Grounding and the Myth of Ontological Innocence

According to the Ontological Innocence Thesis (OIT), grounded entities are ontologically innocent relative to their full grounds. I argue that OIT entails a contradiction, and therefore must be discarded. My argument turns on the notion of “groundmates,” two or more numerically distinct entities that share at least one of their full grounds. I argue that, if OIT is true, then it is both the case that there are groundmates and that there are no groundmates. Therefore, so I conclude, OIT is false. Moreover, once we have seen why OIT is false, only three heterodox views about reality's structure remain. So this paper’s second conclusion is that, even after we have discarded OIT, we are in for an additional surprise

Monitoring Large-Scale Cloud Systems with Layered Gossip Protocols

Monitoring is an essential aspect of maintaining and developing computer systems that increases in difficulty proportional to the size of the system. The need for robust monitoring tools has become more evident with the advent of cloud computing. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds allow end users to deploy vast numbers of virtual machines as part of dynamic and transient architectures. Current monitoring solutions, including many of those in the open-source domain rely on outdated concepts including manual deployment and configuration, centralised data collection and adapt poorly to membership churn. In this paper we propose the development of a cloud monitoring suite to provide scalable and robust lookup, data collection and analysis services for large-scale cloud systems. In lieu of centrally managed monitoring we propose a multi-tier architecture using a layered gossip protocol to aggregate monitoring information and facilitate lookup, information collection and the identification of redundant capacity. This allows for a resource aware data collection and storage architecture that operates over the system being monitored. This in turn enables monitoring to be done in-situ without the need for significant additional infrastructure to facilitate monitoring services. We evaluate this approach against alternative monitoring paradigms and demonstrate how our solution is well adapted to usage in a cloud-computing context.Comment: Extended Abstract for the ACM International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC 2013) Poster Trac

Equity and ecotax reform in the EU: achieving a 10 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions using excise duties

This paper considers the distributional effects of imposing additional excise duties on energy products according to carbon content. The assumed duties escalate from 1999 to 2010 and achieve levels reducing CO2 emissions by 10 per cent below baseline by 2010 for 11 EU member states. By 2010, real personal disposable incomes are 1.6 per cent above baseline and employment is 1.2 per cent above, assuming that the change is tax-revenue-neutral. The study concludes that the changes will be weakly regressive for nearly all the member states in the study if revenues are used to reduce employers’ taxes and strongly progressive if they are given back lump-sum to households.

Observing the clouds : a survey and taxonomy of cloud monitoring

This research was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) grant. Date of Acceptance: 10/12/2014Monitoring is an important aspect of designing and maintaining large-scale systems. Cloud computing presents a unique set of challenges to monitoring including: on-demand infrastructure, unprecedented scalability, rapid elasticity and performance uncertainty. There are a wide range of monitoring tools originating from cluster and high-performance computing, grid computing and enterprise computing, as well as a series of newer bespoke tools, which have been designed exclusively for cloud monitoring. These tools express a number of common elements and designs, which address the demands of cloud monitoring to various degrees. This paper performs an exhaustive survey of contemporary monitoring tools from which we derive a taxonomy, which examines how effectively existing tools and designs meet the challenges of cloud monitoring. We conclude by examining the socio-technical aspects of monitoring, and investigate the engineering challenges and practices behind implementing monitoring strategies for cloud computing.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Debunking Arguments and Metaphysical Laws

I argue that one’s views about which “metaphysical laws” obtain—including laws about what is identical with what, about what is reducible to what, and about what grounds what—can be used to deflect or neutralize the threat posed by a debunking explanation. I use a well-known debunking argument in the metaphysics of material objects as a case study. Then, after defending the proposed strategy from the charge of question-begging, I close by showing how the proposed strategy can be used by certain moral realists to resist the evolutionary debunking arguments

