Springer

This book focuses on organization and mechanisms of expert decision-making support using modern information and communication technologies, as well as information analysis and collective intelligence technologies (electronic expertise or simply e-expertise). Chapter 1 (E-Expertise) discusses the role of e-expertise in decision-making processes. The procedures of e-expertise are classified, their benefits and shortcomings are identified, and the efficiency conditions are considered. Chapter 2 (Expert Technologies and Principles) provides a comprehensive overview of modern expert technologies. A special emphasis is placed on the specifics of e-expertise. Moreover, the authors study the feasibility and reasonability of employing well-known methods and approaches in e-expertise. Chapter 3 (E-Expertise: Organization and Technologies) describes some examples of up-to-date technologies to perform e-expertise. Chapter 4 (Trust Networks and Competence Networks) deals with the problems of expert finding and grouping by information and communication technologies. Chapter 5 (Active Expertise) treats the problem of expertise stability against any strategic manipulation by experts or coordinators pursuing individual goals. The book addresses a wide range of readers interested in management, decision-making and expert activity in political, economic, social and industrial spheres.

Abstract We present an analysis of the distribution of voting power in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic based on the outcomes of the nine general elections in the period 1919–1933. The paper contains a brief description of the political and electoral system of the Weimar Republic and a characterization of the main political actors and their political views. The power distributions are evaluated by means of the Banzhaf index and two new indices which take into account the parties’ preferences to coalesce. A model is constructed to evaluate the parties’ preferences with reference to the closeness of the ideological positions in a one-dimensional political space. Keywords Power distribution · Preferences · Reichstag · Weimar Republic

In practice it is important to evaluate the impact of clusters of extreme observations caused by the dependence in time series. The clusters contain consecutive exceedances of time series over a threshold separated by return intervals with consecutive non-exceedances. We derive asymptotically equal distributions of the number of inter-arrival times between events of interest arising both between two consecutive exceedances of a stationary process $\{R_n:n\ge 1\}$ and between two consecutive non-exceedances. It is found that the distributions are geometric like and corrupted by the extremal index. It is derived that the limit distribution tail of the duration of clusters that is %are defined as a sum of the random number of the weakly dependent regularly varying inter-arrival times with tail index $0

We present a comprehensive {traffic measurement and analysis concept}to cope with the rapid deployment of peer-to-peer multimedia applications and their overlay structures. It integrates four orthogonal dimensions:traffic measurements at the packet layer, data extraction, flow analysis and inspection of peer-to-peer overlays based on a hierarchical multi-layer modeling concept, a characterization of overlay structures by techniques and metrics of complex networks,and a statistical characterization of peer-to-peer traffic features.

We study peer-to-peer packet traffic arising from passive VoIP and video measurements that are generated bySkype and IPTV clients.We provide a common methodology for the statisticalcharacterization of the packet flows, discuss the user's satisfaction and load estimation.Two main ideas are used in our analysis.Due to the dependence of the data we firstpartition the observations into independent blocks and deal further withthe block-wise independent data.Secondly, loss is generated by packet lengths which exceeda channel capacity in a time unit if the inter-arrival times coincide with this time unit. If the inter-arrival times arerandom,loss is generated by those packet lengths corresponding totransmission rates thatexceed the channel capacity.

Although social decisions are universal, very little work was completed in Russia and the Soviet Union on the theory of social choice up until recent times. Thus I am first going to discuss briefly the history of social choice in Russia. I restrict myself to the period up to 1991, since I believe this was the year in which a new era in Russian history began. The development of social choice after 1991 is a subject for future investigation.