Liberal Globalization and Peripheral Justice

The increasing salience of cultural conflicts in the post-Cold War era brings the problem of peripheral justice, defined as the equal attainment of social justice, to the center of current debates on globalization. Specifically, they force us to directly confront the toughest challenge posed by the Weberian tradition: If the principles of justice and equality are beyond the peculiarity of the Occidental civilization, how then may we give a full explanation as to why in the West-and only in the West-the ideal of public reasoning by private people has been materialized? The present study seeks to address this fundamental challenge by drawing on the Marxist tradition of public hegemony developed by Confucian Marxists and Gramsci. I argue that at the core of the problem of peripheral justice is an intrinsic linkage between Eurocentricism and the liberal paradigm of civil society. The prospect of equal justice, therefore, hinges on the development of a new conception of the social that reverses the liberal interpretation of the relationship between bourgeois subjectivity and the social and derives from the primacy of the ethical life for social formation

Analyzing eventual leader election protocols for dynamic systems by probabilistic model checking

Leader election protocols have been intensively studied in distributed computing, mostly in the static setting. However, it remains a challenge to design and analyze these protocols in the dynamic setting, due to its high uncertainty, where typical properties include the average steps of electing a leader eventually, the scalability etc. In this paper, we propose a novel model-based approach for analyzing leader election protocols of dynamic systems based on probabilistic model checking. In particular, we employ a leading probabilistic model checker, PRISM, to simulate representative protocol executions. We also relax the assumptions of the original model to cover unreliable channels which requires the introduction of probability to our model. The experiments confirm the feasibility of our approach

Crashworthiness optimization of ultralight metal structures

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-275).This dissertation extends the use of the dynamic stiffness and transfer matrix methods in marine riser vibration. Marine risers possess a predominant chain topology. The transfer matrix method is appropriate for the analysis of such structures. Wave transmission and reflection matrices are formulated in terms of transfer-matrix elements. The delta-matrix method is introduced to deal with numerical problems associated with very long beams and high frequencies. The general internal relationships between the transfer matrix and dynamic stiffness methods are derived and applied to the problem of a non-uniform beam with discontinuities. An implicit transfer matrix of a general non-uniform beam is derived. The vibration analysis of non-uniform marine risers is addressed by combining the procedure of the dynamic stiffness method with the WKB theory. The WKB-based dynamic stiffness matrix is derived and the frequency-dependent shape function is expressed implicitly. The Wittrick-Williams algorithm is extended to the analysis of a general non-uniform marine riser, allowing automatic computation of natural frequencies. Marine riser models with complex boundary conditions are analyzed. The WKB-based dynamic stiffness method is improved and applied to a non-uniform beam system with discontinuities. A dynamic stiffness library is created. Dynamic vibration absorbers and wave-absorbing terminations are investigated as a means of suppressing vibration. The optimal tuning of multiple absorbers to a non-uniform beam system under varying tension is investigated. The properties of wave-absorbing terminations of a beam system are derived. The vibration of two concentric cylinders coupled by the annulus fluid and by periodic centralizers is modeled. The effects of coupling factors on vibration are numerically evaluated. It is shown that a properly designed inner tubular member may be used to damp the flow-induced vibration of the outer cylinder.by Weigang Chen.Ph.D

Conflict resolution for product performance requirements based on propagation analysis in the extension theory

Traditional product data mining methods are mainly focused on the static data. Performance requirements are generally met as possible by finding some cases and changing their structures. However, when one is satisfied with the structures changed, the other effects are not taken into account by analyzing the correlations; that is, design conflicts are not identified and resolved. An approach to resolving the conflict problems is proposed based on propagation analysis in Extension Theory. Firstly, the extension distance is improved to better fit evaluating the similarity among cases, then, a case retrieval method is developed. Secondly, the transformations that can be made on selected cases are formulated by understanding the conflict natures in the different performance requirements, which leads to the extension transformation strategy development for coordinating conflicts using propagation analysis. Thirdly, the effects and levels of propagation are determined by analyzing the performance values before and after the transformations, thus the co-existing conflict coordination strategy of multiple performances is developed. The method has been implemented in a working prototype system for supporting decision-making. And it has been demonstrated the feasible and effective through resolving the conflicts of noise, exhaust, weight and intake pressure for the screw air compressor performance design