Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken

This essay questions, through a critique of his reading of classical Marxism, the path taken by Alasdair MacIntyre since his break with the Marxist Left in the 1960s. It argues that MacIntyre was uncharitable in his criticisms of Marxism, or at least in his conflation of the most powerful aspects of the classical Marxist tradition with the crudities of Kautskyian and Stalinist materialism. Contra MacIntyre, this essay locates in the writings of the revolutionary Left which briefly flourished up to and just after the Russian Revolution a rich source of dialectical thinking on the relationship between structure and agency that escapes the twin errors of crude materialism or political voluntarism. Moreover, it suggests that by reaching back to themes reminiscent of the young Marx this tradition laid the basis for a renewed ethical Marxism, and that in his youth MacIntyre pointed to the realisation of this project

Alasdair MacIntyre as a Marxist and as a critic of Marxism

This essay reconstructs Alasdair MacIntyre's engagement with Marxism with a view both to illuminating the co-ordinates of his mature thought and to outlining a partial critique of that thought. While the critique of Marxism outlined in After Virtue is well known, until recently Marx's profound influence on MacIntyre was obscured by a thoroughly misleading attempt to label him as a communitarian thinker. If this erroneous interpretation of MacIntyre's mature thought is now widely discredited, the fact that he has distanced himself from several of the arguments he previously gave for rejecting Marxism both reduces the theoretical space between his mature thought and his early Marxism and highlights a consistent theme in his critique of Marxism since the 1960s to which this essay is addressed: his dissatisfaction with the ethical dimension of Marxist attempts to theorise the relationship between socialist militants and the working-class movement from below

Launch Vehicle Operations Simulator

The Saturn Launch Vehicle Operations Simulator (LVOS) was developed for NASA at Kennedy Space Center. LVOS simulates the Saturn launch vehicle and its ground support equipment. The simulator was intended primarily to be used as a launch crew trainer but it is also being used for test procedure and software validation. A NASA/contractor team of engineers and programmers implemented the simulator after the Apollo XI lunar landing during the low activity periods between launches

Practical Materialism: Engels’s Anti-Dühring as Marxist Philosophy

Frederick Engels’s Anti-Dühring was the most important theoretical response to the emerging reformist tendencies within European socialism in the 19th century. It also proved to be Engels’s most influential, and controversial work. Because it is, as Hal Draper points out, ‘the only more or less systematic presentation of Marxism’ by either by Marx or Engels, anyone wanting to reinterpret Marx must first detach it from his seal of approval. It is thus around Anti-Dühring and related texts that debates about the relationship of Marx to ‘Engelsian’ Marxism have tended to focus. This essay re-engages with debates about Engels’s mature work with a view to unpicking his contribution to Marxism from caricatured criticisms of his thought

Road user charging and implications for transport policy: Findings from the CURACAO project

This paper reports on the outcomes of a European project, CURACAO, designed to support the implementation of urban road user charging (URUC) as a demand management tool in urban areas. The project did this through engagement with a User Group of cities interested in pursuing URUC to identify the barriers preventing them from doing so. The project reviewed the complete process of setting up a URUC scheme from the setting of objectives, through to scheme design, predicting impacts, achieving acceptability and the implementation process and presented its findings in a State of the Art Report and a Case Studies Report. The State of the Art Report provides evidence collated from research and practice to address a series of 14 themes identified by the User Group, including objectives; scheme design; technology; business systems; prediction; traffic, environmental, economic and equity impacts; appraisal; acceptability; transferability; implementation; and evaluation. The Case Study Report reviewed 16 proposed or implemented schemes in Europe, focusing on pricing objectives, scheme design, the implementation process and scheme results. On this basis, the CURACAO Consortium developed a list of policy recommendations aimed at cities and regional authorities, national governments, and the European Commission. The paper summarises the main findings of the State of the Art Report and the case studies. On this basis, it outlines the policy recommendations which were drawn, and identifies future research needs

Enhanced conformational space sampling improves the prediction of chemical shifts in proteins.

