Naturalism, Evolution and Culture

In my essay, I will argue that evolution does not undermine naturalism. This is because Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism rests on a false and unmotivated premise and is thus invalid. My argument consists of two parts: In the expository part, I outline Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in considerable detail (section 2). In the argumentative part, I firstly pose William Ramsey’s challenge to Plantinga’s probabilistic claim that the reliability of human cognitive faculties is low and critically examine Plantinga’s response in order to reinforce it (section 3). Secondly, I attack Plantinga’s understanding of human evolution, which motivates his cognitive skepticism, as being unduly narrow (section 4)

Parton Shower and NLO-Matching uncertainties in Higgs Boson Pair Production

We perform a detailed study of NLO parton shower matching uncertainties in Higgs boson pair production through gluon fusion at the LHC based on a generic and process independent implementation of NLO subtraction and parton shower matching schemes for loop-induced processes in the Sherpa event generator. We take into account the full top-quark mass dependence in the two-loop virtual corrections and compare the results to an effective theory approximation. In the full calculation, our findings suggest large parton shower matching uncertainties that are absent in the effective theory approximation. We observe large uncertainties even in regions of phase space where fixed-order calculations are theoretically well motivated and parton shower effects expected to be small. We compare our results to NLO matched parton shower simulations and analytic resummation results that are available in the literature

Evidence of surface loss as ubiquitous limiting damping mechanism in SiN micro- and nanomechanical resonators

Silicon nitride (SiN) micro- and nanomechanical resonators have attracted a lot of attention in various research fields due to their exceptionally high quality factors ($Q$s). Despite their popularity, the origin of the limiting loss mechanisms in these structures has remained controversial. In this paper we propose an analytical model combining acoustic radiation loss with intrinsic loss. The model accurately predicts the resulting mode-dependent $Q$s of a low-stress silicon-rich and a high-stress stoichiometric SiN membrane. The large acoustic mismatch of the low-stress membrane to the substrate seems to minimize radiation loss and $Q$s of higher modes ($n \wedge m \geq 3$) are limited by intrinsic losses. The study of these intrinsic losses in low-stress membranes with varying lengths $L$ and thicknesses $h$ reveals an inverse linear dependence of the intrinsic loss with $h$ for thin resonators independent of $L$. This finding was confirmed by comparing the intrinsic dissipation of arbitrary (membranes, strings, and cantilevers) SiN resonators extracted from literature, suggesting surface loss as ubiquitous damping mechanism in thin SiN resonators with $Q_{surf} = \beta \cdot h$ and $\beta = 6\times10^{10} \pm4\times 10^{10}$~m$^{-1}$. Based on the intrinsic loss the maximal achievable $Q$s and $Q\cdot f$ products for SiN membranes and strings are outlined

Living with Giuillain-Barre' syndrome

The potential long-term symptoms associated with Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) have been made evident in various studies. The purpose of the current investigation was to explore the meaning of living with GBS in a Maltese community setting following discharge from hospital. The study adopted a Heideggerian phenomenological approach. Four Maltese female participants were identified through purposive sampling, two to four years following their diagnosis. The women had all been treated in the Intensive Therapy Unit (ITU) of a Maltese general hospital at the acute stage of their illness. They were interviewed twice in their own environments. Data analysis led to the identification of three super-ordinate themes, namely Lost at Sea, Propelled into Change and The Aftermath. Participants spoke about the long-term symptoms related to GBS which left them feeling worn out most of the time. Subsequently, they were induced to delegate strenuous everyday roles to others, typically close family members. Participants highlighted a feeling of indebtedness towards their relatives, although at times they also felt ‘suffocated’ due to being over-protected. The women were very grateful for the professional care they received as hospital in-patients. However, when back in the community they felt that health care professionals failed to empathise with their needs. Participants described GBS as a “shot out of the blue” that totally transformed their lives. Although GBS changed their outlook on life, they never gave up hope of having a better future. However in trying to re-integrate themselves in society, they were faced with various environmental obstacles and 'human barriers' that led them to social isolation. A key recommendation of the study is the need for an effective discharge planning programme intended to help these patients make a smooth transition as they return back to the community.peer-reviewe

The PS-Battles Dataset - an Image Collection for Image Manipulation Detection

The boost of available digital media has led to a significant increase in derivative work. With tools for manipulating objects becoming more and more mature, it can be very difficult to determine whether one piece of media was derived from another one or tampered with. As derivations can be done with malicious intent, there is an urgent need for reliable and easily usable tampering detection methods. However, even media considered semantically untampered by humans might have already undergone compression steps or light post-processing, making automated detection of tampering susceptible to false positives. In this paper, we present the PS-Battles dataset which is gathered from a large community of image manipulation enthusiasts and provides a basis for media derivation and manipulation detection in the visual domain. The dataset consists of 102'028 images grouped into 11'142 subsets, each containing the original image as well as a varying number of manipulated derivatives.Comment: The dataset introduced in this paper can be found on https://github.com/dbisUnibas/PS-Battle