In Defense of Truth: Skepticism, Morality, and The Matrix

The Matrix exposes us to the uncomfortable worries of philosophical skepticism in an especially compelling way. However, with a bit more reflection, we can see why we need not share the skeptic’s doubts about the existence of the world. Such doubts are appropriate only in the very special context of the philosophical seminar. When we return to normal life we see immediately that they are groundless. Furthermore, we see also the drastic mistake that Cypher commits in turning his back upon reality and re-entering the matrix. Not only does reason compel us to admit the existence of the external world, it also requires us to face this world, to build for ourselves meaningful lives within it, and to engage, as adults, in the serious business of living

Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński

The Effect of Concrete Sample Size in the Compressive Strength Value of Concrete

Concrete is one of the most widely used construction materials. Compressive strength is one of the most important properties of hardened concrete. Different codes use different standards to define the characteristic strength. Albania nowadays is adapting the EN standards, but previously it used to apply the local code KTP. According to KTP standards the concrete samples were cubic specimens of 200mm side length. This study is an attempt to analyse the relation between sample size and compressive strength values of concrete specimens. For this purpose, 4 concrete classes of C8/10, C16/20, C20/25, C30/37 and 5 different cubic sizes of 50, 100, 150, 200, 250mm side length were investigated. The samples were taken according to EN 206-1. Six samples were tested for the determination of the compressive strength value of each class/size combination. According to the compressive strength test results the values increase as the size increases up to 150mm, but as the cube size continues to increase the compressive strength values decrease gradually

Extension of the Finite Integration Technique including dynamic mesh refinement and its application to self-consistent beam dynamics simulations

An extension of the framework of the Finite Integration Technique (FIT) including dynamic and adaptive mesh refinement is presented. After recalling the standard formulation of the FIT, the proposed mesh adaptation procedure is described. Besides the linear interpolation approach, a novel interpolation technique based on specialized spline functions for approximating the discrete electromagnetic field solution during mesh adaptation is introduced. The standard FIT on a fixed mesh and the new adaptive approach are applied to a simulation test case with known analytical solution. The numerical accuracy of the two methods are shown to be comparable. The dynamic mesh approach is, however, much more efficient. This is also demonstrated for the full scale modeling of the complete RF gun at the Photo Injector Test Facility DESY Zeuthen (PITZ) on a single computer. Results of a detailed design study addressing the effects of individual components of the gun onto the beam emittance using a fully self-consistent approach are presented.Comment: 33 pages, 14 figures, 4 table

Comparative Performance Simulation of DSDV, AODV and DSR MANET Protocols in NS2

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) are self-configured and infrastructure less networks with autonomous mobile nodes. Due to the high flexibility, these kind of networks are heavily used in rescue operations, military missions etc. Many routing protocols for this kind of networks exist. This article presents a comparative and quantitative performance study of DSDV, AODV and DSR routing protocols using different simulation models in NS2. Performance metrics like PDR, E2E Delay and Throughput are analyzed under varying network, traffic and mobility parameters like number of nodes, traffic flows, mobility speed and pause time. Results show that AODV outperforms DSDV and DSR in all the performance metrics. DSDV performs better than DSR in terms of PDR and E2E delay. DSR gives 20-30 higher Throughput than DSDV. Performance metrics are highly influenced by network topology parameters like number of nodes and number of traffic flow connections. Mobility parameters like speed and pause time have slight impact on performance