Revisiting Wedge Sampling for Budgeted Maximum Inner Product Search (Extended Abstract)

Top-k maximum inner product search (MIPS) is a central task in many machine learning applications. This work extends top-k MIPS with a budgeted setting, that asks for the best approximate top-k MIPS given a limited budget of computational operations. We study recent advanced sampling methods, including wedge and diamond sampling, to solve budgeted top-k MIPS. First, we theoretically show that diamond sampling is essentially a combination of wedge sampling and basic sampling for top-k MIPS. Second, we propose dWedge, a simple deterministic variant of wedge sampling for budgeted top-k MIPS. Empirically, dWedge provides significantly higher accuracy than other budgeted top-k MIPS solvers while maintaining a similar speedup.

Are conscientious objectors morally obligated to refer?

In this paper, we argue that providers who conscientiously refuse to provide legal and professionally accepted medical care are not always morally required to refer their patients to willing providers. Indeed, we will argue that refusing to refer is morally admirable in certain instances. In making the case, we show that belief in a sweeping moral duty to refer depends on an implicit assumption that the procedures sanctioned by legal and professional norms are ethically permissible. Focusing on examples of female genital cutting, clitoridectomy and ‘normalizing’ surgery for children with intersex traits, we argue that this assumption is untenable and that providers are not morally required to refer when refusing to perform genuinely unethical procedures. The fact that acceptance of our thesis would force us to face the challenge of distinguishing between ethical and unethical medical practices is a virtue. This is the central task of medical ethics, and we must confront it rather than evade it.

Assessing People’s Values of Nature: Where Is the Link to Sustainability Transformations?

The efforts to measure people’s current preferences and values of ecosystem services raise questions about the link to sustainability transformations. The importance of taking social and cultural values of nature into account is increasingly recognised within ecosystem services research and policy. This notion is informing the development and application of social (or socio-cultural) valuation methods that seek to assess and capture non-material social and cultural aspects of benefits of ecosystems in non-monetary terms. Here, ‘values’ refer to the products of descriptive scientific assessments of the links between human well-being and ecosystems. This precise use of the values term can be contrasted with normative modes of understanding values, as underlying beliefs and moral principles about what is good and right, which also influence science and institutions. While both perspectives on values are important for the biodiversity and ecosystem services agenda, values within this space have mainly been understood in relation to assessments and descriptive modes of values. Failing to acknowledge the distinction between descriptive and normative modes bypasses the potential mismatch between people’s current values and sustainability transformations. Refining methodologies to more accurately describe social values risks simply giving us a more detailed account of what we already know—people in general do not value nature enough. A central task for values studies is to explore why or how peoples’ mindsets might converge with sustainability goals, using methods that go beyond assessing current states to incorporate change and transformation.

Organized Futures. On the Ambiguity of the Digital Absorption of Uncertainty

Digitalization primarily takes place in and through organizations. Despite this prominent role, however, the importance of organizational structure-building processes in the digital transformation is still underexposed in discourse. The fact that ongoing digitalization is linked to an established phenomenon and its own logic, is regularly not addressed due to the attraction potential of the semantics of the digital revolution. Digital revolution and the reordering of societal relationships, though, manifest themselves primarily in processes of reorganization. Structural automation processes in the ongoing digital transformation are limiting the scope for action, necessitating forms of structural structurelessness in organizations that cultivate opportunities for chance. Since organizations realize their operations as a dual of structure and individual, and the principle of organization is therefore based on the complementarity of structural formality and unpredictable informality. The paper discusses the topicality of the classical form of modern organization in the digital age and reflects on approaches to a contemporary design of spaces of opportunity. The reflexive handling of future openness is the central task of management and leadership in order to enable variation and innovation in organizations.

