Sophisticated Version Research Articles

How to Use the Paradox of Hedonism

Abstract The paradox of hedonism is the idea that intrinsically desiring nothing other than pleasure can prevent one from obtaining pleasure. In this article, I show how the paradox of hedonism can be used as the basis for an objection against hedonism about well-being, and one that is more defensible than has been commonly recognized. Moreover, I argue that the challenge presented by the paradox can be used to target not only hedonism about well-being, but also desire satisfactionism and the hybrid theory. However, I argue that certain sophisticated versions of all three theories can escape it.

DOES CONTEMPORARY ANALYSIS OF DIFFICULTIES WITH ZENO SEQUENCES CONTAIN A SOLUTION TO THE DICHOTOMY?

We analyze contemporary thought experiments with some Zeno objects and infinity machines. We show how the method of reasoning from J. Hawthorne’s paper helps to understand the structure of one of the refutations of a rather sophisticated version of Zeno’s of Elea Dichotomy. After that, we propose an improvement of this version of the Dichotomy. Further, we show that the method of operating with infinite sequences of conditional sentences – proposed in J. Hawthorne’s paper – is insufficient to refute the last variant of the Dichotomy.

Experimental and Theoretical Investigations on Cold Metal Transfer Welds Using Neural Networks: A Computational Model of Weld Geometry

Cold metal transfer (CMT) welding is a sophisticated version of fusion welding process available with advanced features incorporated in it. During the process of joining metallic parts with CMT, the bead shape and size have significant effects on the weld quality. Typically, bead geometry is characterized by the three important parameters namely weld width, weld depth and reinforcement height. For rapid and intelligent welding, it is imperative to monitor the bead shape and size during the process. However, the measurement system of three parameters is often time consuming and complex. In this paper, an attempt is made to reduce the computational time of artificial intelligence models that are used for intelligent welding processes. Bead coefficient is modelled as an alternative for bead geometry properties. Computationally efficient artificial neural network models are developed for examining the feasibility of bead coefficient over bead geometry properties with and without online-temperature measurements. The predicted results of both forward and reverse neural network models are in good coherence with the experimental values. The outcome of this study is expected to provide a detailed understanding of effects of process parameters on bead geometry and bead coefficient, which facilitates online monitoring of welding processes.

Exact Semianalytical Calculation of Rotation Curves with Bekenstein–Milgrom Nonrelativistic MOND

Abstract Astronomers derive MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) rotation curves using the simple algebraic rule of calculating the acceleration as equal to the Newtonian acceleration (a) divided by some factor μ(a). However, there are velocity differences between this simple rule and the calculation derived from more sophisticated MOND versions such as AQUAL or QMOND, created to expand MOND heuristic law and preserve the conservation of momentum, angular momentum, and energy, and follow the weak equivalence principle. Here we provide recipes based on Milgrom’s proposal to calculate semianalytically (without numerical simulations) MOND rotation curves for any density distribution based on AQUAL, applying it to different models of thin disks. The application of this formalism is equivalent to the creation of a fictitious phantom mass whose field may be used in a Newtonian way to calculate iteratively the MOND accelerations. In most cases, the differences between the application of the simple algebraic rule and the AQUAL-MOND calculations are small, ≲5%. However, the error of the algebraic solution is larger than 5% when more than half of the mass is in the MONDian regime (where Newtonian and MOND rotation speeds differ by more than 10%), reaching in some cases >70% discrepancy, such as in Maclaurin disks, representative of galaxies for which the rotational velocity rises to the edge of the disk as is seen in irregular galaxies. The slope of the rotation speed in the dependence with the radius or the vertical distance of the plane is also significantly changed.

