Nietzsche’s polychrome exemplarism

In this paper, I develop an account of Nietzschean exemplarism. Drawing on my previous work, I argue that an agent’s instincts and other drives constitute her psychological type. In this framework, a drive counts as a virtue to the extent that it is well-calibrated with the rest of the agent’s psychic economy and meets with sentiments of approbation from the agent’s community. Different virtues are fitting for different types, and different types elicit different discrete emotions in people with fine-tuned affective sensitivity, making Nietzsche’s exemplarism doubly pluralistic. Exemplars show us how a type is expressed in different social and cultural contexts. Some live up to the full potential of their type, while others are stymied and demonstrate how pernicious influences can wreck a person’s psychology. While some exemplars inspire admiration that leads to emulation, others elicit a range of other emotions, such as envy, contempt, and disgust. If this is right, then Nietzschean exemplarism offers a richer, more evaluatively and motivationally nuanced moral psychology than the monochrome admire-and-emulate model currently popular

Multi-timescale analysis of fatigue crack growth on interfaces via cohesive-zone models

The paper describes a new non-linear finite-element formulation to analyse fatigue debonding or delamination, along predefined interfaces, which is multi-scale in time. At the small timescale level, cyclic loading and the related oscillating response are considered in an explicit way, whereas at the large timescale level, both the real loading actions and the related response in terms of displacement and stress fields are replaced with minimum and maximum functions over the time of the analysis, which also implies doubling the degrees of freedom of the finite-element model. A cohesive-zone model capable of simulating sub-critical damage growth and hysteretic local response is used on the interface. With a conventional cycle-by-cycle incremental procedure, the analysis would require a number of increments significantly higher than the number of cycles, and would be therefore unfeasible for most industrial applications. Instead, with the developed multi-timescale method, the cycle-by-cycle time integration is transferred from the structural level to the local, integration-point level, whereby the time step can be, and in fact should better be, much larger than the period of the applied actions. The consequent significant saving in terms of computational cost largely offsets the shortcoming of having to double the degrees of freedom of the model and makes the analysis not only feasible but relatively inexpensive in many cases, while retaining excellent accuracy as showed by the presented numerical results. © 2014 Taylor and Francis

An analytical insight into the buckling paradox for circular cylindrical shells under axial and lateral loading

A large number of authors in the past have concluded that the flow theory of plasticity tends to overestimate significantly the buckling load for many problems of plates and shells in the plastic range, while the deformation theory generally provides much more accurate predictions and is consequently used in practical applications. Following previous numerical studies by the same authors focused on axially compressed cylinders, the present work presents an analytical investigation which comprises the broader and different case of nonproportional loading. The analytical results are discussed and compared with experimental and numerical findings and the reason for the apparent discrepancy on the basis of the so-called “buckling paradox” appears once again to lay in the overconstrained kinematics on the basis of the analytical and numerical approaches present in the literature

Promise for the Future: How Federal Programs Can Improve Career Outcomes for Youth & Young Adults with Serious Mental Health Conditions

This report focuses on a critical area of mental health policy – how to assist youth and young adults with serious mental health conditions with improved prospects for successful independent living and economic security through education, job training and community services and supports. It identifies and discusses the array of federal programs that can be deployed to help these individuals through the transition into adulthood; includes recommendations on how state and local policymakers can make the best use of these programs; and suggests changes that should be made to make them more accessible and more effective

Negative Epistemic Exemplars

In this chapter, we address the roles that exemplars might play in a comprehensive response to epistemic injustice. Fricker defines epistemic injustices as harms people suffer specifically in their capacity as (potential) knowers. We focus on testimonial epistemic injustice, which occurs when someone’s assertoric speech acts are systematically met with either too little or too much credence by a biased audience. Fricker recommends a virtue­theoretic response: people who do not suffer from biases should try to maintain their disposition towards naive testimonial justice, and those who find themselves already biased should cultivate corrective testimonial justice by systematically adjusting their credence in testimony up or down depending on whether they are hearing from someone whom they may be biased against or in favor of. We doubt that the prominent admiration­emulation model of exemplarism will be much use in this connection, so we propose two ways of learning from negative exemplars to better conduct one’s epistemic affairs. In the admiration­emulation model, both the identification of what a virtue is and the cultivation of virtues identified thusly proceed through the admiration of virtuous exemplars. We show that this model has serious flaws and argue for two alternatives: the envy­agonism model and the ambivalence­avoidance model

