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
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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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Budget-Constrained Dynamics in Multiagent Systems

Publication Date
2017-January-01
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Department or Program
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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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Coalition Power in Epistemic Transition Systems

Publication Date
2017-January-01
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Department or Program
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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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Crack Systems Analysis of the McCartys Flow, New Mexico, USA

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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Authors
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Abstract

The McCartys Flow is a 3.9-ka vesicular porphyritic basalt lava flow in the Zuni-Bandera Volcanic Field (ZBVF) near Grants, New Mexico. The Lava Falls area on the southern part of the flow is dominated by pahoehoe sheet flows. Topographic features...

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Do Immigrant Inflows Affect Native Location Decisions?

Publication Date
2015-January-01
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This paper investigates the relationship between immigrant inflows and native outflows in US metropolitan areas, using data from the Current Population Survey during the period from 2005-2014. Simple linear regression suggests a significant positive effect of immigrant population growth on...

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Everyone knows that someone knows: quantifiers over epistemic agents

Publication Date
2018-January-01
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Department or Program
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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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From Alternative to Integrative: An Exploration of Acupuncture Within the Western Medical Paradigm

Publication Date
2014-January-01
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I argue that our current health care system—which is based in Western medicine—is inadequate, not only because it is costly, but because it is failing to keep individuals healthy. I posit that this is due to a number of factors...

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Information Flow under Budget Constraints

Publication Date
2018-February-26
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Department or Program
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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
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Department or Program
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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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Second-Order Know-How Strategies

Publication Date
2018-July-10
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Department or Program
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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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Shifting music culture in the age of streaming

Publication Date
2017-January-01
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Department or Program
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This thesis investigates why music streaming services are so popular, beyond their affordability, and the ways in which streaming is shifting music culture. Certain aspects of listening culture which we tend to understand as originating from streaming services, specifically the...

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Strategic Coalitions with Perfect Recall

Publication Date
2018-February-02
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Department or Program
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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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The Poughkeepsie Farmers Market: Whiteness and the Logic of Food Access

Publication Date
2013-January-01
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Authors
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The Poughkeepsie Farmers Market was the epitome of the Poughkeepsie Farm Project's mission to create a "just and sustainable food system in the Hudson Valley." While farm itself had been operating for many years prior to the program, it had...

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Together We Know How to Achieve: An Epistemic Logic of Know-How

Publication Date
2017-January-01
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Department or Program
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Abstract

The existence of a coalition strategy to achieve a goal does not necessarily mean that the coalition has enough information to know how to follow the strategy. Neither does it mean that the coalition knows that such a strategy exists...

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