Experiencing the Ineffable

I can recall the first time I learned to take a fish off the hook after catching it. My grandfather and I were fishing in a river near my home in Connecticut, the sun shone off the yellow of a pumpkinseed sunfish\u27s belly. After removing it from the hook, I put it in a five-gallon pail of water. Despite the clarity of the things I do recall, there are those elements of this memory that remain wholly inaccessible to me. I cannot remember whether it was late spring or early autumn, what color my rod was, or if there were already other fish in the bucket. When I try to fill in these details – these missing pieces of an otherwise whole memory – I find myself confronted with a familiar, yet unusual, sensation. As I describe these circumstances and the sensation at hand, I am sure many people can identify with this feeling of near-remembrance. However, there are no words to directly describe this specific sensation; it is what philosophers call a quale, a sensation that can only be known through experience. Experiencing the Ineffable investigates this sensation, and the potential for art to evoke otherwise incommunicable ideas, through a journal-length essay and a body of artwork. The essay examines the sensation at hand, and similar sensations, through a combination of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and aesthetic theory. The body of artwork, composed of 14 photographs, is carefully arranged within a viewing space in an attempt to evoke the same quale that the essay examines

The Impacts Of Airborne Cloud Microphysical Instrumentation Mounting Location On Measurements Made During The Observations Of Aerosols And Clouds And Their Interactions (ORACLES) Project

ORACLES (ObseRvations of Aerosols above CLouds and their intEractionS) was a five-year NASA investigation into the climate impacts of Southern Africa’s biomass burning aerosols. The University of North Dakota, in coordination with the Cooperative Institute for Severe and High-Impact Weather Research and Operations, the University of Oklahoma and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign integrated and operated a suite of in-situ cloud microphysical instrumentation into the NASA P-3 Orion aircraft to study aerosol-cloud interactions within this region. However, during the course of the individual ORACLES campaigns, the accuracy of the cloud microphysical observations were uncertain due to the mounting location of instruments with respect to the aircraft wing. To address these concerns, an additional wing-mounted pylon design was created and was installed moving the instruments ahead of the leading edge of the aircraft wing in order to sample freestream conditions for ORACLES-2017 and ORACLES-2018. To study the impact of mounting location on cloud microphysical observations taken during ORACLES, a computational fluid dynamical analysis of the NASA P-3 Orion with both pylon designs is performed. Utilizing the OpenFOAM software package, a Eulerian-Lagrangian framework is utilized to simulate compressible flow with particle tracking around the aircraft, mounting locations, and instrumentation. Simulations of the predominant ORACLES vertical cloud sampling profiles, known as sawtooths, and multiple environmental factors are considered. Within the simulated Cloud Droplet Probe sample volume, the departure of the velocity field from freestream conditions was found to vary by up to twelve percent during sawtooth maneuvers for the NASA P-3 original pylon design. While the new pylon design did not achieve freestream conditions, it did minimize this distortion in flow caused by the sawtooth maneuvers, with a five percent difference in the departure of the velocity field from freestream between ascent and descent sawtooth profiles. Overall, the original NASA P-3 pylon design observed the closest velocities to freestream conditions across all simulations

Sensitivity Of Two-Dimensional Stereo (2DS) Probe Derived Parameters To Particle Orientation

Information on the size distribution, orientation and the axial ratio of ice particles is important for the improvement of precipitation retrievals by polarized radar. However, uncertainty in the natural particle orientation and axial ratios remains due to the difficulty in obtaining in situ observations of these parameters. This difficulty arises because of possible re-orientation of particles by airflow around aircraft sampling instrumentation. Due to this possible re-orientation, observations of ice particles become a function of the viewing angle of the sampling instrumentation. The two-dimensional stereo (2D-S) optical array probe (OAP) manufactured by SPEC, Inc. offers the capability for comparison between two orthogonal sample volumes (vertical and horizontal) and the determination of whether previously unknown errors in particle image aspect ratio, size distribution and other derived parameters arise due to the viewing angle of imaging instruments. To further understand the effect of particle orientation on OAP measurements, microphysical data collected with the University of North Dakota Citation II research aircraft during the Integrated Precipitation and Hydrology Experiment (IPHEx) and Olympic Mountain Experiment (OLYMPEx) are analyzed. Planar and columnar type ice crystals have been previously shown to fall with their broad face horizontal. However, 2D-S measurements of aspect ratios indicate a preferred vertical orientation of these particles within the sample volume of the instrument. Analysis of the effects of this orientation suggest that planar crystals are under-represented, and under sized, within OAP measurements

Bilateral Tax Treaties and US Foreign Direct Investment Financing Modes

Though it is often claimed that bilateral tax treaties promote foreign direct investment (FDI), previous empirical studies do not support this view. Indeed, the literature provides mixed results where bilateral tax treaties have a positive impact on FDI flows in some studies and a negative impact in other studies. Using US FDI outflows disaggregated into financing modes, equity capital, reinvested earnings, and inter-company debt, we estimate fixed-effects quantile regression models that include controls for new tax treaties, existing treaties (in place prior to the start of the sample period), and the total number of tax treaties a host country has in effect. Results, in general, indicate that both new and existing US bilateral tax treaties are associated with lower FDI outflows to the host country, while the total number of treaties a host country has in place is associated with greater US FDI outflows to the host country. These results also hold for reinvested earnings flows and equity capital flows. For debt flows, however, existing treaties are associated with greater flows, while new treaties and the total number of host treaties show no consistent statistically significant effect

Seeing What We Can\u27t: Evaluating implicit biases in deep learning satellite imagery models trained for poverty prediction

Previous studies have sought to use Convolutional Neural Networks for regional estimation of poverty levels. However, there is limited research into possible implicit biases in deep neural networks in the context of satellite imagery. In this work, we develop a deep learning model to predict the tertile of per-capita asset consumption, trained on satellite imagery and World Bank Living Standards Measurements Study data. Using satellite imagery collected via survey location data as inputs, we use transfer learning to train a VGG-16 Convolutional Neural Network to classify images based on per-capita consumption. The model achieves an $R^2$ of .74, using thousands of observations across Ethiopia, Malawi, and Nigeria. Using a variety of interpretability techniques, our study seeks to qualitatively analyze images to evaluate implicit biases in the model. Our results indicate that roads, urban infrastructure, and coastlines are the three human-interpretable features that have the largest influence on the predicted consumption level for a given image