Moral Responsibility Expressivism, Luck, and Revision

In his 1962 paper “Freedom and Resentment, Peter Strawson attempts to reconcile incompatibilism and compatibilism about moral responsibility and determinism. First, I present the error committed by the proponents of both these traditional views, which Strawson diagnoses as the source of their standoff, and the remedy Strawson offers to avoid the conflict. Second, I reconstruct the two arguments Strawson offers for a theory of moral responsibility that is based on his proposed remedy. Third, I present and respond to two proposed problems for the Strawsonian theory: moral luck and revisionism. I conclude with a summary of my defense of Strawsonian “expressivism” about moral responsibility, and offer suggestions for further research

Fire damage to an African White-backed Vulture nest tree

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An Inconvenient Past: Slavery at the Texas Governor’s Mansion

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GIS Modeling of the Prominent Geohazards in Arkansas

The State of Arkansas is prone to numerous geohazards. This thesis is a twofold study of prominent geohazards in Arkansas: the first fold includes a novel triggerless approach for mass wasting susceptibility modeling applied to the Boston Mountains in NW Arkansas, and the second fold is a GIS-based regression modeling of the extreme weather patterns at the state level. Each study fold is presented in this thesis as a separate chapter embracing a published peer-reviewed paper. In the first paper, I have used the analytical hierarchy process to assign preliminary statistical weights to the most cogent variables influencing mass wasting in the central Boston Mountains. These most significant variables are then incorporated in Fuzzy modeling of mass wasting susceptibility within the 1200 km2 study area. For comparison and accuracy assessment, a second model has been established using a conventional weighted overlay (WO) approach. Results indicate that the developed novel approach is superior, with approximately 83% accuracy, to the traditional WO approach that has a marginal success of about 28% accuracy. Road related mass wasting events recorded by the Arkansas Department of Transportation have been used to validate both models. In the second paper, I have conducted a systematically gridded analysis of severe weather events, including tornadoes, derechos, and hail, during 1955-2015. The study examines and statistically determines the most significant explanatory variables contributing to the spatial patterns of severe weather events between 1955 and 2015, consequently it identifies severity indices for the entire state. These weather-related hazards and their associated risk will always abide; therefore, the best defense is employ geospatial technologies to plan for hazard mitigation. The mass wasting model developed in this study contributes pivotal information for identifying zones of high risk along roadways in NW Arkansas, which definitely can be adapted to avoid disastrous road failures. In addition, the weather-related severity indices determined at the state level can profoundly benefit state and federal agencies focused on increasing the availability of public and private storm shelters in previously under-represented zones of high risk. This undoubtedly will save lives from unavoidable catastrophic events across the entire state

Inelastic Rate Coefficients for Collisions of C₆Hˉ with H₂ and He

The recent detection of anions in the interstellar medium has shown that they exist in a variety of astrophysical environments -- circumstellar envelopes, cold dense molecular clouds and star-forming regions. Both radiative and collisional processes contribute to molecular excitation and de-excitation in these regions so that the ‘local thermodynamic equilibrium’ approximation, where collisions cause the gas to behave thermally, is not generally valid. Therefore, along with radiative coefficients, collisional excitation rate coefficients are needed to accurately model the anionic emission from these environments. We focus on the calculation of state-to-state rate coefficients of the C6H- molecule in its ground vibrational state in collisions with para-H2, ortho-H2 and He using new potential energy surfaces. Dynamical calculations for the pure rotational excitation of C6H- were performed for the first 11 rotational levels (up to j1 = 10) using the close-coupling method, while the coupled-states approximation was used to extend the H2 rate coefficients to j1 = 30, where j1 is the angular momentum quantum number of C6H-. State-to-state rate coefficients were obtained for temperatures ranging from 2 to 100 K. The rate coefficients for H2 collisions for Δj1 = −1 transitions are of the order of 10-10 cm3 s-1, a factor of 2 to 3 greater than those of He. Propensity rules are discussed. The collisional excitation rate coefficients produced here impact astrophysical modelling since they are required for obtaining accurate C6H- level populations and line emission for regions that contain anions