Big Tech, Big Data, And Competition Policy: Favoring Dynamic Over Static Competition

This paper gives a fresh account of competition in the digital economy. Economic analysis in the field of industrial organization remains largely focused on a sophisticated version of the Schumpeter-Arrow debate, which is unresolved and largely irrelevant. We posit the need to look at competition anew. Static models of monopoly firms and markets in equilibrium are often used to characterize Big Tech firms’ size and scope. We suggest that this characterization is inappropriate because the growth and diversification of many digital firms lead to a situation of broad-spectrum competition that cuts across markets. Current market positions do not reflect monopoly power but are vulnerable to the competitive pressure of disequilibrating forces arising from the use of data-driven operating models, astute resource orchestration, and the exercise of dynamic capabilities. A few strategic errors by management in handling internal transitions and/or external challenges and big tech firms could be competitively impaired. The implications of a more dynamic understanding of the competition process in the digital economy are explored. We consider how big data and entrepreneurial management impacts firm performance. We also explore the nature of different types of rents (Schumpeterian, Ricardian, and monopoly rents) and suggest a modified long-term consumer welfare standard for competition policy. We formulate preliminary tests and predictors to assess dynamic competition. Our perspective advances a policy stance that favors innovation.

Vaccines’ Safety and Effectiveness in the Midst of Covid-19 Mutations

We examined the coronavirus classification and evolution through its multiple mutations that have increased its transmissibility rate up to 70% globally, threatening to undermine the promise of a number of emerging vaccines that primarily focus on the immune detection of the Spike trimer. The safety and effectiveness of different vaccination methods are evaluated and compared, including the mRNA version, the Adenovirus DNA, Spike protein subunits, the deactivated virus genres, and the live attenuated coronavirus. Mutations have been long considered as random events, or mistakes during the viral RNA replication. Usually, what can go wrong will go wrong; therefore, repeated transformations lead to the extinction of a virus. On the contrary, the aggregate result of over 300,000 Covid-19 variants has expanded its transmissibility and infectiousness. Covid-19 mutations do not degrade the virus; they empower and facilitate its disguise to evade detection. Unlike other coronaviruses, Covid-19 amino acid switches do not reflect the random unfolding of errors that eventually eradicate the virus. Covid-19 appears to use mutations adaptively in the service of its survival and expansion. We cite evidence that Covid-19 inhibits the interferon type I production, compromising adaptive immunity from recognizing the virus. The deleterious consequences of the cytokine storm where the CD8+ killer cells injure the vital organs of the host may well be a Covid-19 manoeuvring to escape exposure. It is probable that evolution has programmed Covid-19 with an adeptness designed to debilitate key systemic defences to secure its subsistence. To date the infectiousness of the Covid-19 pandemic is exponentially increasing, denoting the possibility of an even more dangerously elusive, inconspicuous, and sophisticated version of the disease.

Identification of complex non-linear modes of mechanical systems using the Hilbert-Huang transform from free decay responses

Modal analysis is a well-established method for analysis of linear systems, but its extension to non-linear structures has proven to be much more problematic. Several competitive definitions of non-linear modes and a variety of experimental methods have been introduced. In this paper, the definition of complex non-linear modes (CNMs) of mechanical systems is adopted and the possibility of their identification from experimental free decay responses using the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) is explored. It is firstly discussed that since there are similarities in the definition of intrinsic mode functions obtained using the HHT and reduced order model of slow-flow dynamics based on the CNMs, there is a reason to believe that the HHT can indeed extract the CNMs. This paper, however, presents a new insight into the use of the Hilbert-Huang transform by showing that the amplitude-dependent frequency and damping extracted from a free decay response are only suitable for detection and characterisation of non-linearities, but they cannot be used to quantify the non-linear behaviour by fitting the CNMs even if a model of the system is known. The analytical proof of the HHT cannot be currently formulated due to a limited understanding of its empirical nature. Instead, this unconventional conclusion is supported by a series of numerical studies of conservative and non-conservative non-linear systems with a wide range of parameters. In all cases, a special care is taken to apply the basic HHT only on such signals for which mode separation is possible (no mode-mixing occurs). This eliminates the need for more sophisticated HHT versions and clearly demonstrates the inability of the HHT to extract CNMs even for the simplest cases. In addition to numerical studies, the identification of several non-linear modes is demonstrated experimentally using the free decay responses obtained from the ECL benchmark. It is shown that the HHT is able to successfully extract several non-linear modes whose character correspond to the numerical reference, but which cannot be used to quantify the system parameters due to conclusions made in this paper. The findings highlight that the ability of the HHT to quantify non-linear behaviour using non-linear modes extracted from free decay responses is severely limited, while detection and characterisation of non-linear behaviour in a non-parametric manner is feasible.