Academic Cloud Computing Research: Five Pitfalls and Five Opportunities

This discussion paper argues that there are five fundamental pitfalls, which can restrict academics from conducting cloud computing research at the infrastructure level, which is currently where the vast majority of academic research lies. Instead academics should be conducting higher risk research, in order to gain understanding and open up entirely new areas. We call for a renewed mindset and argue that academic research should focus less upon physical infrastructure and embrace the abstractions provided by clouds through five opportunities: user driven research, new programming models, PaaS environments, and improved tools to support elasticity and large-scale debugging. The objective of this paper is to foster discussion, and to define a roadmap forward, which will allow academia to make longer-term impacts to the cloud computing community.Comment: Accepted and presented at the 6th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud'14

Marcus Theory Applied To Acetal Cleavage And Aldol Reactions

The acid catalyzed and uncatalyzed hydrolysis of the acetal 2,2-dimethoxypropane (DMOP) and the ortho ester trimethylorthoacetate (TMOA) have been studied in aqueous solution at 25{dollar}\sp\circ{dollar}C. Theoretical and experimental evidence have been found for a base catalyzed E2 mechanism of DMOP hydrolysis proceeding through an enol ether. This mechanism is neither predicted nor observed for TMOA hydrolysis. The specific acid catalyzed and uncatalyzed rate constants for hydrolysis are for DMOP k{dollar}\rm\sb{lcub}H+{rcub}=(2.5\pm0.3)\times10\sp3\ M\sp{lcub}-1{rcub}s\sp{lcub}-1{rcub},\ k\sb w=(3.6\pm0.2)\times10\sp{lcub}-8{rcub}\ s\sp{lcub}-1{rcub},\ k\sb{lcub}OH-,E2{rcub}=(2.8\pm0.4)\times10\sp{lcub}-8{rcub}\ M\sp{lcub}-1{rcub}s\sp{lcub}-1{rcub},\ and\ for\ TMOA\ k\sb{lcub}H+{rcub}=(2.05\pm0.12)\times10\sp4\ M\sp{lcub}-1{rcub}s\sp{lcub}-1{rcub},\ k\sb w=(3.7\pm0.3)\times10\sp{lcub}-6{rcub}\ s\sp{lcub}-1{rcub}.{dollar} General acid catalysis was observed for TMOA with four general acids. From the Bronsted plot, {dollar}\alpha=0.76\pm0.05.{dollar} Evidence of general acid catalysis in the hydrolysis of DMOP with phenol as general acid was suggestive but inconclusive.;The rate and equilibrium constants for formation, dehydration and, when appropriate, isomerization, have been determined for four hydroxide catalyzed aldol condensations at 25.0{dollar}\sp\circ{dollar}C in aqueous solution. The four reactions studied were acetone, acting as carbon acid, with {dollar}\alpha,\alpha,\alpha{dollar}-trifluoroacetophenone and with p-nitroacetophenone, and p-nitroacetophenone, acting as carbon acid, with p-nitroacetophenone and with acetone. The experimentally determined rate constants agree well with rate constants predicted by Marcus Theory, supporting the utility of Marcus Theory in the prediction of rates of unstudied aldol reactions

The identification of tattoo designs under cover-up tattoos using digital infrared photography.

This paper looks at digital infrared photography as a technique for identifying primary tattoos even if they have been covered up with additional tattoos. The study's goal was to look at a sufficient number of cover-up tattoos using infrared photography to enable the technique to be used more widely, and to attempt to elucidate the reasons for successful and unsuccessful infrared photography of primary tattoos through cover-up tattoos. Thirty-six tattoos were photographed in infrared along with colour control records. The results showed that primary tattoos could be visualized to some extent in 55.6 % of the cover-up tattoos and very well in 38.9%, this still left some 44.4% where the design of the primary tattoo could not be seen. The extent of visibility of underlying designs was found to depend on the ink colour, ink density and the extent to which the tattooist covered or incorporated the existing tattoo into the new design