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In this paper, we address the problem of scheduling jobs on identical machines for minimising the maximum completion time (makespan). Each job requires a sequence-independent setup time, which represents the time needed to prepare the machines for job execution. Then, we introduce a dynamic programme to solve the case with two machines, and show that this problem admits a fully polynomial time approximation scheme. For the case of m machines, we propose heuristics and an adapted genetic algorithm. Some numerical experiments are done to evaluate the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The new era of counterforce in the contemporary world could unfold itself as a new era of preemption in South Asia. It is characterised by increasing vulnerabilities in nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, however, prompting a vigorous development of countermeasures to mitigate these strategic vulnerabilities. India is increasing its counterforce capabilities considerably. Apart from improving its capabilities of target acquisition, accuracy of its delivery systems and reducing their time to hit the target, India is likely to make necessary shifts in its nuclear doctrine. These factors will provide India with the incentives for preemption against Pakistan in the future. The possibility of a counterforce strike can create instability in the region. To mitigate the threat posed by India's advancing counterforce capabilities, Pakistan should enhance its ISR capabilities, develop ASAT capabilities, improve missile accuracy and speed, and bolster survivability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have charted a dramatic rise in the use of preemption both at the federal and state levels since the 1970s, with courts and politicians from both parties enacting preemptions across a range of contentious issues. Thus, preemption is a critical feature of American policymaking—one that almost certainly shapes the political choices of policymakers, organized interests, and voters across levels of government. Despite its significance to the politics of policymaking, scholars have yet to systematically consider the political consequences of preemption. We apply the logic of policy feedback theory to create a framework for analyzing the political consequences of preemption. Specifically, we detail how the use of both federal‐state and state‐local preemption might produce unique resource and interpretive effects that shape the subsequent political behaviors of policymakers, organized interests, and the public. We then consider two illustrative cases—federal preemption of state consumer financial protections and state preemption of local gender identity anti‐discrimination statutes—to demonstrate our framework's application. The article addresses a gap in the preemption literature and provides a critical extension of policy feedback theory, proposing a research agenda for future work to help better understand the politics of a widely used policy tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the use of flow‐based algorithmic and proof techniques applied to preemptive scheduling of jobs on parallel identical machines. For the classical problem in which the jobs have individual release dates and must be finished by a common deadline, we present and prove unified necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a feasible schedule by examining the structure of minimum cuts in a special network. We then study an enhanced model that allows the presence of additional resources, provided that some jobs at any time of their processing require one unit of a particular resource. We extend our argument developed for the classical case to this enhanced model. The generalized necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a feasible schedule are presented and proved using the max‐flow/min‐cut reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the effects of entrenchment, preemption, verb semantics, and morphophonological constraints in Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' retreat from the overgeneralization errors of English dative alternations. Two groups of Chinese EFL learners rated the acceptability of 66 dative verbs in their well and ill forms. The results demonstrated that Chinese EFL learners were simultaneously sensitive to the multiple cues from entrenchment, preemption, semantic, and morphophonological constraints, indicating that Chinese EFL learners restricted the generalization of the dative alternation by utilizing both the statistical verb-bias information and semantic properties of the dative verbs. Moreover, the sensitivity of Chinese EFL learners to these constraints increases with the improvement of their English proficiency. These results validated the usage-based approaches to second language acquisition and provided an answer to the "Baker's Paradox." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firearm violence has soared in American cities, but most states statutorily preempt municipal firearm regulation. This article describes a unique collaboration in Philadelphia among elected officials, public health researchers, and attorneys that has led to litigation based on original quantitative analyses and grounded in innovative constitutional theories and statutory interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Romanian Case Law Review / Revista Română de Jurisprudenţă is the property of Universul Juridic Publishing House 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.)

