’s spending on tobacco control significantly, and coincided with a dramatic decrease in adult smoking prevalence in the state from 31% in 1999 to 21% in 2008.In the 1990's and 2000's tobacco control advocates made numerous unsuccessful attempts to repeal state preemption. The tobacco industry was successful and increasing its political influence and power in the state through campaign contributions and through aligning itself politically with the hospitality and gaming industry. Legislative proposals introduced by health advocates in an effort to advance tobacco control rarely made it out of committee.In 2003, health advocates were successful at increasing Nevada’s cigarette tax by 45 cents to a total of 80 cents per pack. The proposal to increase the cigarette tax came at a time when the state was struggling with a significant budget shortfall. Health advocates did not to push for any of the tax revenue to be devoted to tobacco control programs.In November 2006, Nevada became the 17th state to pass a strong statewide clean indoor air law through a voter initiative sponsored primarily by the American Cancer Society. The initiative was opposed by a competing voter initiative sponsored by a segment of the gaming industry called the slot route operators. While the law included exemptions for bars and the gaming floors of casinos, it represented a significant step forward for tobacco control because it made all other public places including restaurants smokefree and repealed preemption.Challenges with the implementation of Nevada’s new statewide clean indoor air law highlighted the fact that campaigns to introduce smokefree laws via ballot initiative need to coordinate with the state agencies responsible for implementation of the law. The health group initiative campaign did not coordinate with the state health divisions and as a result there were some avoidable implementation challenges. In addition, there were significant legal challenges that escalated to the state supreme court that as of July 2008 were not resolved. Despite the challenges, as of July 2008, Nevada’s clean indoor air law was generally experiencing good compliance and increasing public support.

This Article argues that both courts and scholars are wrong in their categorical approaches to preemption of contracts under the Copyright Act, and proposes an intermediate approach that recognizes the importance of both contract rights and federal policy in preemption analysis. First, it argues that both courts and scholars have misapplied preemption law to breach of contract claims. Although the two sides tend to favor opposite results, they take equally categorical approaches. Categorical approaches to the issue of contract preemption are antithetical to preemption law. Under either express or implied preemption, courts must consider whether a particular state law claim interferes with the purpose of the federal statute. This preemption analysis turns not on the label of state law claim under consideration, but on close examination of the legal and factual details of a particular case.Second, the reason this issue has been analyzed incorrectly is that preemption law seems ill-suited to contract claims. Ordinarily, preemption cases are concerned with whether a state regulatory scheme is likely to supplant a federal scheme. In cases dealing with preemption of contracts, however, that is not ordinarily the issue. State law is necessary to enforce contracts, but the obligations are voluntarily assumed. Thus, the issue is really whether individuals should be able to contract away rights granted by the federal Copyright Act. Accordingly, I argue that in analyzing the Copyright Act’s preemption of contracts, courts should draw more from the law related to contractual waiver of statutory rights. This body of law governs the extent to which individual waivers of statutory rights are enforceable and applies to all kinds of state and federal statutes.Third, the Article proposes a new model for addressing copyright preemption of contracts based on insights from waiver doctrine. Waiver doctrine holds a contractual waiver enforceable if it (1) is clear and unmistakable, and (2) purports to waive statutory rights under the Copyright Act that protect individual rather than public interests. If courts integrate these requirements from waiver doctrine into contract preemption analysis, the analysis will be more consistent with preemption law generally and will find the proper balance between freedom of contract and federal copyright policy.