A materialist approach to Heideggerian anxiety

Martin Heidegger’s radical conception of the ‘subject’ as Dasein (the human being, whose essence is Existence) was meant to deconstruct traditional Cartesian conceptions of the subject based purely on consciousness in the name of retrieving a fundamental ontology. For Heidegger, Dasein is the only entity that can grasp primordial Being, which only becomes accessible in a breakdown of the world in anxiety (Angst). Although Heidegger contends that consciousness is irrelevant to Dasein’s experience of anxiety, I argue that consciousness remains crucial to the concept. While this discovery results in what Theodor W. Adorno calls a pseudo-concrete (abstract and individualistic) ontology, I approach anxiety through a materialist lens via Georg Lukács’s social ontology of the proletariat and Herbert Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism to argue that consciousness of social being may emerge out of anxiety, which may lead to revolutionary social action. In doing so, I underscore the emancipatory potential of anxiety

Optical Tweezers as a Micromechanical Tool for Studying Defects in 2D Colloidal Crystals

This paper reports on some new results from the analyses of the video microscopy data obtained in a prior experiment on two-dimensional (2D) colloidal crystals. It was reported previously that optical tweezers can be used to create mono- and di-vacancies in a 2D colloidal crystal. Here we report the results on the creation of a vacancy-interstitial pair, as well as tri-vacancies. It is found that the vacancy-interstitial pair can be long-lived, but they do annihilate each other. The behavior of tri-vacancies is most intriguing, as it fluctuates between a configuration of bound pairs of dislocations and that of a locally amorphous state. The relevance of this observation to the issue of the nature of 2D melting is discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Algorithms for detecting dependencies and rigid subsystems for CAD

Geometric constraint systems underly popular Computer Aided Design soft- ware. Automated approaches for detecting dependencies in a design are critical for developing robust solvers and providing informative user feedback, and we provide algorithms for two types of dependencies. First, we give a pebble game algorithm for detecting generic dependencies. Then, we focus on identifying the "special positions" of a design in which generically independent constraints become dependent. We present combinatorial algorithms for identifying subgraphs associated to factors of a particular polynomial, whose vanishing indicates a special position and resulting dependency. Further factoring in the Grassmann- Cayley algebra may allow a geometric interpretation giving conditions (e.g., "these two lines being parallel cause a dependency") determining the special position.Comment: 37 pages, 14 figures (v2 is an expanded version of an AGD'14 abstract based on v1

The importance of preventive feedback: inference from observations of the stellar masses and metallicities of Milky Way dwarf galaxies

Dwarf galaxies are known to have remarkably low star formation efficiency due to strong feedback. Adopting the dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way as a laboratory, we explore a flexible semi-analytic galaxy formation model to understand how the feedback processes shape the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Using Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo, we exhaustively search a large parameter space of the model and rigorously show that the general wisdom of strong outflows as the primary feedback mechanism cannot simultaneously explain the stellar mass function and the mass--metallicity relation of the Milky Way satellites. An extended model that assumes that a fraction of baryons is prevented from collapsing into low-mass halos in the first place can be accurately constrained to simultaneously reproduce those observations. The inference suggests that two different physical mechanisms are needed to explain the two different data sets. In particular, moderate outflows with weak halo mass dependence are needed to explain the mass--metallicity relation, and prevention of baryons falling into shallow gravitational potentials of low-mass halos (e.g. "pre-heating") is needed to explain the low stellar mass fraction for a given subhalo mass.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

How Demographics Influence Self-Image

When creating psychological research surveys, demographics are typically recorded at the end of the main survey. The reasoning behind psychologists placing demographic questions at the end can be to omit any biases from the participants (Hughes et al., 2016). However, does the placement of these types of questions influence people without them knowing? This research project will answer these questions to find the effects of demographic question placement on participants. Specifically, can demographic question placement prime individuals and their self-rating of attractiveness and the overall impact of demographic placement on survey results? To test this question, this project will conduct two versions of the study to compare self-ratings of overall attractiveness. In version one, individuals will first answer demographic questions, rate the attractiveness of celebrities, and then rate their own attractiveness. In version two, participants will first rate the attractiveness of celebrities, rate their attractiveness, and then answer demographic questions. All ratings will be on a scale of 1-10. After gathering the data, we will compare the overall attractiveness ratings between the two groups to see if there is a meaningful difference. So far, a preliminary study has been done on 120 individuals, mainly Chapman students. Participants primed with their demographics at the beginning rated their attractiveness lower than participants who answered them at the end. In the future, we plan on conducting this study on Prolific to see if this finding applies to the general population. Overall, this research will further our understanding of the impacts of demographic question placement. This is important since many testing formats currently place demographic questions at the beginning. Thus, this research will influence not only how psychologists conduct research, but also how proctors execute standardized testing in classroom settings