Entrepreneurial Empowerment: You Are Only as Good as Your Employees

As employees are increasingly recognized as an important source of ideas and inspiration, contemporary leadership research finds that the central task of leaders is to empower employees to realize their skills and talents to achieve an organizations' visions and goals. Drawing on this leadership premise, this study develops the concept of entrepreneurial empowerment (EE). EE has structural and psychological dimensions that empower employees to utilize their knowledge to solve the internal Hayekian knowledge problem. EE introduces an endogenous discovery process in which entrepreneurial leaders play a central role in empowering employees to use their localized knowledge. This entrepreneurial discovery process offers opportunities to adapt and innovate using the knowledge experiences of employees. This study underscores that a venture’s success is not tied to an entrepreneur’s inspirational ideas (or, more broadly, their asymmetric knowledge experiences), but to their ability to inspire ideas from all levels of their business hierarchy.

"Fear of Breakdown"

In this paper the author proposes that a central task of psychotherapeutic work is to “stay close to the terror,” particularly when working with those patients whose inner world is populated by often dissociated states of traumatic horror. The paper explores a range of psychoanalytic, Jungian, and trauma theory that might assist in guiding psychotherapists regarding how we might engage with this central task, particularly given the often terrifying intrapsychic, interpsychic, and interpersonal disturbances such therapeutic work entails, for both patient and therapist.

Paradigmatic upgrading of social innovation studies

The guiding idea of this analysis concerns the development of social innovation theory on the paradigmatic basis of the social interaction concept. The aims of the discussion are three-fold. First, the central task is to elaborate on a multidimensional concept of social innovation, defined as organized social change. Second, the development of the social innovation concept is used to evaluate the heuristic potentials of the sociological paradigm of social interaction. Third, the paradigm of social interaction and its capacities to guide the structuration, functioning and development of knowledge about social innovations are put under close scrutiny. The conclusion is that the suggested disciplinary paradigm of sociology and the new concept of social innovation facilitate the explanatory approach to relevant social phenomena, the overcoming of theoretical and methodological dilemmas in sociology and the systematic building up of cumulative sociological knowledge.

“Confessio philosophi”

The “Confessio philosophi” is an early dialogue in which Leibniz engages with what he takes to be the central task of theodicy: to uphold the justice of God. It evinces his commitment to the claim that ours is the best possible world, and offers an account of how such a world could include damnation. Various answers to the question why God is justified in permitting sin are suggested in the dialogue. These are addressed in this chapter, which also highlights a threat to God’s justice raised by the doctrine of eternal damnation which is given surprisingly little attention. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the place of the “Confessio philosophi” in Leibniz’s lifelong theodicy project.

Introduction

The central task of our journal is to present outstanding work on religion. Through our focus on individual scholars in the Portrait section, we are also able to consider how such work is produced, and our hope is to reveal the intellectual, institutional, political, and personal factors behind research that has helped us to revive and reconstruct our field. The subject of this year’s Portrait, Talal Asad, has famously addressed questions about the category of religion in unusually productive and provocative ways.1 Published here for the first time, Asad’s autobiographical observations take the reader through some of the key relationships and events of his life, from a remarkable childhood during which he witnessed the violence of Partition first-hand, to what happened in 1950 when he arrived in London from Pakistan and began to discern the problems behind “the local version of modern civilization into which [he] was being unevenly assimilated,” to the process of becoming an anthropologist and an ethnographer.

Subject Matter: A Modest Proposal

The notion of subject matter is a key concern of contemporary philosophy of language and logic. A central task for a theory of subject matter is to characterise the notion of sentential subject matter, that is, to assign to each sentence of a given language a subject matter that may count as its subject matter. In this paper, we elaborate upon David Lewis’ account of subject matter. Lewis’ proposal is simple and elegant but lacks a satisfactory characterisation of sentential subject matter. Drawing on linguistic literature on focus and on the question under discussion, we offer a neo-Lewisian account of subject matter, which retains all the virtues of Lewis’ but also includes an attractive characterisation of sentential subject matter.