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 articles in this volume grew out of a 2018 conference organized by the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations and Cornell University's ILR School to address questions regarding labor regulation at lower levels of government. During the extended period that federal reform has been blocked, enormous activity has taken place at the state and local levels in terms of both the passage of new employment laws and regulations as well as their administration and enforcement. Drawn from the larger set of papers presented at that conference, these articles focus on specific dimensions of the puzzle. This introduction paints the broader picture suggested by the conference and papers taken as a whole. The move toward federalism as a strategy, particularly as an alternative to organizing through the NLRA, while promising, is so far limited because it focuses on the substance of labor regulation exclusively, in isolation from the procedures through which work regulation is promulgated and enforced. The most likely place to look for reforms that will give the new labor federalism institutional support and stability comparable to that of the New Deal collective bargaining regime at its apogee is in their implementation and enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article investigates the relationship between copyright and publicity right. These rights are connected in a place where the creators of literary and artistic works use the identity symbols of celebrities and especially their images to create their works. Here, the conflict between the two owners of moral rights shows itself. According to the fundamental principles of copyright or author's right, the work belongs to its creator. On the other hand, using a person's image without his consent can be considered an infringement of publicity right because of free riding and exploitation. Therefore, according to the standards raised in pioneering countries such as America, the right to publicity is recognized as an inherent right of a human being to prevent profiteering from identity signs and emphasize the right's economic aspect. The legal doctrines do not agree on the clash between these two rights and whether the reputation owner should be defended and prevented from violating his economic rights or take the side of the copyright holder. This has led to conflicting opinions and also verdicts in American law. Therefore, the primary question of this research is: In cases of interference between copyright and publicity right, who owns the exclusive rights and benefits of the creativity that have appeared? The current research aims to answer the above question with a descriptiveanalytical method and a library and comparative approach. For this purpose, an attempt has been made to clarify the concept of copyright and publicity right, the relationship between the two in terms of similarities and differences, and the interference of these two rights. Solving the conflict between this issue from different legal and judicial perspectives is another subject matter that is considered along with Iran's legal position. The fundamental belief is that if the owner of the publicity right exercises his rights and prevents the manifestation of his identity marks in the literary and artistic works of others, huge damages will be caused to the copyright holders, and consequently, the general public will suffer; This partiality means the opportunity loss to create new and derivative works based on adaptation for other artists and blocks the way of innovation in the future. If the rights of the copyright holder are overridden, the right of the person to benefit from the features of reputation and identity will be infringed. Therefore, in case of interference, a frontier should be found between these two conflicting interests and the rights of copyright creators and owners of publicity right must be considered. In American law, referring to the principle of "fair use" and expanding its dimensions to the publicity right is considered an important step in settling the claims of copyright owners and the right of publicity. In this regard, the four criteria of the nature of use, the nature of publicity right, Substantiality of the Misappropriation, and the effect of the use on the potential market the owner of publicity have been considered in explaining the boundary between commercial and noncommercial use. The article concludes that the dominance of these two different legal bodies does not mean that one has precedence over the other or that each one is nullified by the other. One should respect the author's creative activities and consider protecting the exclusive rights hidden in identity symbols and controlling their use. Therefore, one of the research achievements is that there is coexistence between two rights, and emphasizing each one does not mean excluding the other or reducing each territory against the other. In Iranian law, although the right to publicity has not been taken into consideration by the legislator and the judicial procedure is silent in any case, it is possible to achieve this conclusion with the inspiration of the solution adopted in leading countries and along with global developments, in the assumption that a creator exploits the celebrity's symbols in his work, the judge must make a decision and they can distinguish between commercial and non-commercial exploitation by referring to the principles of fair use and especially the criterion of the nature and context of use, and if they find free riding, consider the famous person entitled to receive compensation. In this way, the creation of a literary and artistic work from the image of a famous person without his consent is allowed if it is either taken in public places and according to the rights of citizenship, based on the right to freedom of expression and access to information, or the creator manifests the celebrity's image in a transformative way based on the derivative work, so that the famous person is regarded the secondary subject of that work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State preemption of local policymaking is an increasingly used political tool and source of intergovernmental conflict. While previous studies have examined the determinants and effects of preemption, to date no study has examined citizens' attitudes and opinions about the practice. Using two original public opinion surveys, we find that support for preemption does not seem to be politically driven as there are no discernable partisan differences and citizens are no more likely to support preemption when their party controls state government. Instead, support for preemption appears to be tied to more general feelings about state government such as trust and perceived responsiveness to citizens. Moreover, when using a survey experiment that primes respondents with a concrete example of preemption—forbidding cities from raising their minimum wage—support for preemption falls. These findings provide important context about citizens' attitudes toward an increasingly prominent tool of state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Anbar University for Law & Political Sciences is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) 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.)

Copyright of Canadian Yearbook of International Law is the property of Cambridge University Press 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.)

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.

