bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Gradient estimates for nonlinear elliptic equations with a gradient-dependent nonlinearity
Authors: Ching Joshua , Cîrstea Florica C. 
Published: January 2019

AbstractIn this paper, we obtain gradient estimates of the positive solutions to weightedp-Laplacian type equations with a gradient-dependent nonlinearity of the form0.1$${\rm div }( \vert x \vert ^\sigma \vert \nabla u \vert ^{p-2}\nabla u) = \vert x \vert ^{-\tau }u^q \vert \nabla u \vert ^m\quad {\rm in}\;\Omega^*: = \Omega {\rm \setminus }\{ 0\} .$$Here,$\Omega \subseteq {\open R}^N$denotes a domain containing the origin with$N\ges 2$, whereas$m,q\in [0,\infty )$,$1<p\les N+\sigma $and$q>\max \{p-m-1,\sigma +\tau -1\}$. The main difficulty arises from the dependence of the right-hand side of (0.1) onx,uand$ \vert \nabla u \vert $, without any upper bound restriction on the powermof$ \vert \nabla u \vert $. Our proof of the gradient estimates is based on a two-step process relying on a modified version of the Bernstein's method. As a by-product, we extend the range of applicability of the Liouville-type results known for (0.1).
Interlacing polynomials and the veronese construction for rational formal power series
Authors: Zhang Philip B. 
Published: January 2019

AbstractFixing a positive integer r and $0 \les k \les r-1$, define $f^{\langle r,k \rangle }$ for every formal power series f as $ f(x) = f^{\langle r,0 \rangle }(x^r)+xf^{\langle r,1 \rangle }(x^r)+ \cdots +x^{r-1}f^{\langle r,r-1 \rangle }(x^r).$ Jochemko recently showed that the polynomial $U^{n}_{r,k}\, h(x) := ( (1+x+\cdots +x^{r-1})^{n} h(x) )^{\langle r,k \rangle }$ has only non-positive zeros for any $r \ges \deg h(x) -k$ and any positive integer n. As a consequence, Jochemko confirmed a conjecture of Beck and Stapledon on the Ehrhart polynomial $h(x)$ of a lattice polytope of dimension n, which states that $U^{n}_{r,0}\,h(x)$ has only negative, real zeros whenever $r\ges n$. In this paper, we provide an alternative approach to Beck and Stapledon's conjecture by proving the following general result: if the polynomial sequence $( h^{\langle r,r-i \rangle }(x))_{1\les i \les r}$ is interlacing, so is $( U^{n}_{r,r-i}\, h(x) )_{1\les i \les r}$. Our result has many other interesting applications. In particular, this enables us to give a new proof of Savage and Visontai's result on the interlacing property of some refinements of the descent generating functions for coloured permutations. Besides, we derive a Carlitz identity for refined coloured permutations.
Constrained Presidential Power in Africa? Legislative Independence and Executive Rule Making in Kenya, 1963–2013
Authors: Opalo Ken Ochieng’ 
Published: January 2019

AbstractDo institutions constrain presidential power in Africa? Conventional wisdom holds that personalist rule grants African presidents unchecked powers. Consequently, there is very little research on African institutions such as legislatures and their impact on executive authority. In this article, the author uses original data on the exercise of presidential authority (issuance of subsidiary legislation) to examine how legislative independence conditions presidential rule making in Kenya. The study exploits quasi-exogenous changes in legislative independence, and finds that Kenyan presidents issue relatively more Legal Notices under periods of legislative weakness, but are constrained from doing so under periods of legislative independence. These findings shed new light on institutional politics in Kenya, and illustrate how executive–legislative relations in the country conform to standard predictions in the literature on unilateral executive action.
Linear Groups with Almost Right Engel Elements
Authors: Shumyatsky Pavel 
Published: January 2019