A biased-potential molecular dynamics simulation method, accelerated molecular dynamics (AMD), was combined with the chemical shift prediction algorithm SHIFTX to calculate (1)H(N), (15)N, (13)Calpha, (13)Cbeta, and (13)C' chemical shifts of the ankyrin repeat protein IkappaBalpha (residues 67-206), the primary inhibitor of nuclear factor kappa-B (NF-kappaB). Free-energy-weighted molecular ensembles were generated over a range of acceleration levels, affording systematic enhancement of the conformational space sampling of the protein. We have found that the predicted chemical shifts, particularly for the (15)N, (13)Calpha, and (13)Cbeta nuclei, improve substantially with enhanced conformational space sampling up to an optimal acceleration level. Significant improvement in the predicted chemical shift data coincides with those regions of the protein that exhibit backbone dynamics on longer time scales. Interestingly, the optimal acceleration level for reproduction of the chemical shift data has previously been shown to best reproduce the experimental residual dipolar coupling (RDC) data for this system, as both chemical shift data and RDCs report on an ensemble and time average in the millisecond range

On the application of two dimensional chirplets for resilient digital image watermarking

Chirplets (swept-frequency harmonic signals) find applications in several areas, including real and synthetic aperture radar, (Fresnel) optics and image processing. The robustness of chirplets to extreme (additive) noise make them an ideal choice in the role of embedding patterns for resilient digital signal and image watermarking. In this paper we present a new watermarking technique which is based on embedding twodimensional chirplet coded binary sequences in digital images. This approach provides a pattern embedded recovery algorithm which is robust to a variety of distortions. However, chirplets have certain parameters that need to be specified, and, given a set of target characteristics, some particular chirplet parameters can be considered optimal. This paper reports on the optimisation of both the chirplet sets and their associated parameters focusing on a classification of their resilience to image distortion

Near-field radiation patterns for an Ultra-Wide-Band antenna

We present a three-dimensional time dependent model for simulating the electromagnetic radiation field patterns generated by Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) antennas. UWB antennas are pulsed mode radiators used to communicate information at high bit rates over short distances. This affects the spatial characteristics of the field patterns assumed to be generated when a Continuous Wave (CW) model is used and this paper investigates the differences between the near-field intensity patterns generated when a pulse and CW mode is used. The purpose of this is to develop a numerical simulation that provides information on the three-dimensional electromagnetic field subject to a known (integrated) antenna geometry. The context of the approach considered is the design of integrated antennas that extend the performance of UWB systems in terms of range (in the near-field) subject to emission standards

Cryptography using evolutionary computing

We present a method of generating encryptors, in particular, Pseudo Random Number Generators (PRNG), using evolutionary computing. Working with a system called Eureqa, designed by the Cornell Creative Machines Lab, we seed the system with natural noise sources obtained from data that can include atmospheric noise generated by radio emissions due to lightening, for example, radioactive decay, electronic noise and so on. The purpose of this is to `force' the system to output a result (a nonlinear function) that is an approximation to the input noise. This output is then treated as an iterated function which is subjected to a range of tests to check for potential cryptographic strength in terms of a positive Lyapunov exponent, maximum entropy, high cycle length, key diffusion characteristics etc. This approach provides the potential for generating an unlimited number of unique PRNG that can be used on a 1-to-1 basis. Typical applications include the encryption of data before it is uploaded onto the Cloud by a user that is provided with a personalised encryption algorithm rather than just a personal key using a `known algorithm' that may be subject to a `known algorithm attack' and/or is `open' to the very authorities who are promoting its use

The quantification of wind turbulence by means of the fourier dimension

Signal Processing within the frequency domain has long been associated with electrical engineering as a means to quantify the characteristics of voltage/current waveforms. Historically, wind speed data (speed/direction) have been captured and stored as statistical markers within a time series description. This form of storage, while cumbersome, is applicable in wind regimes that are relatively laminar. In urban environments, where the associated topographies and building morphologies are heterogeneous, wind speeds are highly turbulent and chaotic. In such environments and with particular reference to wind energy, time series statistics are of limited use, unless the generic probability distribution function (PDF) is also considered. Furthermore, the industry standard metric that quantifies the turbulent component of wind speed, Turbulence Intensity (TI), is computationally cumbersome and resource intensive. An alternative model to quantify turbulence is proposed here. This paper will describe how Fourier dimension modelling (Df), through linkage with the Weibull probability density function, can quantify turbulence in a more efficient manner. This model could potentially be developed to facilitate urban wind power prediction and is relevant to the planning and development considerations within the built environment