APPROACHING THE FISSURE IN BEING: PARMENIDES, SARTRE, PLOTINUS, AND EARLY CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

This essay is a project aimed primarily at mapping certain philosophical and theological ontologies onto psychology; in particular, existential psychology. The existential psychology is strongly inspired by Sartre, and the ontologies which are investigated are those of the pre-Socratic Parmenides, Sartre himself, the Neoplatonist Plotinus, and early Christian representations of the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ as well as the persons of the Trinity. Early (primarily Eastern) Christian doctrines of deification are also treated as significant expressions of a similar, latent existential psychology. The nature of this psychology, brought out by Sartre, is a reaction to tension between conscious and non-conscious being. Consciousness reveals that being can be other to itself: it is the "hole" in the heart of being, as Sartre calls it. I argue that Parmenides regards being as whole and unified in part because he does not or can not find a place for the gap in being which is the nothingness of consciousness. For similar reasons, both Plotinus and Sartre describe conscious being as a denigration of sorts in being. Because of the othering of being to itself in the form of human consciousness, man is always other to himself, and can never fully be what he aims to be. Sartre describes this failed effort as the attempt to become "self-caused," that which can give itself its own essence. It is suggested that Sartre's description of non-conscious being as well as Plotinus' description of the One sometimes appear to contradict themselves insofar as they imply self-causation within non-conscious being, and I argue that this is due to the inability or refusal of either to imagine consciousness as a failed project. Similarly, I argue that the early Trinitarian and Christological controversies of the Christian church as well as some early Christian conceptions of deification (particularly Eastern conceptions) can be seen as representative of attempts to reconcile conscious being with non-conscious being; either in the form of the self-cause or in something approaching it

Finite-time blowup and existence of global positive solutions of a semi-linear SPDE

We consider stochastic equations of the prototype $du(t,x) =(\Delta u(t,x)+u(t,x)^{1+\beta})dt+\kappa u(t,x) dW_{t}$ on a smooth domain $D\subset \mathord{\rm I\mkern-3.6mu R\:}^d$, with Dirichlet boundary condition, where $\beta$, $\kappa$ are positive constants and $\{W_t$, $t\ge0\}$ is a one-dimensional standard Wiener process. We estimate the probability of finite time blowup of positive solutions, as well as the probability of existence of non-trivial positive global solutions

The Power of Contextual Effects in Forensic Anthropology: A Study of Biasability in the Visual Interpretations of Trauma Analysis on Skeletal Remains.(Proceedings of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. February 2013. Volume XIX.)

The potential for contextual information to bias assessments in the forensic sciences has been demonstrated, focusing on the DNA, ballistics, and friction ridge analysis disciplines. This has been discussed in the National Academy of Sciences Report, Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward. However, in many forensic disciplines, such as anthropology, the presence of bias, its impact on objectivity, and how to mitigate its effects is still not fully assessed or appreciated. Effects that may impact the judgment and decision-making of forensic anthropologists need to be measured. No studies have been performed within the discipline assessing possible biasing effects within visual analysis. Biasability potential within forensic anthropology was examined by constructing an experiment that analyzed the effects of external manipulations on judgment and decision-making in visual trauma assessment. This research demonstrates that bias can be detected in the field of forensic anthropology, highlighting the importance of recognizing issues that may influence interpretation during investigation and analysis, as well as the need for further research on how to mitigate these effects

IMPROVING THE PHOTOCATALYTIC ACTIVITY OF TIO2 FOR ENVIRONMENTAL APPLICATIONS: EFFECTS OF DOPING AND OF SURFACE MODIFICATION

Different routes were explored for the solution of the two limiting aspects of TiO2 use in photocatalytic processes, i.e. its large band gap, allowing the exploitation of only a small portion of sunlight, and the fast recombination of photoproduced electron-hole pairs. The attention was first focused on the consequences of noble metal nanoparticles deposition on TiO2, with a systematic study on the photocatalytic performance of commercial TiO2 bearing gold nanoparticles deposited either by so-called deposition-precipitation, with particular attention to the method, either thermal or chemical, employed to reduce the Au(III) precursor into metallic gold, or by photodeposition. Two organic substrates, i.e. the azo dye Acid Red 1 and formic acid, were mainly employed as substrates in photocatalytic oxidative degradation kinetic tests. In order to minimize the major drawback of TiO2 as a photocatalytic material, i.e. its high-energy band gap, sulphur, fluorine and boron were tested as dopants of TiO2. Doped materials prepared by the sol-gel method, containing different nominal dopant amounts and calcined at different temperatures, were systematically investigated in both liquid and gas phase photocatalytic reactions under polychromatic irradiation. Furthermore, the photo-oxidation of acetic acid was also investigated systematically as a function of irradiation wavelength, by collecting so-called action spectra, which represent the most powerful photocatalytic characterization tool to determine the effective wavelength-dependent response and activity of a photocatalyst. The comparison between the shapes of the absorption and the action spectra of the materials allowed one to distinguish between absorption features which are active or inactive in photocatalysis. XPS and EPR analyses gave an essential contribution in order to correlate extra absorption peaks to the chemical composition of doped-TiO2. Finally, the effect of noble metal (Pt and Au) nanoparticles photodeposition on the activity of the best performing doped TiO2 photocatalysts calcined at 700\ub0C was investigated in both energetically down-hill and up-hill reactions, i.e. in formic acid and acetic acid degradation in aqueous suspension and in hydrogen production from methanol/water vapor mixtures. Intriguing synergistic effects of TiO2 doping and of noble metal nanoparticles deposition were observed in both types of reaction

Nonlinear Truss-Based Finite Element Methods for Catenary-Like Structures

This chapter is devoted to an application of a finite element method formulation to forecast the static and mechanical behavior of catenary-like structures subject to general force distributions, whose development was motivated by the need of installing assemblies of containment structures, called log boom lines, upstream a hydroelectric power plant to protect its integrity from the threats that logs carried through the river pose on it. Each log boom is modeled by a tridimensional truss element and the entire lines by assemblages of trusses. While the external forces, modeled with the aid of both simulations from computational fluid dynamics and experiments from a towing tank, originate from both the river stream and the logs that accumulate through the extension of the lines, the internal forces are calculated from classic expressions of solid mechanics; hence, the numerical method imposes equilibrium between them, which ultimately defines the geometry assembly. Verification and validation were performed at both model and prototype scales, and the results corroborated the accuracy of the tool for a series of flow conditions

3D-printed, home-made, UV-LED photoreactor as a simple and economic tool to perform photochemical reactions in high school laboratories

In the paper we present the simple manufacturing of an easy and economical UV-A photoreactor using a desktop 3D printer and its application in chemical transformations. PLA (polylactic acid) was used as inexpensive and not toxic polymer for the 3D printing process, while commercially available decorative ultraviolet LEDs (UV-A) have been employed as a light source. With this device, the photoreduction of benzophenone was performed in high yield and short times, compatible with the duration of a typical laboratory experiment in a high school program