Hayek And Natural Law: Grounding Social Institutions In Human Action And Morals

Friederich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty provides us with a theory of freedom, one that seeks to minimize coercion in the name of progress. The concept of progress is the grounding for Hayek’s entire theory. It ultimately provides the value of both liberty and those things which derive their value by preserving, promoting, and constituting liberty, such as rights and laws more generally. The problem is that progress is an ill-defined concept because Hayek’s descriptions of it are so vague that it cannot provide any satisfying explanation of why progress itself is desirable and, consequently, why we should promote liberty and rights. My solution to this problem is to present John Finnis’s theory of natural law (as given in Natural Law and Natural Rights) in order to provide explicit content to the idea of progress. Using natural law’s emphasis of basic goods such as life, knowledge, and sociability, I show why progress and its derivatives are, in fact, desirable. In particular, I focus on the problems this lack of grounding presents for rights and how natural law’s focus on practical reason can provide moral principles by which we can distinguish good rights from bad ones

Europe\u27s (Lack of) Welfare Chauvinism: Evidence from Surveys and Spending

Immigration’s effect on European welfare states is complicated. On one hand, increased immigration might undermine social solidarity and impose greater fiscal burdens on redistribution, reducing support for welfare spending. On the other, natives could respond to greater globalization with economic anxiety, increasing support for redistribution in order to mitigate risk. Welfare chauvinism predicts a mixed effect—increased spending for programs that middle-class natives use and reduced spending for programs that benefit immigrants disproportionately. I test this theory by analyzing (1) European attitudes towards immigration and welfare spending and (2) actual spending on these programs, particularly social housing. Additionally, I present a brief case study of France’s immigration/welfare relationship. Despite large increases in immigration, I find no significant increase in welfare chauvinistic attitudes and no systematic relationship between immigration and social spending. This surprising result—which contradicts recent empirical findings—suggests that immigration-based fears about Western European welfare states are overstated

The Effects and Motion of an Air-Filled Cylinder being Submerged in Water in the Axial Direction

Submarines operate on the basis of a difference in relative densities between of vessel and the surrounding fluid. This principle is based on the force balance that exists between the total buoyancy force and the force due to gravity. Previous work focuses on the neutral buoyancy depths and velocities of object that once submerged, their buoyancy force is a constant along with the force due to gravity. This work aims to better understand how the compression of air at various depths below the surface of the water contribute to the neutral buoyancy depth, velocity of the object as it rises, and the velocity of the object as it sinks through a narrow tube (to demonstrate wall effects and viscous drag). An open-ended cylinder composed of aluminum was utilized to model each scenario with the open-end section being submerged each time. By relating theories such as Archimedes Principle, the monometer equation, and the ideal gas law, a relationship for neutral buoyancy as well as velocity as a function of depth and time were determined. It was found that the diameter influences largely the neutral buoyancy depth as well as the velocity at which it rises due to drag forces. When evaluating a sinking cylinder, the drag force was simplified to be equal to the viscous drag between the cylinder and tube wall. Viscosity and the difference and diameter between the cylinder and tube were the large influences on the velocity in this case. Future work will provide experimental validation

Liquor Laws and Constitutional Conventions: A Legal History of the Twenty-first Amendment

In 1933 America decisively ended its ill-fated experiment in national prohibition by enacting the Twenty-first Amendment. This article tells the tale of America’s return to liquor from a legal perspective. It recounts the ebb and flow of the prohibitionist movements in the nineteenth century, the congressional debates over the Twenty-first Amendment, the state laws, popular votes, and constitutional conventions that followed, and the state liquor regulatory systems adopted afterwards. A legal approach to prohibition illuminates intriguing, largely overlooked topics, including the constitutional questions activated by Congress’s unprecedented decision to submit the amendment to state conventions rather than legislatures. It is also a window to one of America’s most democratic moments

Toward an understanding of fundamental mechanisms in transitional and turbulence flow control

