Overcoming the Obstacles to the Relativity of Truth

This is a reply to Tomas Marvan's paper "Obstacles to the Relativity of Truth", published in the same issue, in which I attempt to provide an interpretation of the relativist schema "x is true relative to y" by understanding x as ranging over propositions and y as ranging over circumstances of evaluation, as in the familiar Kaplanian picture of semantics. I then answer some of Marvan's worries and reject certain views considered relativist on the basis that they are, in fact, different views in disguise

The Use of the Binding Argument in the Debate about Location

In this paper I inquire into the methodological status of one of the arguments that have figured prominently in contemporary debates about the semantics of a variety of expressions, the so-called “Binding Argument”. My inquiry is limited to the case of meteorological sentences like “It is raining”, but my conclusion can be extended to other types of sentences as well. Following Jason Stanley, I distinguish between three interpretations of the argument. My focus is on the third, weakest interpretation, according to which postulating variables for locations in the logical form of meteorological sentences is the best available explanation of the binding phenomena that such sentences give rise to. My aim is to show that even in this weak interpretation, the argument cannot be reasonably taken to hold. I accomplish this by showcasing several alternative ways to account for the binding data that have not been, as of yet, ruled out as flawed

Minimal Disagreement

In the recent debate about the semantics of perspectival expressions, disagreement has played a crucial role. In a nutshell, what I call “the challenge from disagreement” is the objection that certain views on the market cannot account for the intuition of disagreement present in ordinary exchanges involving perspectival expressions like “Licorice is tasty./no, it’s not.” Various contextualist answers to this challenge have been proposed, and this has led to a proliferation of notions of disagreement. It is now accepted in the debate that there are many notions of disagreement and that the search for a common, basic notion is misguided. In this paper I attempt to find such a basic notion underneath this diversity. The main aim of the paper is to motivate, forge and defend a notion of “minimal disagreement” that has beneficial effects for the debate over the semantics of perspectival expressions

Lamp modulator provides signal magnitude indication

Lamp modulator provides visible indication of presence and magnitude of an audio signal carrying voice or data. It can be made to reflect signal variations of up to 32 decibels. Lamp life is increased by use of a bypass resistor to prevent filament failure

Marital disruption in the Czech Republic: the role of personal characteristics, individuality, and premarital cohabitation

In this paper, we apply event history analysis to examine the possible determinants of marital disruption in the Czech Republic. We use the method of hazard regression with the baseline captured by multiple duration clocks; the event under observation is the first marital union disruption. We use the Fertility and Family Survey data from 1997, which covers the period between the 1970s and the 1990s. We focus on personal characteristics, the attributes of individuality and on conditions of partnership formation. We are particularly interested in characteristics covering the development of respondent’s individuality in early life stages, like being an only child, experiencing the parents’ divorce, living alone after leaving parental home and cohabiting before marriage. We control among others for the effect of educational enrolment and attainment and for the effect of children on marital stability. Through introducing unobserved heterogeneity into model, we also control for unobserved personal characteristics and examine the role of selection in the marital dissolution process. Some of our results are similar to the results found among Western societies: Parental divorce and premarital cohabitation, as well as young age at marriage and childlessness are shifting the probability of marital breakdown towards upper levels. Moreover, we show that having no siblings and living independently in early adulthood contribute to higher marital disruption proneness of individuals.

Introduction to the Computation Offloading from Mobile Devices to the Edge of Mobile Network

This paper introduces the concept of Small Cell Cloud (SCC) composed of multiple Cloud-enabled Small Cells (CeSCs), which provide radio connection for mobile User Equipment (UE) such as smart-phones or wearables such as smart glasses. Moreover, CeSCs host computations offloaded from UEs in a way similar to centralized cloud, yet different in its proximity to users. Proposed client-server architecture of SCC con-veys mechanisms for moving offloaded computations from the UEs to CeSCs. Real-life implementation of the SCC architecture relies on custom-developed Of-floading Framework which is responsible for low-level communication between the UE and the SCC. The Of-floading Framework is accompanied by an Augmented Reality (AR) app, which employs intensive computa-tions for discovery of places of interest. Such app is latency-sensitive, a criterion which makes computation offloading beneficial due to its ability to decrease la-tency. The combination of the O˜oading Framework and the AR app makes up an SCC testbed used for fur-ther performance evaluation. Numerous measurements are carried out to examine the impact of various pa-rameters. Based on Proof-of-concept implementation and thorough measurements, it has been revealed that computation offloading can decrease overall latency as much as to 47 % and energy consumption on the UE side to 56