A friendly and systematic introduction to the theory and applications. The book begins with the sums of independent random variables and vectors, with maximal inequalities and sharp estimates on moments, which are later used to develop and interpret decoupling inequalities. Decoupling is first introduced as it applies to randomly stopped processes and unbiased estimation. The authors then proceed with the theory of decoupling in full generality, paying special attention to comparison and interplay between martingale and decoupling theory, and to applications. These include limit theorems, moment and exponential inequalities for martingales and more general dependence structures, biostatistical implications, and moment convergence in Anscombe's theorem and Wald's equation for U--statistics. Addressed to researchers in probability and statistics and to graduates, the expositon is at the level of a second graduate probability course, with a good portion of the material fit for use in a first year course.
In this highly original study, Gregory Downs argues that the most American of wars, the Civil War, created a seemingly un-American popular politics, rooted not in independence but in voluntary claims of dependence. Through an examination of the pleas and
Debate about the concept of virtue is a persistent theme in academic discourse. One strand of thinking attempts to examine and reconstruct ethical theories with the aim of formulating a new morality or ethics. A second strand of thought, more strongly represented in this work, attempts to explore the social and political world deploying the concept of virtue. Thus, this volume crosses the established borders of academic disciplines in order to provide a richer and more comprehensive understanding of the place of virtues in contemporary western societies. The editors hold that the dominating virtue of our culture and society is the virtue of independence. Yet independence, or individual autonomy, is contingent upon a diverse, and so far ill-understood, set of cultural, biological, economic, ethical, and political practices. The idea of individuality is in other words supervening on a web of formal and informal relations. This volume therefore attempts to improve our understanding of the prevailing ethos of independence as well as of the mechanisms and practices sustaining it. Virtues are examined in specific contexts. Authors explore what we can learn about our dependence on virtues from the archaic Greek culture. They examine the relevance of virtue-ethics to the understanding of day-to-day practices. And they look at the place of virtues in understanding the norms of independence and liberty. Other contributions attend to the virtues of independence and its challenges, examining possible philosophical challenges, questioning whether independence is always a virtue, and how the virtues of justice fare given a commitment to the virtues of independence. The final portion of the book explore the empirical consequences of the virtues of independence. Among the questions addressed are how personal independence affects political and economic institutions, and the connections between norms of independence and the growth of modernity. This volume is an important contribution to contemporary understanding of what constitutes virtuous and ethical behavior. Ludvig Beckman teaches political theory in the department of government at Uppsala University. He is the author of The Liberal State and the Politics of Virtue, and has written several articles on liberal political thought. Emil Uddhammar is research director at the City University of Stockholm, and is the co-editor (with Richard Swedberg) of Sociological Endeavor, a festschrift in honor of Hans L. Zetterberg.
The papers presented in this volume seek to illuminate relationships among the cognitive style of field dependence- independence and biological, psychological, and sociocultural aspects of human functioning across the life span. The book begins by addressing fundamental issues concerning the role of cognitive style in human development. The remainder of the text treats cognitive style in relation to biological, psychological, and sociocultural functioning. Also included is a summary of directions for future research.
In the early sixties, Tayo Ajayi sails to England from Nigeria to take up a scholarship at Oxford University. There he discovers a whole generation high on visions of a new and better world. He meets Vanessa Richardson, the beautiful daughter of a former colonial officer. Their story, which spans four decades, is a bittersweet tale of a brave but doomed affair and the universal desire to fall truly, madly and deeply in love. A lyrical and moving story of unfulfilled love fraught with the weight of history, race and geography and intertwined with questions of belonging, aging, faith and family secrets. In Dependence explores the complexities of contemporary Africa, its Diaspora and its interdependence with the rest of the world.
In this volume, different aspects of logics for dependence and independence are discussed, including both the logical and computational aspects of dependence logic, and also applications in a number of areas, such as statistics, social choice theory, databases, and computer security. The contributing authors represent leading experts in this relatively new field, each of whom was invited to write a chapter based on talks given at seminars held at the Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Center for Informatics in Wadern, Germany (in February 2013 and June 2015) and an Academy Colloquium at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (March 2014). Altogether, these chapters provide the most up-to-date look at this developing and highly interdisciplinary field and will be of interest to a broad group of logicians, mathematicians, statisticians, philosophers, and scientists. Topics covered include a comprehensive survey of many propositional, modal, and first-order variants of dependence logic; new results concerning expressive power of several variants of dependence logic with different sets of logical connectives and generalized dependence atoms; connections between inclusion logic and the least-fixed point logic; an overview of dependencies in databases by addressing the relationships between implication problems for fragments of statistical conditional independencies, embedded multivalued dependencies, and propositional logic; various Markovian models used to characterize dependencies and causality among variables in multivariate systems; applications of dependence logic in social choice theory; and an introduction to the theory of secret sharing, pointing out connections to dependence and independence logic.
Dependence is a common phenomenon, wherever one looks: ecological systems, astronomy, human history, stock markets - but what is the logic of dependence? This book is the first to carry out a systematic logical study of this important concept, giving on the way a precise mathematical treatment of Hintikka's independence friendly logic. Dependence logic adds the concept of dependence to first order logic. Here the syntax and semantics of dependence logic are studied, dependence logic is given an alternative game theoretic semantics, and results about its complexity are proven. This is a graduate textbook suitable for a special course in logic in mathematics, philosophy and computer science departments, and contains over 200 exercises, many of which have a full solution at the end of the book. It is also accessible to readers, with a basic knowledge of logic, interested in new phenomena in logic.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems, FoIKS 2020, held in Dortmund, Germany, in February 2020. The 19 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. The papers address various topics such as big data; database design; dynamics of information; information fusion; integrity and constraint management; intelligent agents; knowledge discovery and information retrieval; knowledge representation, reasoning and planning; logics in databases and AI; mathematical foundations; security in information and knowledge systems; semi-structured data and XML; social computing; the semantic web and knowledge management; and the world wide web.
