Musical Thought And Compositionality

Many philosophers and music theorists have claimed that music is a language, though whether this is meant metaphorically or literally is often unclear. If the claim is meant literally, then it faces serious difficulty—many find it compelling to think that music cannot be a language because it lacks any semantic value. On the other hand, if it is meant metaphorically, then it is not clear what is gained by the metaphor—it is not clear what the metaphor is meant to illuminate. Considering the claim as a metaphor, I take it that what a theorist who speaks in this way is trying to draw our attention to is that there are interesting and illuminating parallels between music and language that might be philosophicallysignificant. Ifthisistheirpoint,thenthequestionis:whatinteresting parallel is it that could be so philosophically significant

Ordinary Monsters: Ethical Criticism and the Lives of Artists

Should we take into account an artist’s personal moral failings when appreciating or evaluating the work? In this essay, I seek to expand Berys Gaut’s account of ethicism by showing how moral judgment of an artist’s private moral actions can figure in one’s overall evaluation of their work. To expand Gaut’s view, I argue that the artist’s personal morality is relevant to our evaluation of their work because we may only come to understand the point of view of the work, and therefore the work’s prescribed attitude, by examining the values, attitudes, and behaviors of the artist. This view is defended against a rival account offered by Bernard Wills and Jason Holt, which holds that the artistic evaluation of an artist’s work is independent from the moral evaluation of their life except in extreme cases

Assessing Rhode Island’s Temporary Caregiver Insurance Act: Insights from a Survey of Employers

This report provides new evidence on Rhode Island’s Temporary Caregiver Insurance (TCI) law, which took effect in January 2014, based on a survey of small and medium-sized businesses in the food services and manufacturing sectors in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts that we carried out in December 2013 (just before the law came into effect) and in January/February 2015 (one year after the law came into effect). We collected information about firm characteristics and productivity, employee life events and work flow, and employer-provided benefits. Comparing Rhode Island employers pre-and post-law to Massachusetts and Connecticut employers over the same time period, we found little evidence of significant impacts of the law on employers (although we note that the sample size for these estimates was small; 104 employers in Rhode Island, and 133 in the other two states combined). We also asked Rhode Island employers directly about their views towards TCI one year after it came into effect and found that a majority of the 213 Rhode Island employers interviewed in 2015 support the new law. Thus, our results suggest that laws like Rhode Island’s TCI may not have significant impacts on small and medium-sized employers and could garner support by such employers once they have experienced them

Hypocrisy as Either Deception or Akrasia

The intuitive, folk concept of hypocrisy is not a unified moral category. While many theorists hold that all cases of hypocrisy involve some form of deception, I argue that this is not the case. Instead, I argue for a disjunctive account of hypocrisy whereby all cases of “hypocrisy” involve either the deceiving of others about the sincerity of an agent's beliefs or the lack of will to carry through with the demands of an agent's sincere beliefs. Thus, all cases of hypocrisy can be described either as cases of deception or as cases of akrasia. If this analysis correct, then I suggest further that the moral status of all instances of hypocrisy must be reduced either to the moral blameworthiness of deception or to the moral blameworthiness of akrasia. There can be no unified account of the moral wrongness of “hypocrisy” that holds across the disjunction

Data-Driven Descriptors for the Thermochemistry of Inorganic Crystalline Solids

The advancement of society has been historically predicated on the discovery or invention of new materials and in particular, inorganic solid-state materials have had transcendent influence on society &ndash; stone for tools, steel for structures, silicon circuits and solar cells, and so forth. Synthesizing a new material is time-consuming, costly, and frustrating for those tasked with the job. The success of solid-state synthesis can be greatly improved if one knows the thermodynamic stability of the material they are trying to make and those they are trying to avoid. This dissertation addresses the prediction of thermodynamic stability for solid-state materials primarily using a branch of quantum chemistry called density functional theory (DFT) and statistical approaches that fall under the umbrella of data analytics and machine learning. We partitioned the pathways of solid-state decomposition into three types to quantify the success of DFT-based approaches for predicting thermodynamic stability in a high-throughput manner. By comparing with experiment, we find that in general, DFT performs quite well. Importantly, when the decomposition pathway type is elucidated for all known inorganic crystals, we find that the type that DFT performs the best on is the most prevalent, supporting the efficacy of DFT-based stability predictions.Still, DFT is computationally expensive and not always practical for a given problem. This motivates the use of data analytics to accelerate the prediction of thermodynamic stability using so-called &ldquo;descriptors&rdquo;. We applied the SISSO (sure independence screening and sparsifying operator) algorithm to identify a new tolerance factor (descriptor) for predicting the experimentally realized stability of perovskites, which are a class of inorganic solids having significant utility as solar absorbers, catalysts, and capacitors.This new tolerance factor was applied to identify new double perovskite solar absorbers in the cesium-chloride chemical space. In doing so, we gain insights into the stability of these materials, point out some pitfalls of common high-throughput approaches, and reveal a number of potential all-inorganic solar absorbers which may become active components in high-efficiency solar cells.Much of the computational materials field is resigned to studying temperature-independent thermodynamics because of the expense of including the effects of vibrational entropy in the solid-state. To address this problem, we again used SISSO, this time to identify a simple descriptor for the Gibbs energy of an arbitrary inorganic crystalline solid. We show how this descriptor can be used for rapid predictions of temperature-dependent stability and thermochemical equilibrium. As a demonstration of the utility of the Gibbs energy descriptor, we used it to screen for active materials that might be able to mediate the conversion of air, water, and sunlight into ammonia using chemical looping. These results provide a detailed thermodynamic analysis of the involved reactions for this process, highlighting the challenging tradeoff between metal oxide and metal nitride stability that must be met for the process to succeed.This work helps reveal the lack of exploration of metal nitride compounds relative to their oxide counterparts. We show that the space of ternary metal nitrides that have been synthesized has the potential to double based on DFT-based stability predictions. We also developed quantitative descriptors for the bonding in metal nitrides to help rationalize their stability and highlight opportunities for synthesizing new nitrides with interesting technological properties.</p

The impacts of paid family and medical leave on worker health, family well-being, and employer outcomes

This article reviews the evidence on the impacts of paid family and medical leave (PFML) policies on workers' health, family well-being, and employer outcomes. While an extensive body of research demonstrates the mostly beneficial effects of PFML taken by new parents on infant, child, and parental health, less is known about its impact on employees who need leave to care for older children, adult family members, or elderly relatives. The evidence on employers is similarly limited but indicates that PFML does not impose major burdens on them. Taken together, the evidence suggests that PFML policies are likely to have important short- and long-term benefits for population health, without generating large costs for employers. At thesame time, further research is needed to understand the effects of different policy parameters (e.g., wage replacement rate and leave duration) and of other types of leave beyond parental leave