Literature and the construction of reality

In this article I consider the idea that Glasersfeld’s “radical constructivism” offers an ideal framework for putting in place such a reality of the best fit for us. Along with this, I examine also the fundamental biological and epistemological limitations that we are faced with when trying to fathom objective reality and, secondly, the inescapable gap between language – which we use as a primary cognitive tool in our attempt to comprehend the world. The paper then show that literature – especially fiction – best meets the criteria for addressing these gaps and constructing such a model of reality in line with what radical constructivism proposes

Jorge Luis Borges and the Nothingness of the Self

In this paper I discuss how Borges uses his ideas on selfhood to explore the “central problem of literature” that Andre Maurois highlighted and how in the process projects to the reader his idea of reality. I argue also that the self that Borges tries to present in his work may nevertheless not be always congruent with the self he may have wanted to convey. This is because his quest is influenced by a number of factors, not least the fact that the self-creation process is affected by our interplay with the external world

Time and the observer in Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges displays an ambivalence in his writings towards the reality of time’s flow. On the one hand, he seems to accept arguments from various thinkers refuting the reality of time. “And yet, and yet…” Borges appears unable to feel completely reconciled to such a view of time. I argue that this is because a view that refutes time denies the observer too along with it. I conclude with demonstrating how Borges, by trying to identify a reconciliation between a refutation of time and acknowledgment of its reality, addressed this problem

A Disdain for the Discrete: How Art Transcends Logic and Language

In this essay I argue that art is able to open a new window on to reality only when art can transcend reason and the confines of language. Moreover, both logic and language have their limitations when used as tools for the creation of meaning and that art helps us overcome these inadequacies in the way it transcends — or even transgresses — the absolutes that underpin our “rational” view of the world. Lastly, the violation of the strictures of logic by art is also emblematic of art’s heightened awareness of certain unique features of reality — in particular, its dynamic and fluid nature — which are not normally readily visible to a mind tied to thinking in terms only of binary truth values

The Exile of Pessoa & Camus

Poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) described himself as someone who is an “exile from the country of which he had always considered himself a citizen…” Is it apposite to associate exile with someone who — apart from spending nine years in South Africa during his youth — essentially never stirred out of his native Portugal? This essay examines this question by comparing Pessoa to another famous exile, Albert Camus

A Structural Health Monitoring Concept on Ultrasonic Based Assessment of Aged Structures with Isotropic and Anisotropic Material Properties

Ultrasound is a technique widely applied in classical NDT where a lot of progress has been made in terms of signal processing, resolution, visualisation, and possibly more. With the introduction of the phased array technique, advanced computation and sensor signal processing also the characterisation of anisotropic materials has been facilitated. In par-allel SHM has emerged as a field of research very much looking into the automation of NDT in view of taking enhanced advantage of an engineering structure’s damage toler-ance and hence light weight potential. Ultrasonic guided waves are a field very much explored currently within the context of SHM and as such it is worth to determine what of the guided wave related techniques developed in NDT may be inheritable for SHM applications. Reverse Phase Matching (RPM) referred to anisotropic material properties and ray tracing are an interesting combination to be pursued in terms of finding an opti-mum sensor configuration for SHM through numerical simulation based on FEM, allowing to take better advantage of a polymer based composite materials potential such as CFRP by taking advantage of those materials’ inherent non-linear responses. The approach to be taken is illustrated with respect to an example, explaining on how to assess an ageing CFRP component in terms of its damage condition and an SHM system to be configured in the end. Finally a systematic is presented on how knowledge generated in NDT can be linked into a ‘SHM-toolbox’ to be used for the advancement of SHM systems to be de-veloped in the longer term.Ultraschall ist eine in der klassischen zerstörungsfreien Prüfung (ZfP) weit verbreitete Technik, bei der vielfältig Fortschritte hinsichtlich Signalverarbeitung, Auflösungsvermö-gen, Visualisierung und vermutlich weiterer Dinge erzielt wurden. Mit der Einführung des Phased Array sowie fortgeschrittener Rechner- und Signalverarbeitungstechnik ist auch die Charakterisierung anisotroper Werkstoffe erleichtert worden. Parallel dazu hat sich das Gebiet der Zustandsüberwachung (Structural Health Monitoring (SHM)) als For-schungsfeld entwickelt, dies im Hinblick auf die Automatisierung der ZfP und der erwei-terten Nutzung des Potenzials der Schadenstoleranz bzw. des Leichtbaus von Bauteilen. Geführte Wellen auf der Basis des Ultraschalls sind im Bereich des SHM ein derzeit breit untersuchtes Forschungsfeld und es ist somit wert zu ermitteln, inwieweit sich auf ge-führte Wellen beziehende Techniken aus der ZfP auf SHM-Anwendungen übertragen werden können. Reverse Phase Matching (RPM) in Verbindung mit anisotropen Werk-stoffeigenschaften und Ray Tracing sind eine in diesem Sinne interessante, sich fügende und verfolgungswerte Kombination, um möglicherweise über die Betrachtung inhärenter nicht-linearer Werkstoffantworten auf der Basis einer numerischen Simulation (FEM) ein optimales Sensornetzwerk für SHM zu bestimmen, womit das Potenzial eines Faserver-bundwerkstoffs wie CFK besser genutzt werden kann. Ein hierzu gewählter Ansatz wird am Beispiel einer gealterten CFK-Struktur im Hinblick auf deren Schädigungszustand er-läutert, für den dann diesbezüglich am Ende ein SHM-System konfiguriert werden kann. Abschließend wird eine Systematik vorgestellt, über die in der ZfP generiertes Wissen mit einem ‘SHM-Werkzeugkasten’ so verknüpft wird, dass längerfristig eine Weiterentwick-lung von SHM-Systemen ermöglicht wird

