Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography

As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception

DEFINITENESS AND PARTICULARITY IN PATENT CLAIMS

To the uninitiated the professional jargon of patents, and particularly of patent claims, is somewhat mystifying even in the most ordinary cases. The profession likes to define the elements of apparatus as means for this, means for that and means for the other. Words like plurality, predetermined and comminuted find remarkably frequent use by patent attorneys. And the habit of using out-of-the-way verbiage may lead the practitioner by force of habit to pass over a simple term like sleeping car in favor of a more elaborate phrase like a communal vehicle for the dormitory accommodation of nocturnal viators. But it does not follow that such literary monstrosities appearing in the definition of the scope of a patent are an imposition on the public or an invasion of the statutory requirement that the inventor shall particularly point out and distinctly claim the part, improvement, or combination which he claims as his invention or discovery

Measuring the Risk of Shortfalls in Air Force Capabilities

The U.S. Air Force seeks to measure and prioritize risk as part of its Capabilities Review and Risk Assessment (CRRA) process. The goal of the CRRA is to identify capability shortfalls, and the risks associated with those shortfalls, to influence future systems acquisition. Many fields, including engineering, medicine and finance, seek to model and measure risks. This research utilizes various risk measurement approaches to propose appropriate risk measures for a military context. Specifically, risk is modeled as a non-negative random variable of severity. Four measures are examined: simple expectation, a risk-value measure, tail conditional expectation, and distorted expectation. Risk measures are subsequently used to weight the objective function coefficients in a system acquisition knapsack problem

The Stability of Thick, Self-Gravitating Disks in Protostellar Systems.

We perform a computational survey of the stability of protostellar systems which contain a self-gravitating disk. The systems are initially represented by a point mass M\sb{c} at the center and a geometrically thick, axisymmetric disk of mass M\sb{d} that supports uniform specific angular momentum and obeys an n = 3/2, polytropic equation of state. The equilibrium disk structure is uniquely defined upon the specification of two key dimensionless system parameters: M\sb{d}/M\sb{c} and $T/\vert W\vert$ (the ratio of rotational kinetic energy of the disk to the gravitational potential energy of the system). The focus of this work is the identification of systems within this two-dimensional parameter space that are marginally unstable toward the development of nonaxisymmetric distortions. The geometric form of the disk\u27s distortion and the likelihood of disk fragmentation as a result of such instabilities is examined with particular attention given to the formation of binary systems. The principal conclusions of this work are: (a) A computer code which results in data that does not require the application of numerical corrections is essential for the identification of marginally unstable models. (b) Models in which the central object is constrained to remain at the center of mass of the system show two principal instabilities, one supplanting the other as the stability of cooler systems is explored. (c) Models in which the central object is allowed to move and interact dynamically with the disk indicate that two new instabilities emerge. These new instabilities arise in disks that appear to be stable when the central object is constrained not to move. The instability occurring in the marginally unstable systems promotes the development of a tightly wound, one-armed spiral perturbation in the disk. (d) Disk fragmentation via the one-armed spiral mode is consistent with observations indicating that binary formation is the principal branch of the stellar formation process