Browsing by Subject "Manipulation"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Open Access
Autonomy, authority and manipulation
(2024-05) Bağcı, Aleyna Tutku
As Weber argues, the main threat of the bureaucratic state is the excessive limitation of individual autonomy. The individual autonomy will always be restricted by state authorities, either for the individual’s benefit or to his detriment. This outcome is an economical and sociological necessity. What does “autonomy” mean? I argue that there are two types of autonomy: the objective and the subjective. Wolff stresses that the autonomous person is not subject to the will of another; he is self-legislating. So, objective autonomy can be understood as self-governance. However, objective autonomy has no prudential value; only subjective autonomy does. A person is autonomous if he thinks that he is autonomous. How is this going to be achieved, though? The main problem which creates the inconsistency between individual autonomy and state authority is the use of coercion. Sunstein proposes the use of “nudges” instead of coercion. As he emphasizes, the use of nudges leads people towards making better choices without restricting their freedom of choice. However, nudges can only be applied on a small scale. What I will propose is a revised bureaucratic state, the rule of selected and very well-trained experts purged from politicians, which does not penetrate into individual matters – except for the use of nudges to direct people to the best possible option for them from a paternalistic perspective – and consists of citizens who trust the expertise of the bureaucrats because of their unique education and their commitment to the legal system. Even though this model reminds of Plato’s Kallipolis, it will be explained in the thesis how the two states differ from one another. The revised bureaucratic system is one way to cut the Gordian knot of authority and autonomy.
Open Access
Functional contour-following via haptic perception and reinforcement learning
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2018) Hellman, R. B.; Tekin, Cem; Schaar, M. V.; Santos, V. J.
Many tasks involve the fine manipulation of objects despite limited visual feedback. In such scenarios, tactile and proprioceptive feedback can be leveraged for task completion. We present an approach for real-time haptic perception and decision-making for a haptics-driven, functional contour-following task: The closure of a ziplock bag. This task is challenging for robots because the bag is deformable, transparent, and visually occluded by artificial fingertip sensors that are also compliant. A deep neural net classifier was trained to estimate the state of a zipper within a robot's pinch grasp. A Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit (C-MAB) reinforcement learning algorithm was implemented to maximize cumulative rewards by balancing exploration versus exploitation of the state-action space. The C-MAB learner outperformed a benchmark Q-learner by more efficiently exploring the state-action space while learning a hard-to-code task. The learned C-MAB policy was tested with novel ziplock bag scenarios and contours (wire, rope). Importantly, this work contributes to the development of reinforcement learning approaches that account for limited resources such as hardware life and researcher time. As robots are used to perform complex, physically interactive tasks in unstructured or unmodeled environments, it becomes important to develop methods that enable efficient and effective learning with physical testbeds.
Open Access
Highly polarized light emission by isotropic quantum dots integrated with magnetically aligned segmented nanowires
(American Institute of Physics, 2014) Uran, C.; Erdem, T.; Guzelturk, B.; Perkgöz, N. K.; Jun, S.; Jang, E.; Demir, Hilmi Volkan
In this work, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept system for generating highly polarized light from colloidal quantum dots (QDs) coupled with magnetically aligned segmented Au/Ni/Au nanowires (NWs). Optical characterizations reveal that the optimized QD-NW coupled structures emit highly polarized light with an s-to p-polarization (s/p) contrast as high as 15: 1 corresponding to a degree of polarization of 0.88. These experimental results are supported by the finite-difference time-domain simulations, which demonstrate the interplay between the inter-NW distance and the degree of polarization.
Open Access
How to prevent trade based stock price manipulation
(2001) İlalan, Deniz
Allen and Gale (1992) construct a model to show that stock price manipulation is possible. The time structure of their model allows manipulators to pretend “informed” traders, so that the local investors cannot distinguish what type of entrant they are facing. When the type of the entrant becomes known to the local investors it is already too late to make any use of that information. In this study we show that an institution can be designed in a very natural fashion which induces different behaviours on the part of manipulators and “informed” traders at the beginning of the process. The institution designed roughly consists of entitling the entrants to resell stocks at a later date as well if they wish to do so. As this reasoning is also accessible to manipulators, the designed institution deters them from entering the market. Regarding the informed traders, their expected gain from entering the stock market may or may not be positive contingent on the basic parameters of the model. There are cases, however, when there is an improvement in the expected total gain of the local investors.
Open Access
Investors’ reaction to litigation announcements by Capital Markets Board of Turkey
(2019-09) Özçiçek, Mahmut Mustafa
I empirically investigate investors’ reaction to the litigations announcements published by Turkish Capital Markets Board (CMB). I use event study to analyze daily abnormal returns for significant market reactions. I compile a litigation announcements sample that spans 202 events of 145 unique stocks between January 20, 2012 and January 3, 2019. My findings show that investors perceive litigations announcements as bad news. Statistically significant negative responses happen both on event day and two days after, hinting difference in investor behavior. I find that the negative reaction to the news are significantly higher for corporations announcements than they are for individual announcements. The negative reaction is significantly higher for indictments announcements than they are for administrative fees.
Open Access
Manipulation via information in large elections
(2006) Sezer, İlhan
This thesis studies manipulations of equilibria by candidates in two-alternative elections along with their effects on voter turnout, winner of the election and social welfare where voters have common values, and both voting and manipulating are costly. We show that manipulation is not desirable for the society, and the candidates’ incentives for manipulating can be mitigated by appropriately sequencing the order of manipulations. We present some results of a manipulation game which may rather unexpected under the assumption that the candidates have prior beliefs about each others’ manipulations. Finally we determine the set of manipulations which can be prevented by informed voters for a given composition of society.
Open Access
Speckle optical tweezers: micromanipulation with random light fields
(Optical Society of America, 2014-07-18) Volpe, G.; Kurtz, L.; Callegari, A.; Volpe, G.; Gigan, S.
Current optical manipulation techniques rely on carefully engineered setups and samples. Although similar conditions are routinely met in research laboratories, it is still a challenge to manipulate microparticles when the environment is not well controlled and known a priori, since optical imperfections and scattering limit the applicability of this technique to real-life situations, such as in biomedical or microfluidic applications. Nonetheless, scattering of coherent light by disordered structures gives rise to speckles, random diffraction patterns with well-defined statistical properties. Here, we experimentally demonstrate how speckle fields can become a versatile tool to efficiently perform fundamental optical manipulation tasks such as trapping, guiding and sorting. We anticipate that the simplicity of these "speckle optical tweezers" will greatly broaden the perspectives of optical manipulation for real-life applications. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America