In Memoriam: Mortimer L. Mendelsohn: (1 December, 1925-8 January, 2020).

In Memoriam: Mortimer L. Mendelsohn: (1 December, 1925-8 January, 2020).

Wprowadzenie do współczesnego ekspresywizmu: Allan Gibbard i emotywistyczne inspiracje

Artykuł poświęcony jest realizacji celu badawczego, na który składają się trzy zadania. Pierwszym z nich jest zarysowanie głównych cech ekspresywizmu metaetycznego, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem różnic i podobieństw zachodzących między tym typem teorii a tradycyjnym emotywizmem. Drugim zadaniem jest przedstawienie podstawowych twierdzeń najbardziej wyrafinowanej wersji współczesnego ekspresywizmu – koncepcji Allana Gibbarda – z uwzględnieniem miejsca uczuć moralnych w analizie sądów moralnych. Po trzecie w artykule omawia się podjęte przez Gibbarda zastosowanie podejścia ekspresywistycznego w metateorii znaczenia i jego metaetyczne konsekwencje, zwłaszcza w zakresie relacji między ekspresywizmem a antynaturalizmem.

Perturbation Theory Near Degenerate Exceptional Points

In an overall framework of quantum mechanics of unitary systems a rather sophisticated new version of perturbation theory is developed and described. The motivation of such an extension of the list of the currently available perturbation-approximation recipes was four-fold: (1) its need results from the quick growth of interest in quantum systems exhibiting parity-time symmetry (PT-symmetry) and its generalizations; (2) in the context of physics, the necessity of a thorough update of perturbation theory became clear immediately after the identification of a class of quantum phase transitions with the non-Hermitian spectral degeneracies at the Kato’s exceptional points (EP); (3) in the dedicated literature, the EPs are only being studied in the special scenarios characterized by the spectral geometric multiplicity L equal to one; (4) apparently, one of the decisive reasons may be seen in the complicated nature of mathematics behind the L≥2 constructions. In our present paper we show how to overcome the latter, purely technical obstacle. The temporarily forgotten class of the L>1 models is shown accessible to a feasible perturbation-approximation analysis. In particular, an emergence of a counterintuitive connection between the value of L, the structure of the matrix elements of perturbations, and the possible loss of the stability and unitarity of the processes of the unfolding of the singularities is given a detailed explanation.

Rule of Law y casos recalcitrantes

Según una sofisticada versión del llamado rule of law, las reglas del derecho deben ser generales, en el sentido de que deben regular clases de casos, no situaciones particulares. La posibilidad de prever cuáles van a ser las decisiones jurídicas depende, entre otras cosas, de este carácter general de las normas. Pero junto a la previsibilidad y certeza que aporta, el carácter general de las reglas puede tener un reverso negativo: en algunas ocasiones, cuando se aplican a algunas circunstancias particulares, lo que parecía funcionar de forma satisfactoria en la teoría o en abstracto, proporciona soluciones inadmisibles (inadmisibles con arreglo a alguna concepción de la justicia). Esos casos son conocidos como casos recalcitrantes. En este artículo propongo una manera de entender el razonamiento jurídico-práctico que mitiga ese reverso negativo de las reglas generales conservando buena parte de la certeza que aportan.