Development of the fabrication process and characterization of piezoelectric BaTiO3/epoxy composite used for coated ultrasonic transducer patterns in structural health monitoring

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is based on integrating and/or adapting a sensor system into a structure such that a tolerable damage to occur can be monitored. This requires a network of transducers specifically when this SHM approach is considered as a monitoring system such as based on guided waves. A desirable solution would be to get a transducer network simply ‘printed’ on the structure considered once the network has been designed such as through a simulation approach. In the paper proposed the fabrication process and characterization of a piezoelectric composite to be used as an ultrasonic transducer for damage sensing of structures based on SHM using guided waves is first considered. The composite consists of piezoelectric BaTiO3 particles homogenously distributed in an epoxy resin matrix. A paste with a solid volume fraction of up to 50 vol% was prepared by the direct mechanical mixing of the piezoelectric particles in the epoxy matrix. Due to the ferroelectric properties of BaTiO3 the polarization of the composite is required with a high electric field prior to use. Two electrodes placed on both sides of the samples are required to measure the dielectric and electromechanical properties of the composite in the form of a thick film. The influence of the volume fraction of BaTiO3 on the dialectic properties and piezoelectric transversal constant (d33) of the piezoelectric composite will be shown. Beyond this more materials processing related work performance of those transducers will be demonstrated. This will be done in terms of getting those coated as a transducer pattern/network on a hosting structure after having had the transducer network determined through simulation. Validation of the approach will be done by looking at the transducer network’s performance in terms of detecting guided acoustic waves

An unusual presentation of extra-hepatic portal venous obstruction

A 13-year-old girl presented with short duration of fever, left upper abdominal pain and massive tender splenomegaly. There was noevidence of liver dysfunction or significant history. Evaluation revealed multiple splenic infarcts with portal vein thrombosis. Shedeveloped splenic abscess and was managed conservatively with percutaneous drainage and antibiotics

Can LLMs Augment Low-Resource Reading Comprehension Datasets? Opportunities and Challenges

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive zero shot performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, demonstrating the ability to reason and apply commonsense. A relevant application is to use them for creating high quality synthetic datasets for downstream tasks. In this work, we probe whether GPT-4 can be used to augment existing extractive reading comprehension datasets. Automating data annotation processes has the potential to save large amounts of time, money and effort that goes into manually labelling datasets. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of GPT-4 as a replacement for human annotators for low resource reading comprehension tasks, by comparing performance after fine tuning, and the cost associated with annotation. This work serves to be the first analysis of LLMs as synthetic data augmenters for QA systems, highlighting the unique opportunities and challenges. Additionally, we release augmented versions of low resource datasets, that will allow the research community to create further benchmarks for evaluation of generated datasets.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, 3 table

SteBLife, a New Approach for the Accelerated Generation of Metallic Materials’ Fatigue Data

The service life of materials and components exposed to repeated mechanical loads is limited, which is why the understanding of the damage evolution and estimating its fatigue life is of high importance for its technical application. This paper shows how temperature and magnetic field measurement methods can be used to describe the cyclic deformation behaviour of metallic materials and to derive parameters from this, which are used in short-term methods to calculate the fatigue life. Within the SteBLife (stepped-bar fatigue life) approach, only three to five fatigue tests with a stepped fatigue specimen are required to determine a complete S–N or Woehler curve with scatter bands for different failure probabilities. If only a trend S–N curve is required, the number of tests can be reduced to a single fatigue test only. In the framework of this paper, these approaches will be presented for normalised SAE 1045 (C45E) and quenched and tempered SAE 4140 (42CrMo4) steels