History, Law, and Justice: Empirical Method and Conceptual Confusion in the History of Law

This Article draws on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Ulpian’s definition of law, and Aristotle’s definition of the polis in order to improve our understanding of the relationship between history, law, and justice. It makes three points. First, real progress can be made by taking one’s instruction from Wittgenstein’s lifelong attempt to banish meaninglessness from thought and speech. He has far more to offer than has been recognized to date. Second, historians of law deceive themselves if they believe that they can write the history of law without writing the history of justice at one and the same time. Law and justice are thoroughly intertwined. Their intertwinement constitutes their meaning. Treating one of them in isolation from the other impairs the meaning of both. Third, writing the history of law means making a commitment to a political community by settling disagreements with the dead. It furnishes a kind of knowledge that is essential for maintaining justice because it gives a meaning to “law,” “justice, ” and “politics ” without which law, justice, and politics fall to the judgment of the dead or that of arbitrary rulers. It does not consist of writing about justice, but of making judgments in writing about the history of law. It is neither to be confused with expressions of opinion nor with statements of pure fact: not expressions of opinion, because it requires statements of fact; not statements of pure fact, because there are no facts to state without agreement in the judgments that make a political community

Context-specificity in facial cues of leadership

Facial cues can have context-contingent effects on leadership judgments, with dominant-looking individuals judged as better leaders in wartime than peacetime contexts and trustworthy-looking individuals judged as better leaders in peacetime than wartime contexts. To further explore this issue participants rated faces for dominance, trustworthiness, attractiveness, effectiveness as leader of a country during wartime or peacetime, and effectiveness as leader of a company manufacturing cars or clothing. Principal component analysis of potential leaders’ characteristics that predicted leadership judgments in prior research produced three components, reflecting general positive regard, dominance, and height, respectively. Perceived dominance and actual height positively predicted leadership judgments in a wartime context but not in a peacetime context. Positive regard positively predicted leadership judgments in a peacetime context, but not in a wartime context. Similar patterns of results were observed for leadership judgments in car manufacturing and clothing-manufacturing contexts. Together, these results present further evidence for context-contingent effects of facial cues on hypothetical leadership judgments

Third-party kinship recognition

Research into third party kinship recognition has been sparse even though kinship provides crucial insight into the biological underpinnings of pro-social and sexual behaviour. Furthermore, the studies that have been conducted are of varying quality and consistency, resulting in a myriad of different findings and conclusions. My doctoral research addressed the common issues in the literature by conducting studies using high quality stimuli, a consistent methodology and appropriate analyses. Study 1 investigated what facial information is used for making kinship judgments in 3D facial images, specifically the contribution of face shape and surface reflectance information (e.g., skin texture, tone, eye and eyebrow colour). Using binomial logistic mixed models, we found that participants were able to detect relatedness at levels above chance for all three stimulus versions. Overall, both individual shape and surface reflectance information contribute to kinship detection, and both cues are optimally combined when presented together. Study 2 investigated whether a smiling facial expression increases the accuracy of judging relatedness compared to a neutral facial expression in human raters. Contrary to expectations, smiling decreased the accuracy of relatedness judgments compared to a neutral facial expression. Study 3 aimed to replicate previous studies suggesting that birth order affects kinship detection ability. Our findings indicate that laterborns do not have an advantage in detecting child sibling pairs and that kinship judgment accuracy is therefore unaffected by rater birth order. Study 4 compared the performance of participants across three commonly used methods (i.e., kinship judgment, similarity rating, matching paradigm), using the same highly-controlled stimulus set. We found that while responses on all three tasks were correlated, performance varied significantly across the tasks. Furthermore, when looking at the effect sex and age of the portrayed individuals had on performance, we found that different results are found dependent on which method is used

Gesture and force sensing based on dielectric elastomers for intelligent gloves in the digital production

Due to recent progress in human-machine interaction the development of interfaces ensuring a safe collaboration between handling devices and workers is gaining in importance and impact to the industry field. For an adequate operation, combined sensing and actuation capabilities are sufficient for interaction units. Smart materials like dielectric elastomers (DEs) are predestinated for integrated multi-functional applications. DEs are lightweight, high energy density and highly stretchable transducers suitable for many different operation areas, like movement tracking, force sensing, haptic feedback and sound generation and can be used to develop highly integrated textile-based user interfaces. This paper shows first results on the development of a novel intelligent glove prototype based on DE elements. The main focus of this investigation lies on DE-based integrated joint angle and force measurement units as well on a cost-efficient and slim sensing electronic. By embedding the resulting system in an Industry 4.0 environment, an adaptive assistance tool can be developed. The resulting system can be used to monitor the desired motion of a worker and to respond with a corresponding haptic feedback, which depends on the specific interaction task. This makes the resulting system a novel, portable assistant tool for industrial environments

