Are philosophers functionally integrated enough to socially know?

According to accounts like Alexander Bird’s Minimal Functional Account of social knowledge, various groups like those within the sciences can socially know that , even if no particular individual within that group knows that . Bird’s primary example of a group that has such knowledge is the community of semiconductor physicists – which, as he contends, is sufficiently functionally integrated to satisfy accounts like his own. But, what about specialist communities within philosophy? Do they satisfy accounts like Bird’s own? Should they? As I will suggest in this article, some of them should, but do not appear to do so – at least, as of yet.Peer reviewe

Spirobisindane-based hole transporting materials for conventional and indoor halide perovskite solar cells

Funding: A-WS thanks Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) for funding. GC thanks the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fellowship and the EPSRC for grant (EP/E036244/1). LKJ acknowledges funding from UKRI-FLF through MR/T022094/1.Hole transporting materials (HTMs) are a vital component for both conventional and indoor perovskite solar cells. Spiro-OMeTAD has become one of the most widely studied HTM; however, its high molecular symmetry tends to give rise to nonuniform films that are not conducive to good photovoltaic device stability and large-area processing. Moreover, other issues relating to Spiro-OMeTAD, such as high cost, have spurred investigations into the development of new HTMs. Here, we report two spirobisindane-based HTMs ( AS-135 and AS-179 ) for conventional and indoor perovskite solar cells. The lower symmetry and ability to synthesize from cheap, readily accessible precursors provides obvious advantages over Spiro-OMeTAD. We show that spirobisindane-based HTMs are effective HTMs under both 1 Sun and indoor illumination upon doping with LiTFSi and power conversion efficiency ≈11% were demonstrated under 1 Sun and over 20% under 1000 lx indoor illuminance.Peer reviewe

Introduction

Funding: Funding for this project was provided by the British Academy’s Newton International Fellowship.Although industrial modernization in Eurasia both preceded and outlived the Soviet project, in popular and scholarly imaginations, manufacturing cities located in the continent’s eastern regions are often understood as quintessentially ‘Soviet’. Yet, this perception tends to ignore the ways in which earlier urban developments were integrated with socialist innovations. This special issue seeks to decentre the concept of ‘Soviet urbanism’ by placing socialist forms into a longue durée perspective on industrial modernity and destabilizing popular equations of ‘post-socialism’ with ‘post-industrialism’. The collection’s contributions explore how modernist urbanism has intersected a variety of political and economic regimes over the past century and how evolving industrial processes continue to shape and reconfigure Eurasia’s urban landscapes.Peer reviewe

Central bank asset purchases : theory and practice

Chapter 1 proposes a novel method for modelling the signalling channel of asset purchases, and integrates this with a stylised portfolio balance model. It then proceeds to identify the signalling channel as responsible for 55% of the GDP response to Quantitative Easing (QE) in the UK, with high uncertainty. While the utility impact of each channel is similar, the signalling channel has a more persistent impact on medium-term consumption and investment. Chapter 2 uses as context a rare natural experiment, the 2022 UK gilt crisis, and develops a DSGE model featuring Non-Bank Financial Institutions to replicate the crisis and policy response. Asset purchases restore market functioning, and their temporary nature is crucial to avoiding a trade-off with monetary policy. Repo loans and macroprudential regulation are viable alternative policies. These results show the central bank can ease financial market stress without loosening monetary policy, delivering its two objectives at all times. Chapter 3 incorporates QE into a New Keynesian Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (NK-DSGE) model featuring verlapping Generations (OLG). I find that QE at the ELB is utility-increasing for all ages and cohorts, but the gains are not evenly distributed and depend on the implementation of Quantitative Tightening (QT). With fast QT, the majority of the utility gains accrue to a narrow group aged 60-64, who benefit from both higher wages and wealth effects. With slow QT, most of the gains instead go to younger households via a tighter labour market. In steady state, looser policy benefits younger households at the expense of older households regardless of whether this is implemented through short-term interest rates or through asset purchases

Long-range crossed Andreev reflection in a topological insulator nanowire proximitized by a superconductor

Funding: This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement number 741121; Y.A.) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through Germany’s Excellence Strategy–Cluster of Excellence Matter and Light for Quantum Computing (ML4Q) under grant number EXC 2004/1 - 390534769 (Y.A.) and grant number CRC 1238 - 277146847 (Subprojects A04 and B01; Y.A.). H.F.L. acknowledges support from the Georg H. Endress Foundation.Crossed Andreev reflection is a non-local transport phenomenon that creates and detects Cooper pair correlations between distant locations. It is also the basis of Cooper pair splitting to generate remote entanglement. Although crossed Andreev reflection has been extensively studied in semiconductors proximity-coupled to a superconductor, observing it in a topological insulator has been very difficult. Here we report the observation of this effect in a proximitized topological insulator nanowire. We perform local and non-local conductance spectroscopy on mesoscopic devices in which superconducting niobium and metallic contacts are connected to a bulk-insulating nanowire. In our local conductance measurements we detect a hard gap and the appearance of Andreev bound states that can reach zero bias. We also occasionally observe a negative non-local conductance when sweeping the chemical potential, providing evidence of crossed Andreev reflection. This signal is detected even over length scales much longer than the expected superconducting coherence length of either niobium or the proximitized nanowire. We suggest that this long-range effect is due to the intricate role of disorder in proximitized nanowires.Peer reviewe