Em busca do conhecimento moral

Neste artigo, depois de esclarecer aspectos da pretensão de objetividade dos juízos morais comuns e aspectos gerais da epistemologia moral, apresento e analiso a possibilidade da existência e obtenção de crenças morais verdadeiras, primeiramente, em posições céticas contrárias a tal, como na perspectiva niilista da teoria do erro e na subjetivista das teorias relativistas (social e individual), depois, em segundo lugar, em duas posições favoráveis ao conhecimento moral, a realista naturalista e a realista não-naturalista ou intuicionista. Uma perspectiva normalmente considerada contrária à existência e obtenção de crenças morais verdadeiras é a expressivista, mas neste artigo sugiro e esboço como ela, ou ao menos algumas de suas versões mais sofisticadas, pode ser epistemicamente amistosa na busca por conhecimento moral, num sentido mais fraco do conceito.

A Multi-Tier Streaming Analytics Model of 0-Day Ransomware Detection Using Machine Learning

Desktop and portable platform-based information systems become the most tempting target of crypto and locker ransomware attacks during the last decades. Hence, researchers have developed anti-ransomware tools to assist the Windows platform at thwarting ransomware attacks, protecting the information, preserving the users’ privacy, and securing the inter-related information systems through the Internet. Furthermore, they utilized machine learning to devote useful anti-ransomware tools that detect sophisticated versions. However, such anti-ransomware tools remain sub-optimal in efficacy, partial to analyzing ransomware traits, inactive to learn significant and imbalanced data streams, limited to attributing the versions’ ancestor families, and indecisive about fusing the multi-descent versions. In this paper, we propose a hybrid machine learner model, which is a multi-tiered streaming analytics model that classifies various ransomware versions of 14 families by learning 24 static and dynamic traits. The proposed model classifies ransomware versions to their ancestor families numerally and fuses those of multi-descent families statistically. Thus, it classifies ransomware versions among 40K corpora of ransomware, malware, and good-ware versions through both semi-realistic and realistic environments. The supremacy of this ransomware streaming analytics model among competitive anti-ransomware technologies is proven experimentally and justified critically with the average of 97% classification accuracy, 2.4% mistake rate, and 0.34% miss rate under comparative and realistic test.

