Against the iterated knowledge account of high-stakes cases

One challenge for moderate invariantists is to explain why we tend to deny knowledge to subjects in high stakes when the target propositions seem to be inappropriate premises for practical reasoning. According to an account suggested by Williamson, our intuitive judgments are erroneous due to an alleged failure to acknowledge the distinction between first-order and higher-order knowledge: the high-stakes subject lacks the latter but possesses the former. In this paper, I provide three objections to Williamson’s account: i) his account delivers counterintuitive verdicts about what it is appropriate for a high-stakes subject to do; ii) the high-stakes subject doesn’t need iterated knowledge in order to be regarded as appropriately relying on the relevant proposition in practical reasoning; iii) Williamson’s account doesn’t provide a good explanation of why the high-stakes subject would be blameworthy if she were relying on the relevant proposition in her practical reasoning

A Defense Of Epistemic Invariantism And Intellectualism

The traditional view of knowledge includes two plausible claims. The first claim is that the truth-conditions required to know some proposition p do not vary. So, for any two subjects who have the same epistemic position regarding p, either both know that p or both do not know that p. An implication of this invariantist position is that any difference in knowledge will be explained by a difference in their epistemic position. The second claim is that only epistemic or ‘truth-conducive’ reasons are relevant to considerations of knowledge. This intellectualist position has recently come under attack from those who argue that whether someone knows that p is partly restricted by their practical situation. The first task of this dissertation is to defend invariantism from the contextualist view that the truth-conditions required to know that p are context-dependent. Contextualists argue that their view best explains our ordinary and intuitively correct knowledge-attributing practices. In response, I argue that they do not adequately address other related claims that are equally ordinary and intuitive. The debate largely hinges on identifying a mistake in the relevant cases and to that end I argue a closer analysis of contextualist cases reveals just such a mistake. In short, the ‘knowledge-denial’ rests on a false belief. The second task is to defend intellectualism from the practicalist view of Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath. Initially, I argue that the argument from their central KJ principle is susceptible to a counter-example first used by Baron Reed to attack the principle itself. This counter-example is much stronger than first realized as it also applies to the SafeReasons principle used as a premise in the argument for KJ. After showing the argument to be unsound, I discuss further examples which reveal a second condition on rational action. This condition suggests that knowing p is not sufficient to justify acting on p—as is implied by KJ—the act must also be worth it

A Methodology for Engineering Collaborative and ad-hoc Mobile Applications using SyD Middleware

Today’s web applications are more collaborative and utilize standard and ubiquitous Internet protocols. We have earlier developed System on Mobile Devices (SyD) middleware to rapidly develop and deploy collaborative applications over heterogeneous and possibly mobile devices hosting web objects. In this paper, we present the software engineering methodology for developing SyD-enabled web applications and illustrate it through a case study on two representative applications: (i) a calendar of meeting application, which is a collaborative application and (ii) a travel application which is an ad-hoc collaborative application. SyD-enabled web objects allow us to create a collaborative application rapidly with limited coding effort. In this case study, the modular software architecture allowed us to hide the inherent heterogeneity among devices, data stores, and networks by presenting a uniform and persistent object view of mobile objects interacting through XML/SOAP requests and responses. The performance results we obtained show that the application scales well as we increase the group size and adapts well within the constraints of mobile devices

Attractiveness-based airline network models with embedded spill and recapture

Purpose: In airline revenue management, the modeling of the spill and recapture effects is essential for an accurate estimation of the passenger flow and the revenue in a flight network. However, as most current approaches toward spill and recapture involve either non-linearity or a tremendous amount of additional variables, it is computationally intractable to apply those techniques to the classical network design and capacity planning models. Design/methodology: We present a new framework that incorporates the spill and recapture effects, where the spill from an itinerary is recaptured by other itineraries based on their attractiveness. The presented framework distributes the accepted demand of an itinerary according to the currently available itineraries, without adding extra variables for the recaptured spill. Due to its compactness, we integrate the framework with the classical capacity planning and network design models. Findings: Our preliminary computational study shows an increase of 1.07% in profitability anda better utilization of the network capacity, on a medium-size North American airline provided by Sabre Airline Solutions. Originality/value: Our investigation leads to a holistic model that tackles the network design and capacity planning simultaneously with an accurate modeling of the spill and re- capture effects.Furthermore, the presented framework for spill and recapture is versatile and can be easily applied to other disciplines such as the hospitality industry and product line design (PLD) problems.Peer Reviewe

