Bodies, Morals, and Religion: Utopia and the Erasmian Idea of Human Progress

Although Thomas More’s description of the Utopians’ ‘Epicurean’ position in philosophy nominally coincides with Erasmus’s defence of the Philosophia Christi, More shows no concern for the arguments Erasmus gave in support of this view. Taking its starting point from Erasmus’s depreciations of the body and More’s intellectual as well as physical preoccupations with the bodily sphere, this article presents the theme of the human body and its moral and religious significance as a test case for comparing Erasmus and More. The treatises both men wrote on Christ’s suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane confirm that both authors dealt with the notion of the body in contrasting ways: Erasmus shows a tendency to address the moral-psychological question of mentally conquering the worldly self, whilst More highlights the way in which ordinary facts and physical things may carry spiritual and religious meaning. Paradoxically, Erasmus consistently applied his spiritualized ideal of man to this-worldly moral and social concerns, whereas More focused on the physical domain out of a religious interest in transcendent truths. In line with Giulia Sissa’s thesis, our hypothesis is that More ostensibly appropriated an Erasmian type of idealism in Utopia, but, contrary to Erasmus himself, focused on the exterior form of a virtuous society, rather than on its moral and spiritual preconditions. While Erasmus advocated a mental transformation towards reason, More’s Utopia envisioned what might come of this

Complexity in Prefix-Free Regular Languages

We examine deterministic and nondeterministic state complexities of regular operations on prefix-free languages. We strengthen several results by providing witness languages over smaller alphabets, usually as small as possible. We next provide the tight bounds on state complexity of symmetric difference, and deterministic and nondeterministic state complexity of difference and cyclic shift of prefix-free languages.Comment: In Proceedings DCFS 2010, arXiv:1008.127

Integrating power and reserve trade in electricity networks

As power markets become liberalised and include more intermittent generation, the trade of reserve energy will become more important. We propose a novel bidding mechanism to integrate power and reserve markets. It facilitates planning for bidding in both markets and adds expressivity to reserve bids\footnote{This work is a part of the IDeaNeD project and sponsored by Agentschap NL, a research funding agency of the dutch ministry of economic affairs, in the IOP-EMVT program. It has also been presented at the AAMAS 2011 conference

Integrating power and reserve trade in electricity networks

In power markets, the trade of reserve energy will become more important as more intermittent generation is traded. In this work, we propose a novel bidding mechanism for the integration of power and reserve markets. It adds expressivity to reserve bids and facilitates planning

Top flavour-changing neutral coupling signals at a linear collider

We present an analysis of the sensitivity of the TESLA e+ e- collider to top flavour-changing neutral couplings to the Z boson and photon. We consider the cases without beam polarization, with only e- polarization and with e- and e+ polarization, showing that the use of the latter substantially enhances the sensitivity to discover or bound these vertices. For some of the couplings the expected LHC limits could be improved up to an order of magnitude for equal running times.Comment: 12 pages, 5 PS figures. Added some references and corrected a typo. Final version to appear in PL

Reducing Electricity Consumption Peaks with Parametrised Dynamic Pricing Strategies Given Maximal Unit Prices

Demand response is a crucial mechanism for flattening of peak loads. For its implementation, we not only require consumers who react to price changes, but also intelligent strategies to select prices. We propose a parametrised meta-strategy for dynamic pricing and identify suitable strategies for given scenarios through offline optimisation using a population model. We also model an important and novel constraint: a price cap (a maximal unit price) for consumer protection. We show in computational simulations that the maximal unit price influences the peak reduction potential of dynamic pricing. We compare our dynamic pricing approach with a constant pricing approach and show that our approach, used by a profit-optimising seller, is both peak-reducing and equally profitable

Bargaining with posterior opportunities: an evolutionary social simulation

Negotiations have been extensively studied theoretically throughout the years. A well-known bilateral approach is the ultimatum game, where two agents negotiate on how to split a pie or a `dollar': the proposer makes an offer and responder can choose to accept or reject. In this paper a natural extension of the ultimatum game is presented, in which both agents can negotiate with other opponents in case of a disagreement. This way the basics of a competitive market are modelled where for instance a buyer can try several sellers before making a purchase decision. The game is investigated using an evolutionary simulation. The outcomes appear to depend largely on the information available to the agents. We find that if the agents' number of future bargaining opportunities is commonly known, the proposer has the advantage. If this information is held private, however, the responder can obtain a larger share of the pie. For the first case we also provide a game-theoretic analysis and compare the outcome with evolutionary results. Furthermore, the effects of search costs and allowing multiple issues to be negotiated simultaneously are investigated

Fairness in smart grid congestion management

With the energy transition, grid congestion is increasingly becoming a problem. This paper proposes the implementation of fairness in congestion management by presenting quantitative fair optimization goals and fairness measuring tools. Furthermore, this paper presents a congestion management solution in the form of an egalitarian allocation mechanism. Finally, this paper proves that this mechanism is truthful, pareto efficient, and maximizes a fair optimization goal