Barnaby Barratt's Polemics

Barnaby Barratt's Polemics Stephen Frosh (bio) What is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years After Freud's 'Secret Committee.' London: Routledge, 2013, 240 pages. Radical Psychoanalysis: An Essay on Free-associative Praxis. London: Routledge, 2016, 242 pages. Beyond Psychotherapy: On Becoming a (Radical) Psychoanalyst. London: Routledge, 2019, 218 pages. Who Knows? According to Barnaby Barratt, psychoanalysis "is the process of breaking-down assumptions. That is, of perpetually being willing to call oneself into question" (2019, p. 50). This is fortunate, because reading his trilogy, one might be forgiven for thinking that being willing to call oneself into question was not the mark of an experienced "radical" psychoanalyst. There is a great deal of certainty in these books. Everyone else is wrong. Most psychoanalysts—sometimes including Freud, especially in his post-1914 metapsychological works—are in fact just "psychoanalysts," the scare quotes being deliberate. Those who talk about psychoanalysis as "a relationship" usually "deteriorate into drivel when asked what sort of dyadic encounter makes this process distinctive" (2013, p. xv). Writers of "undergraduate textbooks in psychology" are "simple minded" (2013, p. 12) whilst little can be found in the "theoretical structures" of relational and intersubjectivist psychoanalysts, despite their "grandiose" claims, "to distinguish their conduct from a sophisticated version of the practices of counseling and coaching" (2013, p. 38). This is all from the opening salvos in the first book, but at least Barratt is consistent. The second volume criticizes pretty well all schools of psychoanalysis (ego [End Page 786] psychological, object relational, Kleinian, Lacanian) for retreating from Freud's radical decentering perception—the famous idea that "the ego is not master in its own house" (Freud, 1917, p.143). The third volume, which is largely a sustained critique of psychotherapy and of psychoanalytic training, concludes with what amounts to a summary of some of his major arguments against his colleagues: the most powerful and pernicious resistance to psychoanalysis has always come from "psychoanalysts' themselves—not only all the alleged practitioners and wannabe practitioners, but also those who have, ignoring the necessity of free associative praxis, seized upon one aspect of the several theoretical models of the mind that Freud constructed after 1914 and then sought to amplify or modify these metapsychological speculations into their own model for the practice of 'psychoanalytically informed' psychotherapy. (2019, p.79) As it happens, though I might be mistaken, Volume 3 seems more moderate than Volume 1, so perhaps some calling-oneselfinto-question (to multiply hyphenations, in a phenomenological kind of way, as Barratt likes to do) has crept in, but this is a matter of degree: Barratt knows the truth of psychoanalysis, and not many other people do. Some others do, of course; it is impossible to be within a discipline or praxis (praxis being another favored term) without acknowledging some predecessors. Volume 2 is dedicated to André Green and Jean Laplanche, with good reason, especially with regard to Laplanche. Laplanche's notions of decentering and recentering, Copernican and Ptolemaic processes, and the "fundamental anthropological situation" (2016, p. 99) are central to Barratt's argument and usually cited—though his claims to originality suffer somewhat from their absolute dependence on Laplanche's now well-known and cogent critique of Freudian backsliding. But this "leaning-on" Laplanche is to good effect, as it gives Barratt's polemic some grounding in the work of a first-rate philosophically oriented psychoanalyst whose systematic thinking on trauma and otherness is inspiring some of the most productive writing on how psychoanalysis might be deployed [End Page 787] to "radical" ends, both theoretically and politically (Fletcher, 2007). These ideas are of great significance for the field of psychoanalysis and for other areas of social theory—for instance, Judith Butler draws on them effectively in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). Barratt does a service in developing them as part of his own effort to reconstruct psychoanalysis as he thinks it should be; whether or not they are not actually his ideas may not therefore really matter. Anyway, spleen over; the turgid and aggressive nature of these texts is my excuse. Instead of taking offense at Barratt's belligerence and his belittling of those with whom he disagrees, it is more useful to look...

Nietzsche's Culture of Humanity: Beyond Aristocracy and Democracy in the Early Period

Nietzsche's Culture of Humanity: Beyond Aristocracy and Democracy in the Early Period

Reclaiming critique in social sciences – or why ‘non-normative critique’ constitutes a contradiction in terms

ABSTRACT The growing popularity that postmodern positions have achieved in the social sciences since the 1970s has brought with it a transformation in the way in which critique is understood and exercised. This has resulted in a ‘weak’ form of critique that, seeking to avoid authoritarian or arbitrary impositions, rejects the evaluative and normative aspirations that had traditionally characterized critical social sciences. In this paper, one of its most sophisticated versions is examined: ‘non-normative critique’ (NNC). First, I reconstruct its proposal, presenting its most distinguishing features. Second, my main argument is offered: NNC is both impossible – because it is based on irresolvable contradictions – and undesirable – because its relativism makes it unfit for emancipatory praxis. The paper finishes with the proposal of the key pillars over which a renewed form of normative critique could be constructed and justified.

Finding the Needle in a Haystack: Detrending Photometric Timeseries Data of Strictly Periodic Astrophysical Objects

Light curves of astrophysical objects frequently contain strictly periodic signals. In such cases, we can use that property to aid the detrending algorithm to fully disentangle an unknown periodic signal and an unknown baseline signal with no power at that period. The periodic signal is modeled as a discrete probability distribution function (pdf), while the baseline signal is modeled as a residual timeseries. Those two components are disentangled by minimizing the total variation (length) of the residual timeseries with regard to the per-bin pdf fluxes. We demonstrate the use of the algorithm on a synthetic case, on the eclipsing binary KIC 3953981 and on the eccentric ellipsoidal variable KIC 3547874. We further discuss the parameters and the limitations of the algorithm and speculate on the two most common use cases: detrending the periodic signal of interest and measuring the dependence of instrumental response on controlled instrumental variables. A more sophisticated version of the algorithm is released as open source on github and available via pip.

