The effect of regulation of excitation on the stability of synchronous machines

Imperial Users onl

U.N. Reform And The International Court Of Justice: Introductory Statement

It is customary during anniversaries to devote some attention to introspection and stock taking. Looking back at my own writings on the subject of U.N. reform (during the fortieth, the fiftieth and now the sixtieth anniversary in 1985, 1995 and this year), I confirmed my long held conviction that the United Nations is indispensable and its Charter, in its basic provisions, has stood the test of time

A House Divided: Partition in Cyprus and Ireland

Honors (Bachelor's)HistoryUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/107734/1/jacovjul.pd

Hume on the Prospects for a Scientific Psychology

In an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume distinguishes between two approaches to what we might call psychology: first, one that appeals to common sense to make virtue seem attractive and second one that attempts to describe the principles governing the mind. Within the second approach, he distinguishes two parts: first, a descriptive branch he calls ‘mental geography’ and, second, a branch he compares to Newton’s project in astronomy. I explain the Hume’s vision of Newtonian psychology, and then I explain its application to Hume’s psychological theory in the first Enquiry. Hume’s attempt to explain causal inference in Part 2 of Section 5 is shown to be an attempt at Newtonian psychology: it’s speculative, explanatory, and attempts to enunciate a psychological law. The paper closes by asking whether Hume succeeded in his attempt to put psychology on Newtonian foundations

Forecasting Interest Rates from the Term Structure: Support Vector Machines Vs Neural Networks

Interest rate forecasting is one of the most challenging tasks in modern nance and economics. Several studies, examining dierent factors and statistical models, have been employed, however they often failed to beat a simple random walk. This study suggests the use of nonlinear, nonparametric models, namely Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Articial Neural Networks (ANN). The methodology employed uses interest rate levels and spreads to predict the daily changes of UK six-month, one-year, three, ve and tenyear spot rates, six months forward. Results are promising, providing evidence in support of the term structures predictive content. Both methods are able to identify the overall trend of future interest rate movements and perform well in terms of Root Mean Squared Error and Mean Absolute Error outperforming, for all maturities, the simple random walk model. Greater accuracy is achieved in terms of predicting the correct direction and by considering longer-maturity rates. Comparison between the two methods shows that the accuracy and generalisation performance of SVMs is superior to that of ANNs in almost every aspect. i

Hume on the Best Attested Miracles

The first argument that Hume offers against believing in miracle stories in Part 2 of his essay on miracles relies on social context in a way that makes it difficult to follow. Hume says that there’s never been a miracle story that’s well enough attested with respect to certain criteria of testimonial strength. A little later in the essay, he cites recent miracle stories coming from that Saint Médard cemetery as meeting the criteria to an exceptionally high degree, but even so, he claims that we can dismiss the stories out of hand. The hidden background assumption is that his Protestant readers wouldn’t have been tempted to believe in miracle stories coming from an oppressed Catholic sect. Other examples in Part 2 of the essay work in the same way. Hume praises to the skies the quality of the evidence for an earlier Jansenist miracle, for a miracle involving the restoration of a leg through holy water at a Catholic cathedral, and a miracle at a temple of Serapis knowing that his readers won’t be inclined to believe in any of them. The point is that these miracles are better attested than the miracle stories in the Bible, and if we shouldn’t believe in the better attested stories, then we shouldn’t believe in the worse. This can seem like an appeal to prejudice, but really Hume is doing something subtler. He knows that it’s easier to criticize the irrational beliefs of others, but sees that once we turn the same standards that we use on others on our own beliefs, epistemic progress is possible

Hume and the Rotting Turnip

Right after Philo’s about-face in Part 12 of the Dialogues, he gives an argument that the dispute between the theist and the atheist is merely verbal. Since everything is at least a little like everything else, the atheist must concede that the source of order is at least remotely like a human intellect, even if this source is something like a rotting turnip. This passage provides a major argument for dismissing Hume’s apparent avowals of theism in the Dialogues and elsewhere, since Philo’s assertions are so loose as to let in a rotting turnip. The right reading of the passage is more interesting. The paragraph was written in 1776, right before Hume’s death. It’s thus one of the few philosophical texts written late enough to reflect his encounter with the French philosophes in the 1760s. We have good biographical evidence that Hume was criticized for being too much of a theist in France. The turnip is rotting not in order to make fun of the argument from design, but in order to make fun of d’Holbach's and Diderot's account of the origin of life, accounts that generalized dramatically from John Needham’s observations of nematodes in rotting wheat. In the rotting turnip paragraph, Hume is attempting to establish that the dispute between the theist and the atheist isn’t empirically tractable, that atheists will never outflank the apophatic theologian on the question of whether human minds are unlike God, and that if atheists are consistent with their analogical methods, they ought to be more open to the argument from design