Weathering Heights: The Emergence of Aeronautical Meteorology as an Infrastructural Science

The first half of the 20th century was an era of weathering heights. As the development of powered flight made the free atmosphere militarily and economically relevant, meteorologists encountered new kinds of weather conditions at altitude. Pilots also learned to weather heights, as they struggled to survive in an atmosphere that revealed surprising dangers like squall lines, fog, icing, and turbulence. Aeronautical meteorology evolved out of these encounters, a heterogeneous body of knowledge that included guidelines for routing aircraft, networks for observing the upper air using scientific instruments, and procedures for synthesizing those observations into weather forecasts designed for pilots. As meteorologists worked to make the skies safe for aircraft, they remade their science around the physics of the free atmosphere. The dissertation tracks a small group of Scandinavian meteorologists, the “Bergen School,” who came to be the dominant force in world meteorology by forecasting for Arctic exploration flights, designing airline weather services, and training thousands of military weather officers during World War II. After the war, some of these military meteorologists invented the TV weather report (now the most widely consumed genre of popular science) by combining the narrative of the pre-fight weather briefing with the visual style of comic-illustrated training manuals. The dissertation argues that aeronautical meteorology is representative of what I call the “infrastructural sciences,” a set of organizationally intensive, purposefully invisible, applied sciences. These sciences enable the reliable operation of large technological systems by integrating theory-derived knowledge with routine environmental observation. The dissertation articulates a set of characteristics for identifying and understanding infrastructural science, and then argues that these culturally modest technical practices play a pervasive role in maintaining industrial lifeways. It concludes by noting that while meteorology successfully helped aviation become a reliable, taken-for-granted part of the transportation system, the interests of aviation created a meteorology that centered on the needs of pilots, to the detriment of fields like agricultural climatology

Christ the Redeemer and the Best of All Possibly Created Worlds: Using Alvin Plantinga\u27s \u27O Felix Culpa\u27 Theodicy as a Response to William Rowe\u27s \u27Can God be Free?\u27 and the Underlying Evidential Argument From Evil

In his The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism, William Rowe famously argues that there are no God justifying goods that we know of that can excuse God\u27s allowing the very many widespread evils and horrors there are in our world. I argue that this forms the backbone of his 2004 volume entitled Can God be Free? in which he posits two further arguments: (1) God must create the best of necessity and is thereby not free and so not praiseworthy, and (2) God cannot create a best world (since there is no best) and so always does less than the best He can and is therefore morally culpable (and so, surpassable). What is more, even if God could have created a best world, Rowe finds it obvious that the actual world is not the best God could have done in creating a world since it includes such things as the Holocaust and other rampant evils and horrors. The intent of this thesis, then, is to argue three things: (1) that God is free in a significant way to create (or refrain from creating) and is thereby worthy of our praise, (2) that there is no world-creating ethic to which God is beholden, and (3) that there is at least one God justifying good in the world that we do know of, namely, the incomparably great good of the divine incarnation and atoning work of Jesus the Christ. Following Alvin Plantinga\u27s argument from his Supralapsarianism, or `O Felix Culpa\u27 it is argued herein that there is no possible world that is of a greater value than a world that includes the divine incarnation and atoning work of the Divine Son. On this model, then, evil and suffering must exist because if they did not, then Jesus and His work would be unnecessary, and without these things there would be no best type of creatable world. In pitting Plantinga\u27s theodical arguments against Rowe\u27s latest contribution, we will see that God has done what Professor Rowe has wished all along: He has freely created a best of all possibly created worlds

In Defense of the Direct Argument for Incompatibilism

Is moral responsibility compatible with the truth of causal determinism? One of the most influential arguments that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism is the so-called ‘Direct Argument,’ developed by Peter van Inwagen in his An Essay on Free Will. Informally put, the Direct Argument goes as follows: If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But we are not responsible for what went on before we were born, and neither are we responsible for what the laws of nature are. Therefore, we are not responsible for the consequences of these things (including our present acts). The Direct Argument is highly significant. If it is successful, we have an argument for incompatibilism about responsibility and determinism that does not make use of two controversial claims typically invoked by incompatibilists: (i) a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise, and (ii) if the person’s action is causally determined, then she could not have done otherwise. Since compatibilists typically deny one or the other of these claims, the Direct Argument offers an intriguing way to argue for incompatibilism about responsibility and determinism that sidesteps many of the traditional battlegrounds between compatibilists and incompatibilists. The Direct Argument relies on two rules of inference, both of which have been questioned by the Argument’s opponents. In my dissertation, I defend the Direct Argument from some of the most pressing recent attacks against these rules. But, there is a further objection, an objection called the No Past Objection, that I argue successfully undermines the Direct Argument. So, I go on to revise the Direct Argument in light of the No Past Objection, and I do so in a way gets around this objection without sacrificing the Argument’s inference rules, or the spirit of its metaphysical assumptions. The result, what I call the Direct Argument*, is a successful argument for incompatibilism about moral responsibility and causal determinism

Classroom assistants in primary schools: Employment and deployment

The study investigates the ways in which classroom assistants in primary schools are deployed in classrooms, and the terms and conditions under which they are employed. The number of classroom assistants in primary schools has grown considerably in recent years, but very little is known about their work. Despite this, government policy is paying increasing attention to their potential to contribute to raising standards of achievement. The study aimed to understand the range of practices which govern the employment of classroom assistants, and the range of ways in which they are deployed in classrooms. The study sought to understand the factors that determine employment practices and patterns of deployment, and the way in which these are interrelated. The study contributes to the growing debate on professional and para-professional roles in primary schools. The study uses a combination of large sample survey and small scale case study methodology. In the first phase, policy and practice in three LEAs were explored through semi-structured interviews with key informants among LEA staff and representatives of trade unions and professional associations. In the second phase, questionnaires were sent to a large sample of schools in these three LEAs for completion by the head teacher, a classroom assistant and a teacher. The returns from LEA 3 were very low and therefore not included in this phase. Finally, three schools in LEA 1 and two schools in LEA 2 were chosen for in-depth case studies, drawing data from non-participant observation and semi-structured interviews with school staff

Shining a spotlight on small rural businesses: How does their performance compare with urban?

Rural enterprises play an important economic role, contributing to national prosperity and wellbeing but are often a blind spot within rural development and wider economic policies and evidence. This paper presents an urban-rural analysis of a large scale survey of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). It applies Propensity Score Matching to allow for an assessment of the effects of rurality on business performance. Results show that England's rural firms have similar levels of turnover to their urban counterparts, but are more likely to report a profit. The analysis also reveals rural firms to be significantly stronger exporters of goods and services and to have goods or services suitable for exporting. However, there are some weaknesses and obstacles to business success that concern significantly more rural than urban firms, that vary with the rurality of local districts, and which require the attention of policy makers and support providers seeking to achieve spatially-balanced and more equitable economic development

Truth and Moral Responsibility

Most philosophers who study moral responsibility have done so in isolation of the concept of truth. Here, I show that thinking about the nature of truth has profound consequences for discussions of moral responsibility. In particular, by focusing on the very trivial nature of truth—that truth depends on the world and not the other way around—we can see that widely accepted counterexamples to one of the most influential incompatibilist arguments can be shown not only to be false, but also impossible