Do Competitive Examinations Promote Diversity in Civil Service?

The representative bureaucracy literature provides a growing body of empirical evidence that a representative public workforce enhances the efficacy and legitimacy of public services. However, little attention has been paid to the capacity of civil service competitive examinations to give equal opportunity of access to public jobs to equally competent citizens. To fill this gap, the authors use French databases to analyze whether competitive examinations comprising both written and oral tests ensure equality of treatment for all candidates regardless of gender, place of residence, or place of birth. The results challenge the capacity of these examinations to treat candidates equally, identifying inequalities in the written tests as well as evaluation biases in the oral tests. However, oral evaluation biases tend to offset inequalities in the written tests. Therefore, selection boards take a sort of affirmative action toward the sole successful members of groups suffering such inequalities.     

基于YouTube的视频源鉴别

在一定条件下,传感器的光电响应非均匀(PRNU)特性能够作为拍摄器材的特异性指标,用于视频图像的来源鉴别.本文利用Luká(s)等[1]定义的小波滤波器提取经过AVC方式重新编码的视频文件中的光电响应非均匀特性模式,研究调节分辨率和编码参数对拍摄器材的光电响应非均匀性模式的影响,发现部分经过重新编码的视频仍能够通过光电响应非均匀特性进行拍摄器材的鉴别.     

Online Dispute Resolution and Bargaining

The automated negotiation process seems to be a powerful mechanism to resolve disputes arising from Internet-based transactions. Automated negotiation is an online blind-bidding process in which an automated algorithm evaluates bids from the parties and settles the case if the offers are within a prescribed range. Following the arguments of the dispute resolution professionals, the main advantage of this procedure is to promote natural agreements by restoring the parties' right to negotiate on their own, without the presence of a third party in the shadow of negotiations. Our purpose is to investigate this issue by modelling the automated negotiation process as a two-person bargaining game under incomplete information. A first result states that, given incomplete information, not all mutually beneficial agreements can be attained via the procedure. Furthermore, the settlement rule has a drastic effect on the players' strategies, which induces that the automated negotiation process does not significantly increase the likelihood of a settlement. The ability of the procedure to generate efficiency is only due to the costs imposed on parties if a disagreement occurs, that is the combination of players' risk aversion and uncertainty.     

The curse of dimensionality in Voting Advice Applications: reliability and validity in algorithm design

ABSTRACT

The proliferation of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) offers voters a simplified means by which to estimate their alignment with the candidates contesting a given election. But are the outputs generated by such applications both reliable and valid? While they differ greatly in design and degree of sophistication, most VAAs share a distinctive element that serves as their defining feature: an aggregation algorithm. Aggregation algorithms are the source of a VAA's legitimacy and yet no formal framework for their evaluation has as yet been agreed upon. We posit a dimensionality reduction technique as a corrective to recognised shortcomings in the dominant approaches to VAA design. We then test our model within a proposed framework for evaluating the validity and reliability of VAA algorithms.     

Freedom to bargain and disputes’ resolution

When two parties are embedded in a dispute, they generally have the possibility to bargain before an external solution is imposed to them, notably through alternative dispute resolution. This bargaining phase may either result from a choice of disputants to negotiate or be imposed by laws or legal contracts. The aim of this paper is to analyze the differences in terms of parties’ bargaining behavior, depending upon the fact that bargaining has been imposed to them or comes from their own will. We conduct an experimental analysis and find out that, under some conditions, a procedure in which parties are forced to bargain leads to more agreements than when parties are free whether to do so. This main result is interpreted in the light of behavioral economics.     

Age Estimation in Living Adults using 3D Volume Rendered CT Images of the Sternal Plastron and Lower Chest

Age estimation is commonly of interest in a judicial context. In adults, it is less documented than in children. The aim of this study was to evaluate age estimation in adults using CT images of the sternal plastron with volume rendering technique (VRT). The evaluation criteria are derived from known methods used for age estimation and are applicable in living or dead subjects. The VRT images of 456 patients were analyzed. Two radiologists performed age estimation independently from an anterior view of the plastron. Interobserver agreement and correlation coefficients between each reader's classification and real age were calculated. The interobserver agreement was 0.86, and the correlation coefficients between readers classifications and real age classes were 0.60 and 0.65. Spearman correlation coefficients were, respectively, 0.89, 0.67, and 0.71. Analysis of the plastron using VRT allows age estimation in vivo quickly and with results similar than methods such as Iscan, Suchey–Brooks, and radiographs used to estimate the age of death.