The scheduler has been extensively studied from the point of view of their schedules, using operations research. However, the scheduler not only fulfils a decision-maker role but also an informational role, responding to requests and disruptions, both from the supply and the demand side. Responding in a timely manner to such requests and disruptions is paramount for the scheduling job. Using a field study with job shadowing of schedulers in a Fortune 500 chemical company, we characterise the scheduler's workflow in a simulation model; this allows us to discriminate between contextual factors of the scheduler's job and behavioural factors inherent to them. Furthermore, it explicitly assesses the effect of increasing the frequency sensing of the outer world on responsiveness. Our findings show that the studied schedulers prioritise sensing activities related to checking emails rather than monitoring for disruptions in a decision support system. Thus, we find a higher potential for relative improvement in terms of responding to possible disruptions shown in decision support systems rather than responding to email requests. Moreover, we show that by adjusting email frequency checking and preemption behaviours, it is possible to revert an out of control situation to finite response times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas traditional Frankfurt-style cases involve what David Lewis calls 'asymmetrical overdetermination', some philosophers have suggested the possibility of designing Frankfurt-style cases involving symmetric causal overdetermination. In this paper, I systematically discuss and assess this possibility, in relation to the different theoretical roles that Frankfurt-style cases may be expected to play. I argue that symmetric overdetermination is a live option in this area, and that there may be dialectical contexts in which it is the most appropriate one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hatch-Waxman Amendments to the Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act requires generic drug manufacturers to match their labeling to the bioequivalent brand-name drug. The decision in PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing reinforced the liability implications when there is a lack of safety information on brand-name drugs by holding the brand-name drug manufacturer liable for failing to fully inform consumers of the relevant safety risks associated with a particular drug. Following this decision, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 introduced a new process for generic drug manufacturers to update their safety information independent of its bioequivalent brand-name drug. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The counterfactual comparative account of harm (CCA) faces well-known problems concerning preemption and omission. In a recent article in this journal, Daniel Immerman proposes a novel variant of CCA, which he calls the worse than nothing account (WTNA). According to Immerman, WTNA nicely handles the preemption and omission problems. We seek to show, however, that WTNA is not an acceptable account of harm. In particular, while WTNA deals better than CCA with some cases that involve preemption and omission, it has implausible implications in other similar cases – cases that, moreover, pose no problems for CCA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a new cross-docking approach with two characteristics, namely paired-doors and preemption, is developed based on the sustainable development goals (SDG12) paradigm that expresses targets to decrease the food losses throughout the supply chain. For every receiving door, there is a corresponding shipping door in front of it. The packages can only be transferred from a receiving door to its shipping counterpart. This new cross-dock is suitable for distributing the perishable products due to the products’ time-sensitive feature. The proposed cross-docking system, which is easier to implement considering the lower automation level required, is compared with the conventional approach to evaluate the new characteristics. Moreover, a genetic algorithm and grey wolf optimizer are proposed to solve the model for the large-sized problem instances. The results show that the proposed cross-docking approach can transfer the products faster than the traditional approach. Also, a predictive model is built by a machine learning algorithm based on the mathematical modeling outputs to predict the makespan by analyzing the factors such as the total product number, number of inbound and outbound vehicles, and the number of paired doors. The results showed that the predictive model could predict the makespan (with an average of 92.8%). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Many affordable housing policies are the domain of local governments. While subnational housing policies can be used to increase racial and economic segregation, they can also protect renters, and thus are not without controversy. Local affordable housing policies include inclusionary zoning, rent control, short-term rental regulation and source of income discrimination. Starting in the 1980s, states began to preempt these local laws, preventing their cities from adopting affordable housing policies. We ask why states choose to preempt one or more of these four affordable housing policies. Using a cross-sectional, time-series dataset of preemptions, we find evidence that more conservative legislatures are more likely to adopt preemptions, while more professional legislatures and states with higher rental rates and previous preemptions are less likely to preempt. Contrary to expectations, interest group density, electoral competition and policy diffusion are not significant predictors of preemption. For advocates and policymakers concerned with increasing affordable housing in their jurisdictions, these results raise unease about the ability to further an affordable housing agenda at the local level, particularly in more conservative political environments, suggesting instead that affordable housing may need to return to the purview of the federal government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predictive algorithms today share more than just semantics with the divinatory practices of the past. This article will map the parallels, contending that the similarities between the two practices are true "propositions" that radically question the way we apprehend the world, the way we draw our knowledge from it, and the way we then act within and upon it. Mindful of the limitations of such a comparative method, it will nevertheless attempt it by deploying a twofold approach. On the one hand, the article questions the epistemological nature of predictive analytics and examines their truth claims with regard to how they represent the future. On the other hand, it focuses on the ontological dimension of predictive analytics and investigates how they shape the world by bringing about the presence of the future in the here and now. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing is a fundamental right and a vital determinant of health. Health equity is not possible without widespread access to safe. affordable. high-quality housing. Local housing policy is a central conduit for advancing such ends. However, preemption of local law is a powerful institutional mechanism that state legislatures sometimes deploy to inhibit or nullify municipal efforts to address housing-based inequities. Local housing policies often have high stakes, are ideologically laden, and are politically salient. This makes them a clear target for preemptive action. Political science research to date has focused on broadly explaining the causes of preemption, with scant emphasis on its consequences and minimal attention to the implications for racial and economic equity. This article highlights the political repercussions of state preemption. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, the article examines how local tenant organizations that work to build power within racially and economically marginalized communities perceive and respond to state preemption. The findings demonstrate how both the reality and the threat of state preemption prompt tenant organizations to adjust (and often minimize) their policy goals and to adapt their political strategies in ways that strain their capacity. By burdening local organizations that are crucial powerresources in marginalized communities, state preemption of local housing policy risks entrenching inequity and eroding democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The preemptive turn in counterterrorism has turned future uncertainties into key objects of contemporary security governance. From an empirically grounded perspective, this article contributes with novel insight into the everyday practices of preemptive politics. Focusing on Ghana as a unique case through which to trace how the mobilization of affect accelerates the transnational proliferation of counterterrorism measures and the commodification of future uncertainty, it shows how the global War on Terror has shaped the emergence of counterterrorism in a context characterized by the absence of terrorist attacks on home soil. Exploring how preemption animates outreach activities, simulation exercises, and nighttime patrols, it shows how police officers attempt to make uncertain futures tangible and actionable through practices of imagination and performance. Aimed at assessing terrorist threats that have not (yet) materialized, the article argues that preemptive policing practices cause a conflation of ordinary crime and extraordinary terror that inflates already existing uncertainties and subverts the institutional security logics of preemption. [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.