Passenger Air Service in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: Overview and Analysis

[Excerpt] Rural America needs safe, efficient, reliable, and accessible passenger air service. Federal government subsidies have long been necessary to assure that residents in smaller, less profitable markets have access to the nation’s transportation network. That access is necessary for a community’s economic health, is arguably a right of all taxpayers and residents, and is in public interest. But market forces within the aviation industry are today driving a restructuring that may curtail or eliminate service to many communities in the nation. And the present political climate raises a serious question about the federal government’s continued commitment to the nation’s rural air transportation system. This report focuses on the state of passenger air service in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [U.P.]. The U.P. is among the most geographically remote areas in the eastern half of the United States. The region’s economic, social, and cultural institutions are increasingly related to a global marketplace. These depend, in varying degrees, on access to the national and global transportation network. Scheduled, commercial passenger air service is especially critical for this area too distant from passenger rail, without adequate commercial bus service, with few four-lane highways and very limited connection to the Interstate Highway system

Estimating time of day demand with errors in reported preferred times: An application to airline travel

AbstractAn essential element of demand modeling in the airline industry is the representation of time of day demand—the demand for a given itinerary as a function of its departure or arrival times. It is an important datum that drives successful scheduling and fleet decisions. There are two key components to this problem: the distribution of the time of day demand and how preferred travel time influences itinerary choice. This paper focuses on estimating the time of day distribution. Our objective is to estimate it in a manner that is not confounded with air travel supply; is a function of the characteristics of the traveler, the trip, and the market; and accounts for potential measurement errors in self-reported travel time preferences. We employ a stated preference dataset collected by intercepting people who were booking continental US trips via an internet booking service. Respondents reported preferred travel times as well as choices from a hypothetical set of itineraries. We parameterize the time of day distribution as a mixture of normal distributions (due to the strong peaking nature of travel time preferences) and allow the mixing function to vary by individual characteristics and trip attributes. We estimate the time of day distribution and the itinerary choice model jointly in a manner that can account for measurement error in the self-reported travel time preferences. We find that the mixture of normal distributions fits the time of day distribution well and is behaviorally intuitive, and the strongest covariates of travel time preferences are party size and time zone change. The methodology employed to treat self-reported travel time preferences as potentially having error contributes to the broader transportation time of day demand literature, which either assumes that the desired travel times are known with certainty or that they are unknown. We find that the error in self-reported travel time preferences is statistically significant and impacts the inferred time of day demand distribution

Optimális vedlési stratégiák = Optimal moult strategies

A pályázat fő célja annak kiderítése volt, hogy a különböző állapotváltozók hogyan befolyásolják az optimális viselkedést, speciálisan a hogyan befolyásolják a fő életmenet események időzítését az éves cikluson belül. E cél elérése érdekében több modellt fejlesztettünk, és változatos terepi megfigyeléseket és aviáriumi kísérleteket folytattunk. Fő modelljeink azt mutatják, hogy az állapotváltozók (pl. tollminőség, energiatartalékok) jelentősen befolyásolhatják a vedlés és vándorlás időzítését, de a táplálékforrás időbeli eloszlása és szezonalitása is jelentős hatással lehet. Fő empirikus eredményeink szerint a táplálék minősége és a paraziták fertőzése jelentősen befolyásolhatja a tollminőséget. Egy komparatív vizsgálatban kimutattuk, hogy a vándorlás időzítését a különféle életmenet jellemzők jelentősen befolyásolják, de a szezuálisan szelektált jellegeknek nincs ilyen hatása. | The main aim of the project was to investigate how state variables effect optimal behaviour in general, and the optimal timing of major life history events over the annual cycle, in particular. To accomplish this aim we developed a couple of annual routine models and performed various field observations and aviary experiments. Our main models show that state variables (quality of feathers, energy reserves) can significantly influence the timing of optimal behaviour (moult, migration) but they also underline the importance of the temporal distribution and seasonality of food sources. Our main empirical results show that diet quality and parasite infection influence feather quality considerably. By a comparative study we found that life history traits (e.g. migration distance and diet) but not sexually selected traits influence the timing of migration