Race as Technology: From Posthuman Cyborg to Human Industry

Cyborg and prosthetic technologies frame prominent posthumanist approaches to understanding the nature of race. But these frameworks struggle to accommodate the phenomena of racial passing and racial travel, and their posthumanist orientation blurs useful distinctions between racialized humans and their social contexts. We advocate, instead, a humanist approach to race, understanding racial hierarchy as an industrial technology. Our approach accommodates racial passing and travel. It integrates a wide array of research across disciplines. It also helpfully distinguishes among grounds of racialization and conditions facilitating impacts of such racialization

Verification of a fieldbus scheduling protocol using timed automata

This paper deals with the formal verification of a fieldbus real-time scheduling mechanism, using the notion of timed-automata and the UPPAAL model checker. A new approach is proposed here that treats the set of schedulers that regulate access on a fieldbus as a separate entity, called the scheduling layer. In addition a network with a changing topology is considered, where nodes may be turned on or off. The behaviour of the scheduling layer in conjunction with the data link, the medium and the network management layer is examined and it is proved that it enjoys a number of desirable properties

Fazang's Total Power Mereology: An Interpretive Analytic Reconstruction

In his _Treatise on the Golden Lion_, Fazang says that wholes are _in_ each of their parts and that each part of a whole _is_ every other part of the whole. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of these remarks according to which they are not obviously false, and I use this interpretation in order to rigorously reconstruct Fazang's arguments for his claims. On the interpretation I favor, Fazang means that the presence of a whole's part suffices for the presence of the whole and that the presence of any such part is both necessary and sufficient for the presence of any other part. I also argue that this interpretation is more plausible than its extant competitor

An Arrovian Impossibility Theorem for the Epistemology of Disagreement

According to conciliatory views about the epistemology of disagreement, when epistemic peers have conflicting doxastic attitudes toward a proposition and fully disclose to one another the reasons for their attitudes toward that proposition (and neither has independent reason to believe the other to be mistaken), each peer should always change his attitude toward that proposition to one that is closer to the attitudes of those peers with which there is disagreement. According to pure higher-order evidence views, higher-order evidence for a proposition always suffices to determine the proper rational response to disagreement about that proposition within a group of epistemic peers. Using an analogue of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, I shall argue that no conciliatory and pure higher-order evidence view about the epistemology of disagreement can provide a true and general answer to the question of what disagreeing epistemic peers should do after fully disclosing to each other the (first-order) reasons for their conflicting doxastic attitudes

The concept of proportionality in the law of the European Communities with comparative material from certain member states

To compare the principle of proportionality on a legal basis in different legal systems presents almost insurmountable difficulties. A review of the relevant bibliography reveals that the concept of proportionality is vague and heavily discussed in most European legal systems. Obviously it is difficult to describe in abstract terms the precise meaning and scope of the principle in question. In this essay it is attempted to portray some general principles which form the substance of the basic idea of proportionality. A narrow approach to the content of the principle of proportionality may result into a very limited scope of examination. Some legal aspects which, in the opinion of others, come under the heading of proportionality could be neglected or even discarded. Thus the definition of proportionality adopted is quite broad essentially referring to the principle according to which public authorities shall take no action the overall costs of which are excessive in relation to its general benefits. Comparative study shows that the concept of proportionality seems to be most elaborate in Germany. This can be easily explained by the fact that it was the Prussian Administrative Tribunal that first recognized and applied the principle of proportionality. Originally designed as a legal limit on the police powers and later on the administration in general, it has been developed after the Second World War to a basic legal principle binding the executive, the judicial and even the legislative power. Different rules derived therefrom lead back to certain patterns of interest conflicts which must be solved in the legal systems included in this study. In this essay it is argued that proportionality involves the State-citizen relationship and could be considered as a response to the historical experience that public authorities, national and supranational, function with the tendency to impair the freedom of the individual

A Russellian Analysis of Buddhist Catuskoti

Names name, but there are no individuals who are named by names. This is the key to an elegant and ideologically parsimonious strategy for analyzing the Buddhist catuṣkoṭi. The strategy is ideologically parsimonious, because it appeals to no analytic resources beyond those of standard predicate logic. The strategy is elegant, because it is, in effect, an application of Bertrand Russell\u27s theory of definite descriptions to Buddhist contexts. The strategy imposes some minor adjustments upon Russell\u27s theory. Attention to familiar catuṣkoṭi from Vacchagotta and Nagarjuna as well as more obscure catuṣkoṭi from Khema, Zhi Yi, and Fa Zang motivates the adjustments. The result is a principled structural distinction between affirmative and negative catuṣkoṭi, as well as analyses for each that compare favorably to more recent efforts from Tillemans, Westerhoff, and Priest (among others)

Processor allocation for partitionable multiprocessor systems

The processor allocation problem in an n-dimensional hypercube multipro-cessor is similar to the conventional memory allocation problem. The main objective is to maximize the utilization of available resources as well as minimize the inherent system fragmentation. In this thesis, a new processor allocation strategy is proposed, and compared with the existing strategies, such as, the Buddy strategy, the Single Gray Code strategy (SGC), the Multiple Gray Code (MGC), and the Maximal Set of Subcubes (MSS). We will show that our proposed processor allocation strategy outperforms the existing strategies, by having the advantage of being able to allocate unused processors to other jobs/algorithms

Synopsis of the Robert and Sarah Boote Conference in Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism in Physics

This document is a synopsis of discussions at the workshop prepared by Nicholaos Jones and Kevin Coffey, with remarks added by by Chuang Liu, John D. Norton, John Earman, Gordon Belot, Mark Wilson, Bob Batterman and Margie Morrison. The program is included in an appendix

Synopsis of the Robert and Sarah Boote Conference in Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism in Physics

This document is a synopsis of discussions at the workshop prepared by Nicholaos Jones and Kevin Coffey, with remarks added by by Chuang Liu, John D. Norton, John Earman, Gordon Belot, Mark Wilson, Bob Batterman and Margie Morrison. The program is included in an appendix