The shipbuilding industry, characterized by its high complexity and remarkable comprehensiveness, deals with large-scale equipment construction, conversion, and maintenance. It contributes significantly to the development and national security of countries. The maintenance of large vessels is a complex management engineering project that presents a challenge in lowering maintenance time and enhancing maintenance efficiency during task scheduling. This paper investigates a preemptive multi-skill resource-constrained project scheduling problem and a task-oriented scheduling model for marine power equipment maintenance to address this challenge. Each task has a minimum capability level restriction during the scheduling process and can be preempted at discrete time instants. Each resource is multi-skilled, and only those who meet the required skill level can be assigned tasks. Based on the structural properties of the studied problem, we propose an improved Moth-flame optimization algorithm that integrates the opposition-based learning strategy and the mixed mutation operators. The Taguchi design of experiments (DOE) approach is used to calibrate the algorithm parameters. A series of computational experiments are carried out to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and validity of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of predictive analytics in shaping the social worlds in which they thrive, and in particular the world of the first year of Great State University's student success initiative. Specifically, this article investigates the following research paradox: predictive analytics, as driven by a logic premised on predicting the future, lock Great State University into a never-ending present. Through Brian Massumi's concept of a logic of preemption, this paper explores how a quest for proper predictive analytics locked this student success initiative into a hamster wheel of a never-ending present, where the only space and time of action was here and now. It is argued that the function of predictive analytics in higher education is to produce space and time through dividuation and continuous algorithmic variation, freezing both past and future and restricting spacetimes of change to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study strategic investment in continuous time with positive externalities of changing magnitude. Our model particularly allows for two correlated risk factors. Constructing subgame-perfect equilibria with pure and mixed strategies, we observe the novel effect that it is important for the firms to anticipate preemption. In fact, the presence of a second risk factor implies also an additional strategic risk. We quantify the associated extra waiting cost and show that it is ex ante uncertain whether investment will happen when there is a first- or a second-mover advantage. Our formal arguments involve several methodological contributions. In addition, we provide detailed specifications of our basic model to address various applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This RCD analyzes the Alabama Supreme Court's recent answer to two certified questions sent to the court from the Eleventh Circuit. The questions involved whether a pharmaceutical company's duty to warn included a duty to provide instructions about how to properly mitigate for warned of risks, and if the pharmaceutical company had such a duty could a plaintiff recover if their physician would have prescribed the same drug but just changed their monitoring scheme. The Alabama Supreme Court answered both questions in the affirmative, expanding the causation standard in failure to warn claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shipbuilding industry, characterized by its high complexity and remarkable comprehensiveness, deals with large-scale equipment construction, conversion, and maintenance. It contributes significantly to the development and national security of countries. The maintenance of large vessels is a complex management engineering project that presents a challenge in lowering maintenance time and enhancing maintenance efficiency during task scheduling. This paper investigates a preemptive multi-skill resource-constrained project scheduling problem and a task-oriented scheduling model for marine power equipment maintenance to address this challenge. Each task has a minimum capability level restriction during the scheduling process and can be preempted at discrete time instants. Each resource is multi-skilled, and only those who meet the required skill level can be assigned tasks. Based on the structural properties of the studied problem, we propose an improved Moth-flame optimization algorithm that integrates the opposition-based learning strategy and the mixed mutation operators. The Taguchi design of experiments (DOE) approach is used to calibrate the algorithm parameters. A series of computational experiments are carried out to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and validity of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.