Neurons and Narratives: Living in a Wittgensteinian World

My thesis explores the running narratives that are present within the mind, prodding at whether or not there is any significant difference between this consciousness and a fictional narrative that we read in a book. Within this exploration I look into the implications behind being conveyed as a linguistic construct and the inherent constricting violence that is present in the symbolization that is language. Following this analysis, I provide a Nietzschean reading of the ethical implications that we face if we are to take the notion of violent language seriously and how we as people are to meet and react to this moral imperative

Multiculturalism and the State: Globalization, National Protection, and the Role of Social Policy in Québec and Canada

This dissertation is an historical comparative examination of economic globalization (i.e., global market integration) effects on state political economic capacities in Québec and Canada. The central goal of the project is to understand how global market integration has altered the policy capacities of state institutions. Specifically, this dissertation examines Canadian multiculturalism and Québec interculturalism as social policy responses to ethno-cultural diversification resulting from increased global market integration. I argue that increased global market integration decreases state capacity to enact economic protections, but not the demand for protections from national populations. The result of these changes (ethno-cultural diversification and decreased economic policy capacity) is a shift in social policy capacity toward control and management of national cultural definitions, symbols, and structures of meaning. That is, as state capacity to meet national protectionist demands through economic policy decreases as a result of global market integration, the state must seek out alternative means of meeting national protectionist demands. These means are found in the management and control of national culture. The dissertation further concludes that this political re-orientation enables national populations to increases their relative power with respect to the state. This has placed the state in a precarious position between the powerful demands of global market proponents and the increasingly powerful demands of national populations for protections from the adverse affects of market integration

In Vivo Evaluation of the Secure Opportunistic Schemes Middleware using a Delay Tolerant Social Network

Over the past decade, online social networks (OSNs) such as Twitter and Facebook have thrived and experienced rapid growth to over 1 billion users. A major evolution would be to leverage the characteristics of OSNs to evaluate the effectiveness of the many routing schemes developed by the research community in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we showcase the Secure Opportunistic Schemes (SOS) middleware which allows different routing schemes to be easily implemented relieving the burden of security and connection establishment. The feasibility of creating a delay tolerant social network is demonstrated by using SOS to power AlleyOop Social, a secure delay tolerant networking research platform that serves as a real-life mobile social networking application for iOS devices. SOS and AlleyOop Social allow users to interact, publish messages, and discover others that share common interests in an intermittent network using Bluetooth, peer-to-peer WiFi, and infrastructure WiFi.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted in ICDCS 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1702.0565

Rods are less fragile than spheres: Structural relaxation in dense liquids composed of anisotropic particles

We perform extensive molecular dynamics simulations of dense liquids composed of bidisperse dimer- and ellipse-shaped particles in 2D that interact via repulsive contact forces. We measure the structural relaxation times obtained from the long-time decay of the self-part of the intermediate scattering function for the translational and rotational degrees of freedom (DOF) as a function of packing fraction \phi, temperature T, and aspect ratio \alpha. We are able to collapse the \phi and T-dependent structural relaxation times for disks, and dimers and ellipses over a wide range of \alpha, onto a universal scaling function {\cal F}_{\pm}(|\phi-\phi_0|,T,\alpha), which is similar to that employed in previous studies of dense liquids composed of purely repulsive spherical particles in 3D. {\cal F_{\pm}} for both the translational and rotational DOF are characterized by the \alpha-dependent scaling exponents \mu and \delta and packing fraction \phi_0(\alpha) that signals the crossover in the scaling form {\cal F}_{\pm} from hard-particle dynamics to super-Arrhenius behavior for each aspect ratio. We find that the fragility at \phi_0, m(\phi_0), decreases monotonically with increasing aspect ratio for both ellipses and dimers. Moreover, the results for the slow dynamics of dense liquids composed of dimer- and ellipse-shaped particles are qualitatively the same, despite the fact that zero-temperature static packings of dimers are isostatic, while static packings of ellipses are hypostatic.Comment: 10 pages, 17 figures, and 1 tabl

