Reply to Nathan: How to reconstruct the causal argument

Nicholas Nathan tries to resist the current version of the causal argument for sense-data in two ways. First he suggests that, on what he considers to be the correct re-construction of the argument, it equivocates on the sense of proximate cause. Second he defends a form of disjunctivism, by claiming that there might be an extra mechanism involved in producing veridical hallucination, that is not present in perception. I argue that Nathan’s reconstruction of the argument is not the appropriate one, and that, properly interpreted, the argument does not equivocate on proximate cause. Furthermore, I claim that his postulation of a modified mechanism for hallucinations is implausibly ad hoc.     

On a compromise social choice correspondence

This paper analyzes the compromise social choice correspondence derived from the τ-value of digraph games. Monotonicity of this correspondence is shown. A connection between several properties of social choice correspondences based on game theoretical solutions and game theoretical properties of the underlying solutions is given. Applications to several game theoretic solutions are provided.     

Magnetic poly(glycidyl methacrylate) microspheres prepared by dispersion polymerization in the presence of electrostatically stabilized ferrofluids

Fine magnetite nanoparticles, both electrostatically stabilized and nonstabilized, were synthesized in situ by precipitation of Fe(II) and Fe(III) salts in alkaline medium. Magnetic poly(glycidyl methacrylate) (PGMA) microspheres with core‐shell structure, where Fe₃O₄ is the magnetic core and PGMA is the shell, were obtained by dispersion polymerization initiated with 2,2′‐azobisisobutyronitrile (AIBN), 4,4′‐azobis(4‐cyanovaleric acid) (ACVA), or ammonium persulfate (APS) in ethanol containing poly(vinylpyrrolidone) or ethylcellulose stabilizer in the presence of iron oxide ferrofluid. The average microsphere size ranged from 100 nm to 2 μm. The effects of the nature of ferrofluid, polymerization temperature, monomer, initiator, and stabilizer concentration on the PGMA particle size and polydispersity were studied. The particles contained 2–24 wt % of iron. AIBN produced larger microspheres than APS or ACVA. Polymers encapsulating electrostatically stabilized iron oxide particles contained lower amounts of oxirane groups compared with those obtained with untreated ferrofluid. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part A: Polym Chem 42: 5827–5837, 2004     

Design and synthesis of labeling reagents (MS probes) for highly sensitive electrospray ionization mass spectrometry and their application to the detection of carbonyl, alcohol, carboxylic acid and primary amine samples.

Novel labeling reagents, called MS probes, which possess a positively charged quaternary amine moiety and can transform a neutral analyte into a charged compound by simply mixing with the analyte and allowing the mixture to stand from several minutes to 30 min at room temperature or while heating to 50 degrees C, were designed and synthesized for the highly sensitive detection of carbonyl, alcohol, carboxylic acid and primary amine samples by electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS). The positively charged products can be detected with high sensitivity in an ESI-MS system, which is the most popular liquid MS instrument. All of the labeled products showed a remarkably large increase in the molecular-ion peak abundance detection sensitivity of over 500-fold at picomolar concentration levels compared to that of unlabeled analytes in an ESI-MS system. These MS probes, used together with liquid MS detection, are widely applicable as a convenient method for the highly sensitive detection of less than picomolar levels of analytes, and therefore greatly enhance the power of ESI-MS analysis.     

Invariant ideals of twisted crossed products

We will prove a result concerning the inclusion of non-trivial invariant ideals inside non-trivial ideals of a twisted crossed product. We will also give results concerning the primeness and simplicity of crossed products of twisted actions of locally compact groups on -algebras. Received: 25 January 2002; in final form: 22 May 2002/Published online: 2 December 2002 This work is partially supported by Hong Kong RGC Direct Grant.     

Multi-Item Scheduling by Benders' Decomposition

Scheduling the production of several items requires the determination of production quantities in different periods in the presence of resource constraints. Several approximate and heuristic algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. However, no method for finding an optimal solution has as yet been developed. It is shown that the problem may be solved advantageously using Benders' decomposition. The subproblem in Benders' decomposition is shown to be a transportation problem, and some strategies for solving the master problem are indicated. The paper concludes with a sample problem demonstrating the application of the method.     

An Overview of Scheduling Problems Arising in Satellite Communications

Satellite communications, like batches of work in a job shop, need to be scheduled in order to use their resources as efficiently as possible. The most common satellite communications system in use today is known as Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA), in which data from earth stations is buffered before being transmitted to the appropriate receiver on a satellite. Cycles of transmission are fixed for all stations. Since the same satellite will be used for routeing data in several different ways, a schedule must be devised to use the receivers, repeaters and transmitters on board to minimize the time needed for completion of a batch of work. This paper is a survey of current scheduling algorithms used for optimizing satellite communications resources. Apart from telecommunications, the methods presented here could be applied to more general scheduling problems with renewable resources but without precedence constraints.