Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

Armstrong's Axioms and Navigation Strategies

Publication Date
2018-February-02
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

The paper investigates navigability with imperfect information. It shows that the properties of navigability with perfect recall are exactly those captured by Armstrong's axioms from database theory. If the assumption of perfect recall is omitted, then Armstrong's transitivity axiom is...

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Automatic control: the vertebral column of dogfish sharks behaves as a continuously variable transmission with smoothly shifting functions

Publication Date
2016-July-07
Document Type
Document Type
Abstract

During swimming in dogfish sharks, Squalus acanthias, both the intervertebral joints and the vertebral centra undergo significant strain. To investigate this system, unique among vertebrates, we cyclically bent isolated segments of 10 vertebrae and nine joints….

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Budget-Constrained Dynamics in Multiagent Systems

Publication Date
2017-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

The paper introduces a notion of a budget-constrained multiagent transition system that associates two financial parameters with each transition: a pre-transition minimal budget requirement and a post-transition profit. The paper proposes a new modal language for reasoning about such a...

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Built for speed: strain in the cartilaginous vertebral columns of sharks

Publication Date
2014-February-01
Document Type
Document Type
Abstract

In most bony fishes vertebral column strain during locomotion is almost exclusively in the intervertebral joints, and when these joints move there is the potential to store and release strain energy. Since cartilaginous fishes have poorly mineralized vertebral centra, we...

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Coalition Power in Epistemic Transition Systems

Publication Date
2017-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The paper proposes a bimodal logic that describes an interplay between coalition strategies and distributed knowledge. Unlike the existing literature, the paper assumes that a strategy must be not only executable but also verifiable. That is, the strategy of a...

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Distribution, inflation, and public industrial enterprises

Publication Date
1991-September-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

A Kaleckian model, featuring the complementarity of the public and private sectors and administered pricing of public-sector products, is developed to examine the impact of public enterprises on income distribution between the state, capital, and labor. Public-sector mark-up and relative...

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Everyone knows that someone knows: quantifiers over epistemic agents

Publication Date
2018-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Modal logic S5 is commonly viewed as an epistemic logic that captures the most basic properties of knowledge. Kripke proved a completeness theorem for the first-order modal logic S5 with respect to a possible worlds semantics. A multiagent version of...

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Inflation, growth, and import bottlenecks in the Turkish manufacturing sector

Publication Date
1989-November-01
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

This paper argues that, in economies heavily dependent on imported inputs, the responsiveness of price and output to cost and demand factors are altered by foreign exchange bottlenecks if the government resorts to nonmarket allocation of import licenses. A model...

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Information Flow under Budget Constraints

Publication Date
2018-February-26
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Although first proposed in the database theory as properties of functional dependencies between attributes, Armstrong's axioms capture general principles of information flow by describing properties of dependencies between sets of pieces of information. This article generalizes Armstrong's axioms to a...

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Lighthouse principle for diffusion in social networks

Publication Date
2018-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The article investigates an influence relation between two sets of agents in a social network. It proposes a logical system that captures propositional properties of this relation valid in all threshold models of social networks with the same structure. The...

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Quesnay's Tableau Economique: An expository note

Publication Date
1991-September-01
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

Francois Quesney's Tableau is reformulated as a two-sector linear system. Stationary state interclass exchanges are described by a sequential accounting Tableau of real and monetary holdings of each class at each step of the circulation process. A diagrammatic framework is...

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Second-Order Know-How Strategies

Publication Date
2018-July-10
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The fact that a coalition has a strategy does not mean that the coalition knows what the strategy is. If the coalition knows the strategy, then such a strategy is called a know-how strategy of the coalition. The paper proposes...

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Strategic Coalitions with Perfect Recall

Publication Date
2018-February-02
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The paper proposes a bimodal logic that describes an interplay between distributed knowledge modality and coalition know-how modality. Unlike other similar systems, the one proposed here assumes perfect recall by all agents. Perfect recall is captured in the system by...

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Take Up the Song: Commemorating the Centennial Anniversary of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Publication Date
2023
Department or Program
Document Type
Access Level
Abstract

This booklet celebrates the centennial of the award of the first Pulitzer Prize to a female poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay (VC 1917). On April 30, 1923, Millay received a letter informing her that she had won the $1,000 Pulitzer...

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Testing biological hypotheses with embodied robots: adaptations, accidents, and by-products in the evolution of vertebrates

Publication Date
2014-November-12
Document Type
Document Type
Abstract

Evolutionary robotics allows biologists to test hypotheses about extinct animals. In our case, we modeled some of the first vertebrates, jawless fishes, in order to study the evolution of the trait after which vertebrates are named: vertebrae. …

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