AbstractLet G be a linear group such that for every g ∈ G there is a finite set ${\cal R}(g)$ with the property that for every x ∈ G all sufficiently long commutators [g, x, x, …, x] belong to ${\cal R}(g)$. We prove that G is finite-by-hypercentral.
COMMENT ON ‘DE ROO ET AL. (2019). ON-FARM TRIALS FOR DEVELOPMENT IMPACT? THE ORGANIZATION OF RESEARCH AND THE SCALING OF AGRICULTURAL TECHNOLOGIES’
Authors: WALL PATRICK C. , THIERFELDER CHRISTIAN L. , NYAGUMBO ISAIAH , RUSINAMHODZI LEONARD , MUPANGWA WALTER 
Published: January 2019

SUMMARYIn their recent paper ‘On-farm trials for development impact? The organization of research and the scaling of agricultural technologies’, de Roo, Andersson and Krupnik report on three case studies, each undertaken by one of the authors, of projects conducting on-farm research. They reach conclusions on the limitations of the projects themselves and the effects of ‘donor dependency’, and propose a strategy to overcome these issues. However, the description of the philosophy, strategies and conduct of the projects reviewed in the southern African case study is incomplete and misleading, and shows that the case study author did not understand or overlooked important project components. Due to this the conclusions reached, insofar as this case study is concerned, are largely either invalid or already contemplated in the project activities. Here, we describe more fully the philosophy and strategies followed by the series of projects on which the case study was conducted, which were designed to facilitate, through the upscaling of project methodologies, the eventual outscaling and widespread adoption of more sustainable farming systems by smallholder farmers in eastern and southern Africa. We propose these methodologies as a valid comprehensive approach to the organization of agricultural research for development for the successful development, scaling-up and scaling-out of agricultural technologies.
PAUPER, PERCENTILE, PRECARITY: ANALYTICS FOR POVERTY STUDIES IN AFRICA
Authors: GUYER JANE I. 
Published: January 2019

AbstractThe paper reviews the history of the concepts used to depict poverty in Africa. “Pauperism” is a legal concept, deriving from early modern law in Britain, which frames individual situations, places the paupers under specific rights and duties, and was applied in early colonial situations. Percentile is a economic-demographic concept, implying class difference, indexed to measurable or imputed monetary income, which became an instrument of government in the colonial world mainly after 1945, moving into the international comparative world after the era of independence. In the neoliberal era after 1989, the concept of precarity, and a focus on realizable assets rather than income, has taken higher profile than an emergent replacement for the comparative-percentile approach, sometimes now depicted as “living on $2 a day”. The paper indicates the conceptual and political implications and challenges of each of these depictions.
WHEN NUMBERS REPRESENTED POVERTY: THE CHANGING MEANING OF THE FOOD RATION IN FRENCH COLONIAL AFRICA
Authors: BONNECASE VINCENT 
Published: January 2019

AbstractThis article examines the evolution of dietary knowledge about French colonial Africa, from the 1920s to the early 1950s. More specifically, it focuses on efforts to quantify daily food intake by tracing the different meanings assigned to nutrition over time. While such statistics were used as early as the 1920s to evaluate the food consumption of populations most useful to the imperial economy, it was only after the Second World War that they became a means of measuring living standards according to universal metrics. This history invites us to reflect on how poverty in Africa came to be recognized as a problem, by showing that such a process has neither been based entirely on social reality nor on the knowledge produced to delineate privation. Rather it also emerged from the changing set of meanings associated with this knowledge.
The Petition as Event: Colonial Bombay,circa1889–1914
Authors: KIDAMBI PRASHANT 
Published: January 2019

