Introduction to Nietzsche on Mind and Nature

This chapter provides summaries of the chapter of this book and introduces the major themes and debates addressed in the volume. Discussed are Nietzsche’s metaphysics; his philosophy of mind in light of contemporary views; the question of panpsychism of Beyond Good and Evil 36; the rejection of dualism in favour of monism, in particular a monism of value; Nietzsche’s positions on consciousness and embodied cognition in light of recent cognitive science; a conception of freedom and agency based on an intrinsically motivating; embodied sense of self-efficacy; a Nietzschean account of valuing understood as drive-induced affective orientations of which an agent approves; the idea of ressentiment conceived as a process of intentional, not reflectively strategic, self-deception about one’s own conscious mental states; and a defence of a Nietzschean naturalism

Design of a Prototype Machine to Automate Satellite Wire Harness Assembly

Wire harness construction is a frequent source of delays in the satellite assembly process, due to a high rate of human error in the harness assembly process. While automated assembly could reduce the error rate and increase production efficiency, manipulation of wires with established robotic assembly methods is difficult because of their flexibility. This project introduces a novel machine to automate wire harness assembly by adopting a design similar to that of existing cartesian 3D printers, circumventing problems faced by established automation methods. The machine can rout wire onto a flat wire harness template and can cut and process up to eight different types of wire simultaneously, all without human interaction. This report details the conceptualization and design of such a machine, as well as the current assembly and validation status of the existing prototype. Although the prototype is incomplete at the closing of the 2020 MDP project cycle, it is concluded that the team’s current approach shows promise in successfully automating wire harness assembly and should be explored and refined further in future efforts.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169574/1/Honors_Capstone_Wire_Harness_Automation_yuankail.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169574/2/Honors_Capstone_NGWire_presentation_yuankail.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169574/3/yuankail_capstone_video.mp

Relaxation and derelaxation of pure and hydrogenated amorphous silicon during thermal annealing experiments

The structural relaxation of pure amorphous silicon (a-Si) and hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) materials, that occurs during thermal annealing experiments, has been analysed by Raman spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry. Unlike a-Si, the heat evolved from a-Si:H cannot be explained by relaxation of the Si-Si network strain, but it reveals a derelaxation of the bond angle strain. Since the state of relaxation after annealing is very similar for pure and hydrogenated materials, our results give strong experimental support to the predicted configurational gap between a-Si and crystalline silicon.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 1 table to be published in Applied Physics Letter

Changes in the capacity of visual working memory in 5- to 10-year-olds

Using the Luck and Vogel change detection paradigm, we sought to investigate the capacity of visual working memory in 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds. We found that performance on the task improved significantly with age and also obtained evidence that the capacity of visual working memory approximately doubles between 5 and 10 years of age, where it reaches adult levels of approximately three to four items

Can the crystallization rate be independent from the crystallization enthalpy? The case of amorphous silicon

The crystallization enthalpy measured in a large series of amorphous silicon (a-Si) materials varies within a factor of 2 from sample to sample (Kail et al 2011 Phys. Status Solidi RRL 5 361). According to the classical theory of nucleation, this variation should produce large differences in the crystallization kinetics leading to crystallization temperatures and activation energies exceeding 550 C and 1.7 eV, respectively, the ‘standard’ values measured for a-Si obtained by self-implantation. In contrast, the observed crystallization kinetics is very similar for all the samples studied and has no correlation with the crystallization enthalpy. This discrepancy has led us to propose that crystallization in a-Si begins in microscopic domains that are almost identical in all samples, independently of their crystallization enthalpy. Probably the existence of microscopic inhomogeneities also plays a crucial role in the crystallization kinetics of other amorphous materials and glasses