HOW TO AVOID SOLIPSISM WHILE REMAINING AN IDEALIST: LESSONS FROM BERKELEY AND DHARMAKIRTI

This essay examines the strategies that Berkeley and Dharmakirti utilize to deny that idealism entails solipsism. Beginning from similar arguments for the non-existence of matter, the two philosophers employ markedly different strategies for establishing the existence of other minds. This difference stems from their responses to the problem of intersubjective agreement. While Berkeley\u27s reliance on his Cartesian inheritance does allow him to account for intersubjective agreement without descending into solipsism, it nevertheless prevents him from establishing the existence of other finite minds. I argue that Dharmakirti, in accounting for intersubjective agreement causally, is able to avoid Berkeley\u27s shortcoming. I conclude by considering a challenge to Dharmakirti\u27s use of inference that Ratnakirti, a Buddhist successor of Dharmakirti, advances in his Disproof of the Existence of Other Minds and briefly exploring a possible response that someone who wants to advocate an idealist position could give

About Notations in Multiway Array Processing

This paper gives an overview of notations used in multiway array processing. We redefine the vectorization and matricization operators to comply with some properties of the Kronecker product. The tensor product and Kronecker product are also represented with two different symbols, and it is shown how these notations lead to clearer expressions for multiway array operations. Finally, the paper recalls the useful yet widely unknown properties of the array normal law with suggested notations

Effects of Genetics and Environment on Red Flour Beetle Aggregation

Red Flour Beetles are major pests for farmers storing grain and cause large profit losses. These beetles infest grain stores and their presence leads to mold growth (Baldwin). Learning the cause of aggregation groupings in Red Flour Beetles will help with pest control and would be a great step in the Nature versus Nurture Debate (Breed). Males produce a pheromone to attract females that seems to influence social behaviors (Boake). The effects genetics and environment have on aggregation behaviors of Arkansas and Brazilian strains have never been evaluated. This project was designed to fill this research gap by assessing the impacts of genetics and environment on aggregation groupings of Arkansas and Brazilian strains of Red Beetles. The results of the study show that environment has the largest influence on groupings on the first day, but then genetics has the largest influence in the days following. This leads to the implication that genetics has a deeper effect on aggregation than environment overall; but environment has a stronger effect for a short amount of time

Spectral Unmixing with Multiple Dictionaries

Spectral unmixing aims at recovering the spectral signatures of materials, called endmembers, mixed in a hyperspectral or multispectral image, along with their abundances. A typical assumption is that the image contains one pure pixel per endmember, in which case spectral unmixing reduces to identifying these pixels. Many fully automated methods have been proposed in recent years, but little work has been done to allow users to select areas where pure pixels are present manually or using a segmentation algorithm. Additionally, in a non-blind approach, several spectral libraries may be available rather than a single one, with a fixed number (or an upper or lower bound) of endmembers to chose from each. In this paper, we propose a multiple-dictionary constrained low-rank matrix approximation model that address these two problems. We propose an algorithm to compute this model, dubbed M2PALS, and its performance is discussed on both synthetic and real hyperspectral images

Coupling of Length Scales and Atomistic Simulation of MEMS Resonators

We present simulations of the dynamic and temperature dependent behavior of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) by utilizing recently developed parallel codes which enable a coupling of length scales. The novel techniques used in this simulation accurately model the behavior of the mechanical components of MEMS down to the atomic scale. We study the vibrational behavior of one class of MEMS devices: micron-scale resonators made of silicon and quartz. The algorithmic and computational avenue applied here represents a significant departure from the usual finite element approach based on continuum elastic theory. The approach is to use an atomistic simulation in regions of significantly anharmonic forces and large surface area to volume ratios or where internal friction due to defects is anticipated. Peripheral regions of MEMS which are well-described by continuum elastic theory are simulated using finite elements for efficiency. Thus, in central regions of the device, the motion of millions of individual atoms is simulated, while the relatively large peripheral regions are modeled with finite elements. The two techniques run concurrently and mesh seamlessly, passing information back and forth. This coupling of length scales gives a natural domain decomposition, so that the code runs on multiprocessor workstations and supercomputers. We present novel simulations of the vibrational behavior of micron-scale silicon and quartz oscillators. Our results are contrasted with the predictions of continuum elastic theory as a function of size, and the failure of the continuum techniques is clear in the limit of small sizes. We also extract the Q value for the resonators and study the corresponding dissipative processes.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, to be published in the proceedings of DTM '99; LaTeX with spie.sty, bibtex with spiebib.bst and psfi