Dimensionality reduction for hand-independent dexterous robotic grasping

In this paper, we build upon recent advances in neuroscience research which have shown that control of the human hand during grasping is dominated by movement in a configuration space of highly reduced dimensionality. We extend this concept to robotic hands and show how a similar dimensionality reduction can be defined for a number of different hand models. This framework can be used to derive planning algorithms that produce stable grasps even for highly complex hand designs. Furthermore, it offers a unified approach for controlling different hands, even if the kinematic structures of the models are significantly different. We illustrate these concepts by building a comprehensive grasp planner that can be used on a large variety of robotic hands under various constraints

Reversible plasticity in amorphous materials

A fundamental assumption in our understanding of material rheology is that when microscopic deformations are reversible, the material responds elastically to external loads. Plasticity, i.e. dissipative and irreversible macroscopic changes in a material, is assumed to be the consequence of irreversible microscopic events. Here we show direct evidence for reversible plastic events at the microscopic scale in both experiments and simulations of two-dimensional foam. In the simulations, we demonstrate a link between reversible plastic rearrangement events and pathways in the potential energy landscape of the system. These findings represent a fundamental change in our understanding of materials--microscopic reversibility does not necessarily imply elasticity.Comment: Revised pape

When Do Robots Have Free Will? Exploring the Relationships between (Attributions of) Consciousness and Free Will

While philosophers and scientists sometimes suggest (or take for granted) that consciousness is an essential condition for free will and moral responsibility, there is surprisingly little discussion of why consciousness (and what sorts of conscious experience) is important. We discuss some of the proposals that have been offered. We then discuss our studies using descriptions of humanoid robots to explore people’s attributions of free will and responsibility, of various kinds of conscious sensations and emotions, and of reasoning capacities, and examine the relationships between these attributions. Our initial results suggest that people’s attributions of free will are strongly influenced by their attributions of conscious emotions, such as happiness and disappointment, including Strawsonian emotions, such as pride and regret. These results provide some support for an intriguing proposal: Free will requires the capacity to make decisions that really matter to the agent, and for anything to really matter to the agent, she must be able to consciously experience the good and bad effects of the decisions she makes—to suffer and regret, or to enjoy and feel proud of, their outcomes

Electronic Spectrum of Dihydrogenated Buckminsterfullerene in a 6 K Neon Matrix

Vibrationally resolved electronic absorption spectrum of 1,2-dihydrogenated[60]fullerene has been recorded in a 6 K neon matrix after mass-selected deposition of m/z = 722 cations produced from reaction of protonated methane and C60 in an ion source. One system has the origin band at 688.5 ± 0.1 nm and another commencing at 404.8 ± 0.1 nm. Theoretical computations were used to calculate the relative energies of three isomers of dihydrogenated[60]fullerene and time-dependent density functional theory predicted the vertical excitations to 50 electronic states

The Columbia Grasp Database

Collecting grasp data for learning and benchmarking purposes is very expensive. It would be helpful to have a standard database of graspable objects, along with a set of stable grasps for each object, but no such database exists. In this work we show how to automate the construction of a database consisting of several hands, thousands of objects, and hundreds of thousands of grasps. Using this database, we demonstrate a novel grasp planning algorithm that exploits geometric similarity between a 3D model and the objects in the database to synthesize form closure grasps. Our contributions are this algorithm, and the database itself, which we are releasing to the community as a tool for both grasp planning and benchmarking

Protein translocation:what’s the problem?

We came together in Leeds to commemorate and celebrate the life and achievements of Prof. Stephen Baldwin. For many years we, together with Sheena Radford and Roman Tuma (colleagues also of the University of Leeds), have worked together on the problem of protein translocation through the essential and ubiquitous Sec system. Inspired and helped by Steve we may finally be making progress. My seminar described our latest hypothesis for the molecular mechanism of protein translocation, supported by results collected in Bristol and Leeds on the tractable bacterial secretion process–commonly known as the Sec system; work that will be published elsewhere. Below is a description of the alternative and contested models for protein translocation that we all have been contemplating for many years. This review will consider their pros and cons