Turbulence is an emergent phenomenon found throughout nature and engineering, alike. It plays a vital role in the aquatic locomotion of organisms, scalar mixing, fluid transport, shipping and transportation, and even the flow of biological fluids in the human body. Therefore, it is of utmost importance in both a practical and engineering sense to better understand turbulence with the goal of better controlling it. This dissertation focuses broadly on better understanding the underlying mechanisms behind wall-bounded turbulent flows, with an emphasis on exploiting those mechanisms for turbulence flow control. We developed a numerical simulation to study the effect of slip surfaces on the dynamics of transitional and turbulent flows. Slip surfaces were found to promote the return of a turbulent flow to the laminar state. They also impact the transition to and from turbulence depending upon flow structure. The simulation was extended to study composite drag reduction of slip surfaces and polymer additives. An additive effect was observed due to the distinct drag reduction mechanisms of each individual method. Using simulations and experiments, intermittent dynamics of turbulent flows were investigated which manifest in the form of low-drag events: events described by low levels of skin friction and three-dimensionality. Because these events exhibit desirable traits, they are targets for flow control techniques, and their characterization will hopefully inform more efficient flow control methods. The minimal flow unit (MFU) approach to simulating turbulent flows was first popularized by the seminal 1991 work of Jiménez and Moin. Since then, the technique has become a powerful tool in teasing out underlying mechanisms of turbulent flows due to its ability to resolve the many scales in turbulence. While the technique faithfully captures the dynamics of most flows, there are questions surrounding larger Reynolds numbers. We investigate the efficacy of MFUs in promoting healthy turbulence and show that additional criteria should be put in place when simulating higher Reynolds number flows with MFUs. Adviser: Jae Sung Par

CRISPR/Cas9-based editing of a sensitive transcriptional regulatory element to achieve cell type-specific knockdown of the NEMO scaffold protein

The use of alternative promoters for the cell type-specific expression of a given mRNA/protein is a common cell strategy. NEMO is a scaffold protein required for canonical NF-κB signaling. Transcription of the NEMO gene is primarily controlled by two promoters: one (promoter B) drives NEMO transcription in most cell types and the second (promoter A) is largely responsible for NEMO transcription in liver cells. Herein, we have used a CRISPR/Cas9-based approach to disrupt a core sequence element of promoter B, and this genetic editing essentially eliminates expression of NEMO mRNA and protein in 293T human kidney cells. By cell subcloning, we have isolated targeted 293T cell lines that express no detectable NEMO protein, have defined genomic alterations at promoter B, and do not support canonical NF-κB signaling in response to treatment with tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Nevertheless, non-canonical NF-κB signaling is intact in these NEMO-deficient cells. Expression of ectopic NEMO in the edited cells restores downstream NF-κB signaling in response to TNF. Targeting of the promoter B element does not substantially reduce NEMO expression (from promoter A) in the human SNU-423 liver cancer cell line. We have also used homology directed repair (HDR) to fix the promoter B element in a 293T cell clone. Overall, we have created a strategy for selectively eliminating cell type-specific expression from an alternative promoter and have generated 293T cell lines with a functional knockout of NEMO. The implications of these findings for further studies and for therapeutic approaches to target canonical NF-κB signaling are discussed.GM117350 - National Institutes of Health; CA077474 - National Institutes of HealthPublished versio

On the Comparison of Flow Physics between Minimal and Extended Flow Units in Turbulent Channels

Direct numerical simulations were performed to study the effects of the domain size of a minimal flow unit (MFU) and its inherent periodic boundary conditions on flow physics of a turbulent channel flow in a range of 200 ≤ Reτ ≤ 1000. This was accomplished by comparing turbulent statistics with those computed in sub-domains (SD) of extended domain simulations. The dimensions of the MFU and SD were matched, and SD dynamics were set to minimize artificial periodicities. Streamwise and spanwise dimensions of healthy MFUs were found to increase linearly with Reynolds number. It was also found that both MFU and SD statistics and dynamics were healthy and in good agreement. This suggests that healthy MFU dynamics represent extended-domain dynamics well up to Reτ= 1000, indicating a nearly negligible effect of periodic conditions on MFUs. However, there was a small deviation within the buffer layer for the MFU at Reτ= 200, which manifested in an increased mean velocity and a tail in the Q2 quadrant of the u’-v’ plane. Thus, it should be noted that when considering an MFU domain size, stricter criteria may need to be put in place to ensure healthy turbulent dynamics

Quartet for the End of Time

https://dc.ewu.edu/music_performances/1626/thumbnail.jp

Development of a Robust Setup for the Study of Wetting Characteristics of Low Melting Point Metals

• Energy use is very inefficient • Approx. 60% rejected mostly in the form of waste heat • Low melting point metals are promising for applications in thermal energy management, conversion, and storag