AbstractThe historiography on colonial petitioning has primarily construed it as an authorized ritual of supplication designed to affirm and reproduce established power relations. This article restores to the analysis of the petition its status as a potential ‘event’ that could exceed its documentary confines and generate new communities of action. Focusing specifically on colonial Bombay,circa1889–1914, it highlights three ways in which petitioning marked a rupture in the relations between rulers and ruled, and heralded significant shifts in the local constructions of state and society. First, the article shows how Bombay's Indian residents deployed the petitioning process to contest the unprecedented degree of state intervention in their quotidian lives following an extraordinary civic crisis that engulfed the city in the last decade of the Victorian era. Secondly, the article contends that the petitions that ordinary Indians in Bombay submitted to the different agencies of urban government point to a more complex set of orientations to the colonial state than has been acknowledged by scholars. Thirdly, the article argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, collective petitioning in colonial Bombay had become embedded in forms of political action with which it is conventionally regarded as being incompatible.
A Bureaucracy of Rejection: Petitioning and the impoverished paternalism of the British-Indian Raj
Authors: STEPHENS JULIA 
Published: January 2019

AbstractBombay, the hub of Britain's Indian Ocean empire, hosted a ceaseless flow of humanity: sailors and lawyers, street performers and royal refugees. When fate set obstacles in their way, the residents of this teeming metropolis petitioned colonial officials, looking on them as patriarchal providers of last resort. These petitions, which this article terms ‘personal pleas’, adeptly braided different, often contradictory, idioms of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial governance, from stylized imitations of traditional authority to bureaucratic proceduralism. Their functional contribution to Raj governance, however, remains a puzzle since the vast majority of petitions were rejected. For the British, the steady flow of rejections threatened to unmask the disjuncture between the expectations and realities of Raj paternalism. As a result, colonial officials viewed personal pleas with a mixture of ridicule and concern. Yet, while unsettling for officials, personal pleas rarely spurred the collective politics associated with anti-colonial resistance. Thus, where other articles in this special issue focus on petitioning's functional contributions to the consolidation of state bureaucracies and the formation of new publics, this article traces the genre's more emotive dimensions. Even as they failed to consolidate colonial discipline or resistance, personal pleas provided a vehicle for the airing of the lived contradictions and tensions of empire. They allowed rulers and subjects alike to fantasize about the possibility of a more benevolent order, and to vent their frustration when those fantasies crumbled in the face of imperial indifference.
Cows and Constitutionalism
Authors: DE ROHIT 
Published: January 2019

AbstractCows have been the subject of political petitioning in South Asia for over a hundred years. This article examines the changing relationship between communities and the state in India through the transformation of petitioning practices—from ‘monster’ petitions, to postcard campaigns and constitutional writs—by the proponents and opponents of the cow protection movement from the late nineteenth century through to the first decades of independence. The article shows that, instead of disciplining and formalizing popular politics, petitioning provides channels for mobilization and disruption. As Hindus and Muslims engaged in competitive petitioning to rally a public, persuade the executive, or litigate through the courts, the question of cow slaughter was recast from one of community representation to religious belief, to property rights, to federalism, and, finally, questions of national economic development. In the absence of representative government in colonial India, Hindus for cow protection generated massive petitions which argued that they represented popular democratic will. Despite the lack of a constitution, Muslim petitioners sought to establish a judicially enforceable framework to protect their right to cow slaughter. Independence, which brought both democracy and a written constitution, caused a fundamental break with older claims and forms of petitioning, and led to both Hindus and Muslims seeking to settle the debate through writ petitions before constitutional courts.
Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia: Introduction
Authors: DE ROHIT , TRAVERS ROBERT 
Published: January 2019