Effects of Electrode Materials and Compositions on the Resistance Behavior of Dielectric Elastomer Transducers

Dielectric elastomer (DE) transducers possess various advantages in comparison to alternative actuator technologies, such as, e.g., electromagnetic drive systems. DE can achieve large deformations, high driving frequencies, and are energy efficient. DEs consist of a dielectric membrane sandwiched between conductive electrodes. Electrodes are especially important for performance, as they must maintain high electrical conductivity while being subjected to large stretches. Low electrical resistances allow faster actuation frequencies. Additionally, a rate-independent, monotonic, and hysteresis-free resistance behavior over large elongations enables DEs to be used as resistive deformation sensors, in contrast to the conventional capacitive ones. This paper presents a systematic study on various electrode compositions consisting of different polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and nano-scaled carbon blacks (CB). The experiments show that the electrode resistance depends on the weight ratio of CB to PDMS, and the type of CB used. At low ratios, a high electrical resistance accompanied by a bimodal behavior in the resistance time evolution was observed, when stretching the electrodes cyclic in a triangular manner. This phenomenon decreases with increasing CB ratio. The type of PDMS also influences the resistance characteristics during elongation. Finally, a physical model of the observed phenomenon is presented

Electrode Impact on the Electrical Breakdown of Dielectric Elastomer Thin Films

Dielectric Elastomer Actuators (DEAs) enable the realization of energy-efficient and compact actuator systems. DEAs operate at the kilovolt range with typically microampere-level currents and hence minimize thermal losses in comparison to low voltage/high current actuators such as shape memory alloys or solenoids. The main limiting factor for reaching high energy density in high voltage applications is dielectric breakdown. In previous investigations on silicone-based thin films, we reported that not only do environmental conditions and film parameters such as pre-stretch play an important role but that electrode composition also has a significant impact on the breakdown behavior. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of electrical breakdown on thin silicone films coated with electrodes manufactured by five different methods: screen printing, inkjet printing, pad printing, gold sputtering, and nickel sputtering. For each method, breakdown was studied under environmental conditions ranging from 1 ◦C to 80 ◦C and 10% to 90% relative humidity. The effect of different manufacturing methods was analyzed as was the influence of parameters such as solvents, silicone content, and the particle processing method. The breakdown field increases with increasing temperature and decreases with increasing humidity for all electrode types. The stiffer metal electrodes have a higher breakdown field than the carbon-based electrodes, for which particle size also plays a large role

Preregistered direct replication of "Sick body, vigilant mind: the biological immune system activates the behavioral immune system"

The tendency to attend to and avoid cues to pathogens varies across individuals and contexts. Researchers have proposed that this variation is partially driven by immunological vulnerability to infection, though support for this hypothesis is equivocal. One key piece of evidence (Miller & Maner, 2011) shows that participants who have recently been ill—and hence may have a reduced ability to combat subsequent infection—allocate more attention to faces with infectious-disease cues than do participants who have not recently been ill. The current article describes a direct replication of this study using a sample of 402 individuals from the University of Michigan, the University of Glasgow, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam—more than 4 times the sample size of the original study. No effect of illness recency on attentional bias for disfigured faces emerged. Though it did not support the original finding, this replication provides suggestions for future research on the psychological underpinnings of pathogen avoidance

Design, Manufacturing, and Characterization of Thin, Core-Free, Rolled Dielectric Elastomer Actuators

In this work, we develop a coreless rolled dielectric elastomer actuator (CORDEA) to be used as artificial muscles in soft robotic structures. The new CORDEA concept is based on a 50 µm silicone film with screen-printed electrodes made of carbon black suspended in polydimethylsiloxane. Two printed silicone films are stacked together and then tightly rolled in a spiral-like structure. Readily available off-the-shelf components are used to implement both electrical and mechanical contacts. A novel manufacturing process is developed to enable the production of rolled actuators without a hollow core, with a focus on simplicity and reliability. In this way, actuator systems with high energy density can be effectively achieved. After presenting the design, an experimental evaluation of the CORDEA electromechanical behavior is performed. Finally, actuator experiments in which the CORDEA is pre-loaded with a mass load and subsequently subject to cycling voltage are illustrated, and the resulting performance is discussed