The Reliability of Memory: An Argument from the Armchair

The “problem of memory” in epistemology is concerned with whether and how we could have knowledge, or at least justification, for trusting our apparent memories. I defend an inductive solution—more precisely, an abductive solution—to the problem. A natural worry is that any such solution would be circular, for it would have to depend on memory. I argue that belief in the reliability of memory can be justified from the armchair, without relying on memory. The justification is, roughly, that my having the sort of experience that my apparent memory should lead me to expect is best explained by the hypothesis that my memories are reliable. My solution is inspired by Harrod’s (1942) inductive solution. Coburn (1960) argued that Harrod’s solution contains a fatal flaw. I show that my solution is not vulnerable to Coburn’s objection, and respond to a number of other, recent and likely objections

KIC 7385478: An eclipsing binary with a {\gamma} Doradus component

We present spectroscopic and photometric analysis of the eclipsing binary KIC\,7385478. We find that the system is formed by F1V + K4III-IV components. Combining results from analysis of spectroscopic data and $Kepler$ photometry, we calculate masses and radii of the primary and the secondary components as M$_{1}$ = 1.71 $\pm$ 0.08 \Msun, M$_{2}$ = 0.37 $\pm$ 0.04 \Msun~ and R$_{1}$ = 1.59 $\pm$ 0.03\Rsun, R$_{2}$ = 1.90 $\pm$ 0.03\Rsun, respectively. Position of the primary component in HR diagram is in the region of $\gamma$ Doradus type pulsators and residuals from light curve modeling exhibit additional light variation with a dominant period of $\sim$0.5 day. These are clear evidences of the $\gamma$ Doradus type pulsations on the primary component. We also observe occasional increase in amplitude of the residuals, where the orbital period becomes the most dominant period. These may be attributed to the cool star activity originating from the secondary component.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 5 table

Water flow risks and stakeholder impacts on the choice of a dam site

This study evaluates three alternative locations for building a fresh water dam in the Yeşilirmak Valley of North Cyprus. Each of the three sites has different investment costs, water storage capabilities and socio‐political repercussions. These kinds of trade‐offs have in recent years characterised much of the worldwide debate surrounding the construction of electricity and irrigation dams. Another issue raised in this paper is the appropriate treatment of the risk and variability associated with the availability of water to fill the dam through time. This paper demonstrates how an integrated financial‐economic‐stakeholder analysis can provide the inputs needed by decision‐makers in such situations to make rational political and economic choices.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Leveraging intelligence from network CDR data for interference aware energy consumption minimization

Cell densification is being perceived as the panacea for the imminent capacity crunch. However, high aggregated energy consumption and increased inter-cell interference (ICI) caused by densification, remain the two long-standing problems. We propose a novel network orchestration solution for simultaneously minimizing energy consumption and ICI in ultra-dense 5G networks. The proposed solution builds on a big data analysis of over 10 million CDRs from a real network that shows there exists strong spatio-temporal predictability in real network traffic patterns. Leveraging this we develop a novel scheme to pro-actively schedule radio resources and small cell sleep cycles yielding substantial energy savings and reduced ICI, without compromising the users QoS. This scheme is derived by formulating a joint Energy Consumption and ICI minimization problem and solving it through a combination of linear binary integer programming, and progressive analysis based heuristic algorithm. Evaluations using: 1) a HetNet deployment designed for Milan city where big data analytics are used on real CDRs data from the Telecom Italia network to model traffic patterns, 2) NS-3 based Monte-Carlo simulations with synthetic Poisson traffic show that, compared to full frequency reuse and always on approach, in best case, proposed scheme can reduce energy consumption in HetNets to 1/8th while providing same or better Qo