On 4 May 2014, as a tumultuous general election in India drew to a close, theIndian Expressnewspaper published a column by Tavleen Singh, with the headline ‘No more petitioners: no more petitioners’. The column went on to quote P. Chidambaran, the outgoing finance minister of the defeated Congress government, who diagnosed a historical shift in the mentality of the Indian electorate. ‘India has moved on,’ Chidambaran was reported as saying, ‘from a petitioner society to an aspirational one. Treating people as petitioners is a mistake . . . even the poor demand a better life and are no longer resigned to their fate.’ In India, the column argued, ‘poor people’ now had ‘middle class aspirations’, desiring ‘jobs and development’ rather than ‘charity’ and that this was a major reason for the success of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2014 elections. To be a ‘petitioner’, in this analysis, was to be ground down by poverty and resignation, and dependent on the ‘charity’ of others. It was a passing historical condition, a sign of underdevelopment that could be sloughed off by the sudden awakening across society of ‘middle class aspirations’.
Factors associated with satisfaction of inpatient psychiatric care: a cross country comparison
Authors: Bird Victoria , Miglietta Elisabetta , Giacco Domenico , Bauer Michael , Greenberg Lauren , Lorant Vincent , Moskalewicz Jacek , Nicaise Pablo , Pfennig Andrea , Ruggeri Mirella , Welbel Marta , Priebe Stefan 
Published: January 2019

AbstractBackgroundPatient satisfaction is a key indicator of inpatient care quality and is associated with clinical outcomes following admission. Different patient characteristics have been inconsistently linked with satisfaction. This study aims to overcome previous limitations by assessing which patient characteristics are associated with satisfaction within a large study of psychiatric inpatients conducted across five European countries.MethodsAll patients with a diagnosis of psychotic (F2), affective (F3) or anxiety/somataform (F4) disorder admitted to 57 psychiatric inpatient units in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK were included. Data were collected from medical records and face-to-face interviews, with patients approached within 2 days of admission. Satisfaction with inpatient care was measured on the Client Assessment of Treatment Scale.ResultsHigher satisfaction scores were associated with being older, employed, living with others, having a close friend, less severe illness and a first admission. In contrast, higher education levels, comorbid personality disorder and involuntary admission were associated with lower levels of satisfaction. Although the same patient characteristics predicted satisfaction within the five countries, there were significant differences in overall satisfaction scores across countries. Compared to other countries, patients in the UK were significantly less satisfied with their inpatient care.ConclusionsHaving a better understanding of patient satisfaction may enable services to improve the quality of care provided as well as clinical outcomes for all patients. Across countries, the same patient characteristics predict satisfaction, suggesting that similar analytical frameworks can and should be used when assessing satisfaction both nationally and internationally.
The Allais paradox: what it became, what it really was, what it now suggests to us
Authors: Mongin Philippe 
Published: January 2019

AbstractWhereas many others have scrutinized the Allais paradox from a theoretical angle, we study the paradox from an historical perspective and link our findings to a suggestion as to how decision theory could make use of it today. We emphasize that Allais proposed the paradox asa normative argument, concerned with ‘the rational man’ and not the ‘real man’, to use his words. Moreover, and more subtly, we argue that Allais had an unusual sense of the normative, being concerned not so much with therationality of choicesas with therationality of the agent as a person. These two claims are buttressed by a detailed investigation – the first of its kind – of the 1952 Paris conference on risk, which set the context for the invention of the paradox, and a detailed reconstruction – also the first of its kind – of Allais’s specific normative argument from his numerous but allusive writings. The paper contrasts these interpretations of what the paradox historically represented, with how it generally came to function within decision theory from the late 1970s onwards: that is, as an empirical refutation of the expected utility hypothesis, and more specifically of the condition of von Neumann–Morgenstern independence that underlies that hypothesis. While not denying that this use of the paradox was fruitful in many ways, we propose another use that turns out also to be compatible with an experimental perspective. Following Allais’s hints on ‘the experimental definition of rationality’, this new use consists inletting the experiment itself speak of the rationality or otherwise of the subjects. In the 1970s, a short sequence of papers inspired by Allais implemented original ways of eliciting the reasons guiding the subjects’ choices, and claimed to be able to draw relevant normative consequences from this information. We end by reviewing this forgotten experimental avenue not simply historically, but with a view to recommending it for possible use by decision theorists today.
EXTREME VALUE ANALYSIS WITHOUT THE LARGEST VALUES: WHAT CAN BE DONE?
Authors: Zou Jingjing , Davis Richard A. , Samorodnitsky Gennady 
Published: January 2019

