An effective method for determining consensus in large collectives

Nowadays, using the consensus of collectives for solving problems plays an essential role in our lives. The rapid development of information technology has facilitated the collection of distributed knowledge from autonomous sources to find solutions to problems. Consequently, the size of collectives has increased rapidly. Determining consensus for a large collective is very time-consuming and expensive. Thus, this study proposes a vertical partition method (VPM) to find consensus in large collectives. In the VPM, the primary collective is first vertically partitioned into small parts. Then, a consensus-based algorithm is used to determine the consensus for each smaller part. Finally, the consensus of the collective is determined based on the consensuses of the smaller parts. The study demonstrates, both theoretically and experimentally, that the computational complexity of the VPM is lower than 57.1% that of the basic consensus method. This ratio reduces quickly if the number of smaller parts reduces.

Dissecting landscape art history with information theory

Painting has played a major role in human expression, evolving subject to a complex interplay of representational conventions, social interactions, and a process of historization. From individual qualitative work of art historians emerges a metanarrative that remains difficult to evaluate in its validity regarding emergent macroscopic and underlying microscopic dynamics. The full scope of granular data, the summary statistics, and consequently, also their bias simply lie beyond the cognitive limit of individual qualitative human scholarship. Yet, a more quantitative understanding is still lacking, driven by a lack of data and a persistent dominance of qualitative scholarship in art history. Here, we show that quantitative analyses of creative processes in landscape painting can shed light, provide a systematic verification, and allow for questioning the emerging metanarrative. Using a quasicanonical benchmark dataset of 14,912 landscape paintings, covering a period from the Western renaissance to contemporary art, we systematically analyze the evolution of compositional proportion via a simple yet coherent information-theoretic dissection method that captures iterations of the dominant horizontal and vertical partition directions. Tracing frequency distributions of seemingly preferred compositions across several conceptual dimensions, we find that dominant dissection ratios can serve as a meaningful signature to capture the unique compositional characteristics and systematic evolution of individual artist bodies of work, creation date time spans, and conventional style periods, while concepts of artist nationality remain problematic. Network analyses of individual artists and style periods clarify their rhizomatic confusion while uncovering three distinguished yet nonintuitive supergroups that are meaningfully clustered in time.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE STRUCTURE OF THE-JET FILM CONTACT DEVICE CONSTRUCTION FOR INTENSIFICATION OF HEAT MASS EXCHANGE

In the article the authors presented the construction of a contact device with an artificial unevenness on a vertical partition, which contributes to an increase in the specific contact area of the liquid and gas phases, in order to intensify the heat-storage process in the column apparatus, the experimental setup, the experimental procedure, the results of the experiments and the conclusions on the work. The experiments demonstrated the effect of the geometric parameters of the working section (width of the working area, height of the working area, bending radius of the working section) of the artificial unevenness of the partition of the contact device on the spreading area of the film and on the deviation of the liquid from the axis of the edge of the working section. The most effective ratio of the diameter of the drain of the liquid to the width of the working section is shown and the influence of the height of the working area on the efficiency of the proposed design of a jet-film contact device with an artificial unevenness on a vertical partition.