Anomalous Monism: Oscillating between Dogmas

Davidson's anomalous monism, his argument for the identity between mental and physical event tokens, has been frequently attacked, usually demanding a higher degree of physicalist commitment. My objection runs in the opposite direction: the identities inferred by Davidson from mental causation, the nomological character of causality and the anomaly of the mental are philosophically problematic and, more dramatically, incompatible with his famous argument against the third dogma of empiricism, the separation of content from conceptual scheme. Given the anomaly of the mental and the absence of psychophysical laws, there are no conceptual resources to relate mental and physical predicates. We fall in the third dogma if we claim that the very same token event is mental and physical. One of the premises must be rejected: I will claim that we do not need a law to subsume cause and effect to be entitled to speak of causation. Davidson has never offered an argument to back this premise. Against such a dogma I will sketch some ideas pointing towards a different conception of causality, singularist and undetachable from explanatory practices

Imaging of fuel mixture fraction oscillations in a driven system using acetone PLIF

Measurements of fuel mixture fraction are made for a jet flame in an acoustic chamber. Acoustic forcing creates a spatially-uniform, temporally-varying pressure field which results in oscillatory behavior in the flame . Forcing is at 22,27, 32, 37, and 55 Hz. To asses the oscillatory behavior, previous work included chemiluminescence, OH PUF, nitric oxide PUF imaging, and fuel mixture fraction measurements by infrared laser absorption. While these results illuminated what was happening to the flame chemistry, they did not provide a complete explanation as to why these things were happening. In this work, the fuel mixture fraction is measured through PUF of acetone, which is introduced into the fuel stream as a marker. This technique enables a high degree of spatial resolution of fuel/air mixture value. Both non-reacting and reacting cases were measured and comparisons are drawn with the results from the previous work. It is found that structure in the mixture fraction oscillations is a major contributor to the magnitude of the flame oscillations

Experimental Analysis of Algorithms for Coflow Scheduling

Modern data centers face new scheduling challenges in optimizing job-level performance objectives, where a significant challenge is the scheduling of highly parallel data flows with a common performance goal (e.g., the shuffle operations in MapReduce applications). Chowdhury and Stoica introduced the coflow abstraction to capture these parallel communication patterns, and Chowdhury et al. proposed effective heuristics to schedule coflows efficiently. In our previous paper, we considered the strongly NP-hard problem of minimizing the total weighted completion time of coflows with release dates, and developed the first polynomial-time scheduling algorithms with O(1)-approximation ratios. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive experimental analysis on a Facebook trace and extensive simulated instances to evaluate the practical performance of several algorithms for coflow scheduling, including the approximation algorithms developed in our previous paper. Our experiments suggest that simple algorithms provide effective approximations of the optimal, and that the performance of our approximation algorithms is relatively robust, near optimal, and always among the best compared with the other algorithms, in both the offline and online settings.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figures, 11 table

Improved estimate of electron capture rates on nuclei during stellar core collapse

Electron captures on nuclei play an important role in the dynamics of the collapsing core of a massive star that leads to a supernova explosion. Recent calculations of these capture rates were based on microscopic models which account for relevant degrees of freedom. Due to computational restrictions such calculations were limited to a modest number of nuclei, mainly in the mass range A=45-110. Recent supernova simulations show that this pool of nuclei, however, omits the very neutron-rich and heavy nuclei which dominate the nuclear composition during the last phase of the collapse before neutrino trapping. Assuming that the composition is given by Nuclear Statistical Equilibrium we present here electron capture rates for collapse conditions derived from individual rates for roughly 2700 individual nuclei. For those nuclei which dominate in the early stage of the collapse, the individual rates are derived within the framework of microscopic models, while for the nuclei which dominate at high densities we have derived the rates based on the Random Phase Approximation with a global parametrization of the single particle occupation numbers. In addition, we have improved previous rate evaluations by properly including screening corrections to the reaction rates into account.Comment: 32 pages, 13 figures, 1 table; elsart; to appear in Nuclear Physics

Long-term evolution of massive star explosions

We examine simulations of core-collapse supernovae in spherical symmetry. Our model is based on general relativistic radiation hydrodynamics with three-flavor Boltzmann neutrino transport. We discuss the different supernova phases, including the long-term evolution up to 20 seconds after the onset of explosion during which the neutrino fluxes and mean energies decrease continuously. In addition, the spectra of all flavors become increasingly similar, indicating the change from charged- to neutral-current dominance. Furthermore, it has been shown recently by several groups independently, based on sophisticated supernova models, that collective neutrino flavor oscillations are suppressed during the early mass-accretion dominated post-bounce evolution. Here we focus on the possibility of collective flavor flips between electron and non-electron flavors during the later, on the order of seconds, evolution after the onset of an explosion with possible application for the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, conference proceeding, HANSE 2011 worksho

Backbending in 50Cr

The collective yrast band and the high spin states of the nucleus 50Cr are studied using the spherical shell model and the HFB method. The two descriptions lead to nearly the same values for the relevant observables. A first backbending is predicted at I=10\hbar corresponding to a collective to non-collective transition. At I=16\hbar a second backbending occurs, associated to a configuration change that can also be interpreted as an spherical to triaxial transition.Comment: ReVTeX v 3.0 epsf.sty, 5 pages, 5 figures included. Full Postscript version available at http://www.ft.uam.es/~gabriel/Cr50art.ps.g