AbstractIn this paper, we are concerned with the analysis of heavy-tailed data when a portion of the extreme values is unavailable. This research was motivated by an analysis of the degree distributions in a large social network. The degree distributions of such networks tend to have power law behavior in the tails. We focus on the Hill estimator, which plays a starring role in heavy-tailed modeling. The Hill estimator for these data exhibited a smooth and increasing “sample path” as a function of the number of upper order statistics used in constructing the estimator. This behavior became more apparent as we artificially removed more of the upper order statistics. Building on this observation we introduce a new version of the Hill estimator. It is a function of the number of the upper order statistics used in the estimation, but also depends on the number of unavailable extreme values. We establish functional convergence of the normalized Hill estimator to a Gaussian process. An estimation procedure is developed based on the limit theory to estimate the number of missing extremes and extreme value parameters including the tail index and the bias of Hill's estimator. We illustrate how this approach works in both simulations and real data examples.
DÉMONSTRATION PAR L'ABSURDE OU DÉMONSTRATION DIRECTE: AL-SIJZĪ, SUR L'INCOMMENSURABILITÉ DE LA DIAGONALE AVEC LE CÔTÉ
Authors: Rashed Roshdi 
Published: January 2019

AbstractIn this paper, I examine the opposition between direct proof and proof per impossibile, introduced by al-Sijzī (second half of the 10th century) in his treatise entitled The side is not commensurable with the diagonal. From this example he gives to illustrate this opposition, al-Sijzī argues the superiority of the direct proof. In this paper, I also give the editio princeps of his treatise, as well as its first translation.
THÉORIE DES COMÈTES ET OBSERVATIONS INÉDITES EN OCCIDENT MUSULMAN
Authors: Bekli Mohamed Reda , Chadou Ilhem , Aissani Djamil 
Published: January 2019

AbstractIn this paper, we present the Aristotelian theory of comets, which is well known in the Muslim West through the commentaries of Ibn Rušd and Ibn Bāǧǧa. This aspect is covered three centuries later in an unknown manuscript attributed to the famous mathematician Ibn Ġāzī al-Miknāsī (1437-1513), and this text is not present in the known list of his works. The author devotes a part of his manuscript to the comet astrology following Ptolemy, and introduces a critical position of Iḫwān al-Ṣafā’, characterized by the rejection of the sidereal comets idea. We are also interested in comet classifications given by Ibn Ġāzī and another author ‘Alī al-Antākī. We found that the content of the De cometis of pseudo-Ptolemy is analogous with the text of Ibn Ġāzī, and almost identical to the text of al-Antākī. Then, we are interested in observations of comets from the 9th to the end of the 19th century in North Africa and in Islamic Spain (Andalusia), recorded in some Arabic manuscripts on astronomy and history, which have never been the subject of an extensive study. The studied observations are: the two comets X/975 P1 and X/998 D1 reported by an anonymous author of the 15th century, the X/1381 V1 comet reported by Ibn al-Qāḍī (1553-1616), the passage of Halley's comet in 1456 reported by Muḥammad al-Zarkašī (1434-1525), the C/1743 X1 comet observed by ‘Abd al-Razzāq ibn Ḥamadūš (1695-1785), which confirm its fan structure, the two observations of Ibn ‘Alī al-Šrīf al-Šalāṭī of the D/1770 L1, and especially the C/1769 P1 comet. The graphic representation of this latter comet is unprecedented in the Muslim West.
UN LEMME D'ANALYSE DONT USE IBN AL-HAYTHAM EN GNOMONIQUE, DIOPTRIQUE ET CINÉMATIQUE CÉLESTE
Authors: Penchèvre Erwan 
Published: January 2019

AbstractIn several places and for different purposes, Ibn al-Haytham has studied the variations of a well-known function. The context of these applications reveals some characteristics of Ibn al-Haytham's mathematical and physical thought. An in-depth study of his mathematical proofs of monotony show how close he was from an elaborate concept of the continuous.