A Feasibility Pump and Local Search Based Heuristic for Bi-Objective Pure Integer Linear Programming

We present a new heuristic algorithm to approximately generate the nondominated frontier of bi-objective pure integer linear programs. The proposed algorithm employs a customized version of several existing algorithms in the literature of both single-objective and bi-objective optimization. Our proposed method has two desirable characteristics: (1) there is no parameter to be tuned by users other than the time limit; (2) it can naturally exploit parallelism. An extensive computational study shows the efficacy of the proposed method on some existing standard test instances in which the true frontier is known, and also some large randomly generated instances. We show that even a basic version of our algorithm can significantly outperform the Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (Deb et al. 2002), and the sophisticated version of our algorithm is competitive with Multidirectional Local Search (Tricoire 2012). We also show the value of parallelization on the proposed approach.

Review of Recent Detection Methods for HTTP DDoS Attack

With increment in dependency on web technology, a commensurate increase has been noted in destructive attempts to disrupt the essential web technologies, hence leading to service failures. Web servers that run on Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) are exposed to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. A sophisticated version of this attack known as distributed denial of service (DDOS) is among the most dangerous Internet attacks, with the ability to overwhelm a web server, thereby slowing it down and potentially taking it down completely. This paper reviewed 12 recent detection of DDoS attack at the application layer published between January 2014 and December 2018. A summary of each detection method is summarised in table view, along with in-depth critical analysis, for future studies to conduct research pertaining to detection of HTTP DDoS attack.

Why Legal Positivism (Again)?

This was a keynote address at the annual meeting of the Australasian Society of Legal Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 2013. (It is a much expanded version of some brief remarks presented in 2010.) Why is legal positivism the dominant view among legal philosophers? address begins with a somewhat lengthy methodological preamble, offering reasons to resist the extravagant metaphysical inflation of the purported theoretical virtues of positivism in some recent jurisprudential writing by Dickson and Shapiro, among others. Artifacts do not have essential attributes, not even functional ones. (Leslie Green's partial resistance to my metaphysical deflation in his recent The Morality in Law is shown to depend on some confusions about the status of the claim that law is an artifact.) I then suggest that legal positivism has three theoretical virtues counting in its favor. First, if we take seriously the benchmark for theoretical adequacy that Hart gave for his theory - namely, that it capture what the ordinary educated person familiar with a modern municipal legal system understands by the concept of law - that positivism does the best job of accounting for this ordinary understanding. (Particular attention is drawn to Raz's original arguments for legal positivism of this form, as opposed to his perhaps better-known, if more controversial, argument from the nature of authority.) Second, the positivist account of law is the one deployed fruitfully in all the empirical social sciences. Third, the positivist theory does not involve incredible or controversial metaphysical assumptions. last two theoretical considerations are acknowledged to presuppose naturalism, but I suggest that doing so is unavoidable. Are there any competitors to the positivist theory so understood? most sophisticated version of natural law theory, that of John Finnis, has conceded the main points in dispute to the legal positivists, and fails to articulate a successful argument against descriptive jurisprudence. A plausible theoretical reconstruction of the jurisprudence of American Legal Realism shows it to presuppose the positivist view. Scandinavian Legal Realism is shown to reject Hart's benchmark of theoretical adequacy (the first point, above), and so to be undertaking a wholly different project, one in no competition with Hart's. Dworkin's theory, by contrast, fails along the the three dimensions of theoretical adequacy along which legal positivism succeeds. paper concludes that the appeal of Dworkin's theory to constitutional lawyers in the Anglophone world and elsewhere is due entirely to the (correct) perception that his theory makes moral considerations relevant to the resolution of momentous constitutional questions; unfortunately, nothing in the positivist theories of Hart and Raz denies the relevance of moral considerations to such questions. I end with some sociological reflections on jurisprudence that may partly explain the continued resistance to legal positivism, contrasting my own sociological speculations with Dworkin's final and embarrassing ad hominem arguments against legal positivism.