Black Boxes

We introduce Black Boxes, the intention being provably in ZFC, we have guesses of extra structure. The guesses are pairwise quite far but together are "dense". We first deal with the simplest case, were the existence comes from winning a game by just writing down the opponent's moves. We show how it helps when instead orders we have tress with boundedly many levels, having freedom in the last. After this we quite systematically look at existence of black boxes, and make connection to non-saturation of natural ideals and diamonds on them. Chapter IV of upcoming book "Nonstructure Theory"

Ordered Black Boxes: Existence

We defined ordered black boxes in which for a partial $J$ we try to predict just a bound in $J$ to a function restricted to $C_\alpha$. The existence results are closely related to pcf, propagating downward. We can start with trivial cases.Comment: 15 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:0710.015

Black boxes and open secrets: trilogues as 'politicised diplomacy'.

Why do EU actors promote secluded fora of decision making even as they have committed themselves to open and public lawmaking? How do they perceive and reconcile the ensuing tensions in practice? These questions, arising amidst growing public controversy, point to a blind spot in the scholarly agenda on EU lawmaking, which has overwhelmingly focused on the games institutions play. From an interpretivist perspective, we argue that rules are ‘made’ not by detached officials, but by practitioners puzzling out the meaning of their actions in their everyday experiences. Based on extensive interview material, the article captures trilogues as ‘politicised diplomacy’ and shows how they have become a ‘permeable institution’, shaped by dense flows of exchange between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. The article helps pinpoint to what extent and how trilogues challenge democratic norms; and it punctures the myth of trilogues as quiet politics dominated by producer interests

Thermodynamics of black holes in finite boxes

We analyze the thermodynamical behavior of black holes in closed finite boxes. First the black hole mass evolution is analyzed in an initially empty box. Using the conservation of the energy and the Hawking evaporation flux, we deduce a minimal volume above which one black hole can loss all of its mass to the box, a result which agrees with the previous analysis made by Page. We then obtain analogous results using a box initially containing radiation, allowed to be absorbed by the black hole. The equilibrium times and masses are evaluated and their behavior discussed to highlight some interesting features arising. These results are generalized to $N$ black holes + thermal radiation. Using physically simple arguments, we prove that these black holes achieve the same equilibrium masses (even that the initial masses were different). The entropy of the system is used to obtain the dependence of the equilibrium mass on the box volume, number of black holes and the initial radiation. The equilibrium mass is shown to be proportional to a {\it positive} power law of the effective volume (contrary to naive expectations), a result explained in terms of the detailed features of the system. The effect of the reflection of the radiation on the box walls which comes back into the black hole is explicitly considered. All these results (some of them counter-intuitive) may be useful to formulate alternative problems in thermodynamic courses for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. A handful of them are suggested in the Appendix.Comment: RevTex file, 2 .ps figures. Submitted to AmJPhy

Precise Request Tracing and Performance Debugging for Multi-tier Services of Black Boxes

As more and more multi-tier services are developed from commercial components or heterogeneous middleware without the source code available, both developers and administrators need a precise request tracing tool to help understand and debug performance problems of large concurrent services of black boxes. Previous work fails to resolve this issue in several ways: they either accept the imprecision of probabilistic correlation methods, or rely on knowledge of protocols to isolate requests in pursuit of tracing accuracy. This paper introduces a tool named PreciseTracer to help debug performance problems of multi-tier services of black boxes. Our contributions are two-fold: first, we propose a precise request tracing algorithm for multi-tier services of black boxes, which only uses application-independent knowledge; secondly, we present a component activity graph abstraction to represent causal paths of requests and facilitate end-to-end performance debugging. The low overhead and tolerance of noise make PreciseTracer a promising tracing tool for using on production systems

Grey Box Data Refinement

We introduce the concepts of grey box and display box data types. These make explicit the idea that state variables in abstract data types are not always hidden. Programming languages have visibility rules which make representations observable and modifiable. Specifications in model-based notations may have implicit assumptions about visible state components, or are used in contexts where the representation does matter. Grey box data types are like the ``standard'' black box data types, except that they contain explicit subspaces of the state which are modifiable and observable. Display boxes indirectly observe the state by adding displays to a black box. Refinement rules for both these alternative data types are given, based on their interpretations as black boxes