Almost sure convergence of cover times for ψ-mixing systems

Funding: The author acknowledges a grant from the Chinese Scholarship Council.Given a topologically transitive system on the unit interval, one can investigate the cover time, that is, the time for an orbit to reach a certain level of resolution in the repeller. We introduce a new notion of dimension, namely the stretched Minkowski dimension, and show that under mixing conditions, the asymptotics of typical cover times are determined by Minkowski dimensions when they are finite, or by stretched Minkowski dimensions otherwise. For application, we show that for countably full-branched affine maps, results using the usual Minkowski dimensions fail to give a finite limit of cover times, whilst the stretched version gives a finite limit. In addition, cover times for irrational rotations are calculated as counterexamples due to the absence of mixing.Peer reviewe

Evaluation and upscaling of impregnated La0.20Sr0.25Ca0.45TiO3 fuel electrodes for solid oxide electrolysis cells

Funding: The authors acknowledge HEXIS AG and the EPSRC grants: EP/L017008/1—“Capital for Great Technologies,” EP/T019298/1—Light Elements Analysis Facility (LEAF), EP/J016454/1—Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Supergen Hub and EP/P024807/1—Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Hub Extension (H2FC SUPERGEN) for financial support.Recent research into Rh and Ce0.80Gd0.20O1.90-impregnated La0.20Sr0.25Ca0.45TiO3 fuel electrodes for solid oxide fuel cells has demonstrated the high-stability of these material sets to a variety of harsh operating conditions at small scales (1 cm2 active area button cells), as well as commercial scales (100 cm2 cells) in short stacks (5 cells) and full micro-combined heat and power systems (60 cells). In this work, the authors present a comprehensive evaluation of the ability of these novel titanate-based materials to function as fuel electrodes in solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOECs). Short-term and durability testing of button cell scale SOECs highlighted the limited stability of lanthanum strontium manganite-based air electrodes, under CO2 and steam electrolysis conditions, with lanthanum strontium cobaltite ferrite-based air electrodes offering improved degradation characteristics. Upscaling of this optimized cell chemistry to a 16 cm2 active area SOEC and testing under CO2, CO2/H2O and H2O electrolysis conditions demonstrated encouraging performance over a period of ∼600 h, with stable co-electrolysis performance at ∼−7.5 A at 1.47 V for the first 100 h.Peer reviewe

Natalie Duddington’s religious translations from Russian : faith in translation

Funding: The author gratefully acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 802437).This article examines translations of religious texts from Russian into English by Natalie Duddington (1886-1972), better known as an assistant to the prolific translator Constance Garnett. I consider ‘religious’ to refer to both spiritual and scriptural texts, given the overlap between religious and secular values in Russian culture. I explore Duddington’s career as a translator from the perspective of her traditionally female habitus (Simeoni, 1998) which dictates Duddington’s “invisibility” (Venuti, 2008). I argue, however, that invisibility is not necessarily imposed on a female translator by the rules of the cultural field in which she operates. Instead, I analyse Duddington’s translatorial hexis (Charlston, 2013) to show that, somewhat counter-intuitively, a translator can choose voluntarily to relinquish her own voice in the process of intercultural mediation, to further her perceived higher spiritual purposes. Duddington contributed to the British cultural field as a translator of Russian religious philosophy and literature, and as an author of her own philosophical works. Through these activities, she did not seek a more privileged position in society or to receive great personal gain. On the contrary, her main objective was to bring British and Russian people closer through shared spiritual wisdom.Peer reviewe

Affect, video games, and postdigital technogenesis in contemporary literary fiction

Abstract redacte

Shear zone folds : structural analysis and interpretation

Funding: This study was funded by the Irvine Bequest of the University of St Andrews, together with the Russell Trust, the Geological Society of London, and the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland.Shear zones and associated folds form an important category of structures that are widely developed in the internal portions of orogenic belts. The analysis of such folds is crucial as they can be used to help determine kinematics, bulk strain and deformation histories of crustal-scale shear zones as well as influencing fluid flow and potential mineralisation. Our case study focuses on a Caledonian shear zone in NW Ireland that is marked by NW-directed crustal thickening (D1) that is followed by a later phase (D2) of SE-directed gravity-driven extensional collapse. We provide a detailed analysis of mesoscopic folds and fabrics formed during this greenschist-facies extension in order to answer some general questions including how to distinguish folds with hinges that initiate parallel to transport versus those folds that have rotated towards shear, the control that larger folds may have upon the geometry and orientation of smaller folds, and the influence that lithology plays in the evolution of shear zone folds. Our study comprises a mixed fold and fabric data set derived from a complex combination of i) flow perturbation folds with hinges that have initiated sub-parallel to transport, ii) sheath folds with hinges that have rotated towards transport during intense progressive shear, and iii) spiral folds with hinges that initiate normal to transport but fail to rotate as they roll and tighten. These mesoscopic folds form across a range of scales with smaller folds forming at a variety of angles, and in some cases transecting larger fold hinges indicating a non-Pumpellyan or incongruous relationship. Competent psammites host more open folds with hinges at higher angles to transport when compared to weaker pelites that contain tighter folds at variable angles to shear. Lithology and scale are therefore critical factors in controlling shear zone folds, with natural data sets commonly dominated by smaller-scale (<10 cm) folds that are more prevalent and easier to measure at outcrop. A consequence of this bias in recording data is that the amount of fold rotation (and hence bulk strain) may be over-estimated. A further complication is that fold pairs preserve more open upper hinges compared to tighter lower hinges that are closer to underlying detachments, meaning that the exact position of the hinge within fold pairs should be routinely recorded. The flattening of buckle fold hinges within competent psammites reflects the influence of gravity-driven deformation with an absolute sense of top-down-to the SE shear, which we interpret as being focussed into the shear zone during orogenic collapse.Peer reviewe