70,719 research outputs found

    Electric Transmission Lines and the Environment

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    One of the significant outgrowths of the current interest in environmental questions is the increasing prominence of aesthetics qua aesthetics as a subject for judicial and administrative concern. A major area of litigation, and one which has by its very nature lent itself to an analysis of the significance, and viability, of purely aesthetic issues, has involved high voltage transmission lines

    Experimental Philosophical Aesthetics as Public Philosophy

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    Experimental philosophy offers an alternative mode of engagement for public philosophy, in which the public can play a participatory role. We organized two public events on the aesthetics of coffee that explored this alternative mode of engagement. The first event focuses on issues surrounding the communication of taste. The second event focuses on issues concerning ethical influences on taste. In this paper, we report back on these two events which explored the possibility of doing experimental philosophical aesthetics as public philosophy. We set the stage by considering the significance and current state of efforts in public philosophy, and by introducing the emerging sub-discipline of experimental philosophical aesthetics. Then, we discuss the research and outreach aspects of the two events on the aesthetics of coffee. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on the prospects and potential pitfalls of experimental philosophy as public philosophy

    The Poetic Dimension of Everyday Aesthetic Appreciation. Perspectives from East-Asian Cultures

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    As Yuriko Saito, one of the main exponents of everyday aesthetics holds, East-Asian cultures have long established a deep link between artistic practices and everyday life, transforming apparently mundane practices such as having a cup o ftea with cakes into a highly ritualized form of art (cha-no-yu) and allowing us to enjoy the fleeting moment. The tea ceremony example is grounded, as this paper aims at showing, on a whole East-Asian worldview (as exemplfieied in Confucianism, Daoism and Zen Buddhism philosophies) whereby aesthetic appreciation is deeply pervaded by a poetic feeling, mainly consisting in the interactive harmony or attunement established with the particular circumstances of one’s own life due precisely to its fleeting and evanescent nature. To accomplish this, savouring and perceiving the uniqueness ingrained in every single human experience, the adequate attitude is the poetic one, due to its holistic and non-discriminative nature. Having as its focus everyday life, or simply put, life as such in its specificity, traditional artistic practices in East-Asia as the arts of the brush, garden design or utilitarian crafts such as pottery, become means of revealing what, due to its closeness, lies hidden in ordinary experience. Utilitarian arts are, in this sense, a priviledged way of conveying this end due precisely to its practical link with ordinary existence, preventing the eventual arousal of a purely formal and detached apprehension. The only coherent way to develop this awareness of the extraordinary in the ordinary, to use Leddy’s expression, is through the main feature of all poetic qualities: indirect allusion and subdued reference so that what is close at hand may shine in a different light. Particularly, in association with Japanese Zen Buddhism, where the rootedness of aesthetics in the ordinary is stronger, it has frequently adopted the form of restraint, contention, reserve, or, as Saito puts it, “insufficiency”. This paper aims at showing with the help of a few examples how this difuse poetic attitude, so prevalent in Traditional East-Asian contexts, is required not only in standardized art practices, but also in a wider aesthetic level of awareness of our ordinary experiences. In order to justify these claims, it will refer first to the ideal of harmony or poetic resonance in Chinese aesthetics and then it will refer to some concrete Japanese aesthetic categories inspired by Zen Buddhism, such as mono-no-aware, sabi, wabi, or yugen

    Landscape, environment and community impacts of nuclear power

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    This paper is the third in a series of 8 that make up the evidence base for SDC report 'The role of nuclear power in a low carbon economy'.This document investigates the landscape impacts of all the processes involved in nuclear power from mining the fuel ore to power transmission lines. Water use, community and employment impacts are also covered.Publisher PD

    Rewriting Modernity

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    This article rereads Paul Virilio, drawing on the distinctionbetween topography and topology to argue a case for Virilio as a rewriter of modernity. Invoking Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of rewriting modernity as an unbroken process of accumulation founded on affective life in “Re-writing Modernity” and “Argumentation and Presentation: The Foundation Crisis,” it enlists topology as a horizontal spatial structure that enables us to rethink space, time,and modernity outside the limits of the “squared horizon,” where the“squared horizon” is viewed as a spatial and textual metaphor for framing perspectives on the past, present, and future. The analysis deconstructs the topography of the “squared horizon” as a relationality in an unfolding continuum, where spaces exist ontologically and where the immaterial forces of the dromospheric and the atmospheric generate a relational and historical connectedness

    Cultural evolution in Vietnam’s early 20th century: a Bayesian networks analysis of Franco-Chinese house designs

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    The study of cultural evolution has taken on an increasingly interdisciplinary and diverse approach in explicating phenomena of cultural transmission and adoptions. Inspired by this computational movement, this study uses Bayesian networks analysis, combining both the frequentist and the Hamiltonian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach, to investigate the highly representative elements in the cultural evolution of a Vietnamese city’s architecture in the early 20th century. With a focus on the façade design of 68 old houses in Hanoi’s Old Quarter (based on 78 data lines extracted from 248 photos), the study argues that it is plausible to look at the aesthetics, architecture, and designs of the house façade to find traces of cultural evolution in Vietnam, which went through more than six decades of French colonization and centuries of sociocultural influence from China. The in-depth technical analysis, though refuting the presumed model on the probabilistic dependency among the variables, yields several results, the most notable of which is the strong influence of Buddhism over the decorations of the house façade. Particularly, in the top 5 networks with the best Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) scores and p\u3c0.05, the variable for decorations (DC) always has a direct probabilistic dependency on the variable B for Buddhism. The paper then checks the robustness of these models using Hamiltonian MCMC method and find the posterior distributions of the models’ coefficients all satisfy the technical requirement. Finally, this study suggests integrating Bayesian statistics in the social sciences in general and for the study of cultural evolution and architectural transformation in particular

    The Aesthetic Turn: Toward a Television Aesthetic (Again)

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    Philosophical Toys as Vectors for Diagrammatic Creation: The Case of The Fragmented Orchestra

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    The central topic of this essay consists into establishing a relation between two dimensions of formation: the conceptual process of creating philo- sophical toys - that is of reelaborating existing philosophical concepts, mainly deriving from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in terms of their potential as ‘operative constructs' - and their parallel redeployment towards the specific problem of analyz- ing a recent transdisciplinary artwork. By means of this strategical shift, theory looses its character of explanation and illustration. Philosophy as toy becomes rather the matter of evaluating the com- plexity of a specific artistic composition in terms of its aesthetic potential. It contributes towards developing meta- stable conditions of mutual resonance between heterogeneous modalities of creation

    WeighstEd

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    The purpose of this design thesis is to outline and describe the design project; WeighstEd. WeighstEd, is a data collection, storage, and analysis system for food waste to help Santa Clara University’s Sustainability Center reach a quantifiable food waste reduction goal of 10% by 2020 by using data to make informed cafeteria changes. The report will outline the entire engineering design process from ideation to manufacture including analysis techniques and benchmark testing. This report will serve as a written documentation of three mechanical engineers Senior Design Project completed at Santa Clara University. WeighstEd will be implemented at on campus events and in the university cafeteria beginning in the 2019-2020 school year
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