This article sets out a theoretical framework for the political economy of the private rental sector, with a particular focus on the question of inequality. It brings together three existing bodies of research. First, macro-accounts of social stratification and wealth inequality. Second, Marxian critiques of the antagonism between accumulation and social reproduction. Third, qualitative accounts of tenants’ experiences of housing inequality. The article synthesises these three literatures to put forward a political economy approach which can capture the multi-dimensional and multi-scale nature of both ‘housing’ and ‘home’ in the private rental sector. In so doing, it contributes to recent research on ‘generation rent’, in particular the related class and generational inequalities, as well as wider debates on the political economy of housing.
In the domain of \emph{Computing with words} (CW), fuzzy linguistic approaches are known to be relevant in many decision-making problems. Indeed, they allow us to model the human reasoning in replacing words, assessments, preferences, choices, wishes… by \emph{ad hoc} variables, such as fuzzy sets or more sophisticated variables. This paper focuses on a particular model: Herrera and Martínez' 2-tuple linguistic model and their approach to deal with unbalanced linguistic term sets. It is interesting since the computations are accomplished without loss of information while the results of the decision-making processes always refer to the initial linguistic term set. They propose a fuzzy partition which distributes data on the axis by using linguistic hierarchies to manage the non-uniformity. However, the required input (especially the density around the terms) taken by their fuzzy partition algorithm may be considered as too much demanding in a real-world application, since density is not always easy to determine. Moreover, in some limit cases (especially when two terms are very closed semantically to each other), the partition doesn't comply with the data themselves, it isn't close to the reality. Therefore we propose to modify the required input, in order to offer a simpler and more faithful partition. We have added an extension to the package jFuzzyLogic and to the corresponding script language FCL. This extension supports both 2-tuple models: Herrera and Martínez' and ours. In addition to the partition algorithm, we present two aggregation algorithms: the arithmetic means and the addition. We also discuss these kinds of 2-tuple models.
This tutorial summarizes the new approach to complex system theory that comes basically from physical information analogies. The information components and gates are defined in a similar way as components in electrical or mechanical engineering. Such approach enables the creation of complex networks through their serial, parallel or feedback ordering. Taking into account wave probabilistic functions in analogy with quantum physics, we can enrich the system theory with features such as entanglement. It is shown that such approach can explain emergencies and self-organization properties of complex systems.
A trial of analogies utilization among electrical, mechanical and information circuits is presented. The concepts of Information Power and significant proximity of the measure of information and knowledge could enable upgrading these analogies for solving important tasks from the area of Systems Engineering. This attempt seems to be attractive, as it could help in using the well-established and proved methodologies from the classical areas of electricity or mechanics.
Jednotlivci mají nesmírně velké systémy modálních znalostí a domněnek - systémy toho, co a je a co není možné, a systémy toho, co je a co není nutné. Takové individualizované systémy modálních znalostí a domněnek se nazývají "modálni světy." V tomto článku se ukazuje, že modalita plyne z kauzace, že modálni "implikace" a "vyplývání" je třeba chápat jako modálni determinovanost, že modálni slovesa nefungují sama o sobě, nýbrž zároveň s jinými prostředky, že modálni znalosti lze pojednat, že existují plochy modálni stability a že některé modálni znalosti jsou explicitní a jiné implicitní. Článek uzavírá návrhem reprezentace modálních znalostí a domněnek.