A novel rate-dependent cohesive-zone model combining damage and visco-elasticity

This is the author’s post-print version of a work that was accepted for publication in Computers & Structures. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication.The published paper is available from the link below.This paper presents a novel rate-dependent cohesive-zone model combining damage and visco-elasticity and based on two fundamental assumptions. Firstly we postulate the existence of an intrinsic (i.e. rate-independent) fracture energy. Secondly, within a thermodynamically consistent damage-mechanics framework we assume that the evolution of the damage variable is related to the current free energy and to the intrinsic fracture energy. The underlying idea is that the energy of the bonds at the micro-level is rate-independent and that the rate-dependence of the overall dissipated energy during crack propagation is a natural by-product of the visco-elastic dissipation lumped on the zero-thickness interface. Quite good agreement within an expected range of loading rates was obtained between numerical and experimental results for a DCB specimen with steel arms bonded through a rubber interface. This is despite the fact that for this application the model has been kept as simple as possible using a quadratic elastic energy and linear visco-elasticity with one relaxation time only. Therefore, the presented results support the fundamental principles behind the proposed approach and indicate that the model has the potential to be refined into a highly accurate tool of analysis based on sound physical arguments.EPSR

Tax Competition in EU implies EMTR different: some effects on FDI and Economic Growth Rate

Tax base mobility in a globalised economy implies that tax policy influences savings, domestic investments and inter-jurisdictional capital mobility. Assuming the existence of spatial and temporal interdependence, using: a data set of EU countries, after the capital market liberalisation, and a longitudinal data technique for pooling time series of cross section; we test how difference in national tax influence capital inflows and outflows. More, using a cointegration analysis on GDP procapita and FDI time series’, we investigate the link between these two paths.Tax Competition, FDI, Economic Growth, Cointegration analysis

Nudges and other moral technologies in the context of power: Assigning and accepting responsibility

Strawson argues that we should understand moral responsibility in terms of our practices of holding responsible and taking responsibility. The former covers what is commonly referred to as backward-looking responsibility , while the latter covers what is commonly referred to as forward-looking responsibility . We consider new technologies and interventions that facilitate assignment of responsibility. Assigning responsibility is best understood as the second- or third-personal analogue of taking responsibility. It establishes forward-looking responsibility. But unlike taking responsibility, it establishes forward-looking responsibility in someone else. When such assignments are accepted, they function in such a way that those to whom responsibility has been assigned face the same obligations and are susceptible to the same reactive attitudes as someone who takes responsibility. One family of interventions interests us in particular: nudges. We contend that many instances of nudging tacitly assign responsibility to nudgees for actions, values, and relationships that they might not otherwise have taken responsibility for. To the extent that nudgees tacitly accept such assignments, they become responsible for upholding norms that would otherwise have fallen under the purview of other actors. While this may be empowering in some cases, it can also function in such a way that it burdens people with more responsibility that they can (reasonably be expected to) manage

Reduction of gear pair transmission error with tooth profile modification

The gear noise problem that widely occurs in power transmission systems is typically characterised by one or more high amplitude acoustic signals. The noise originates from the vibration of the gear pair system caused by transmission error excitation that arises from tooth profile errors, misalignment and tooth deflections. This paper aims to further research the effect of tooth profile modifications on the transmission error of gear pairs. A spur gear pair was modelled using finite elements, and the gear mesh was simulated and analysed under static conditions. The results obtained were used to study the effect of intentional tooth profile modifications on the transmission error of the gear pair. A detailed parametric study, involving development of an optimisation algorithm to design the tooth modifications, was performed to quantify the changes in the transmission error as a function of tooth profile modification parameters as compared to an unmodified gear pair baseline

A thermodynamically consistent derivation of a frictional-damage cohesive-zone model with different mode i and mode II fracture energies

The present paper deals with the derivation of an interface model characterized by macroscopic fracture energies which are different in modes I and II, the macroscopic fracture energy being the total energy dissipated per unit of fracture area. It is first shown that thermo-dynamical consistency for a model governed by a single damage variable, combined with the choice of employing an equivalent relative displacement and of a linear softening in the stress-relative displacement law, leads to the coincidence of fracture energies in modes I and II. To retrieve the experimental evidence of a greater fracture energy in mode II, a micro-structured geometry is considered at the typical point of the interface where a Representative Interface Element (RIE) characterized by a periodic arrangement of distinct inclined planes is introduced. The interaction within each of these surfaces is governed by a coupled damage-friction law. A sensitivity analysis of the correlation between micromechanical parameters and the numerically computed single-point microstructural response in mode II is reported. An assessment of the capability of the model in predicting different mixed mode fracture energies is carried out both at the single microstructural interface point level and with a structural example. For the latter a double cantilever beam with uneven bending moments has been analyzed and numerical results are compared with experimental data reported in the literature for different values of mode mixity. © 2014 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved