Conference Presentation of Transcendence and Epistemology for the 2005 Centre of Theology and Politics Annual Conference

This paper argues that a Platonistic turn to religion would enable the epistmology of transcendence to ground Western thought in meaningful metaphysics

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationSudden cardiac arrest (SCA) is a leading killer in the United States. A large number of patients experience SCA outside of hospitals where there is an inherent delay in treatment due to slow first response times. In the out-of-hospital setting, ventricular fibrillation (VF)-induced SCA (VF-SCA) is the most common context in which the event manifests. VF leads to chaotic electrical and hence contractile function of the heart resulting in loss of cardiac output causing ischemia. Left untreated, electrical activity rapidly deteriorates, culminating in complete electrical failure or asystole. Survival rates for patients found in asystole are a mere 1%: asystole is a death sentence. Despite the high event and death rates of VF-SCA, little is known concerning the mechanisms of electrical failure. This dissertation represents the first concerted effort to understand the pathophysiology of electrical failure. The work contained herein can be divided into three projects. These projects were conducted in whole animal and isolated whole heart models of VFSCA. The first is a detailed examination of the complex patterns of electrical failure in VF-SCA. I found a highly complex pattern of electrical failure spanning the intra- and interchamber heterogeneities in three-dimensions. Second, I investigated the contributions of two canonical yet untested theories of electrical failure during VF-SCA: hyperkalemia and ATP-sensitive potassium channel (KATP) opening. I reached the surprising conclusion that neither hyperkalemia nor KATP opening-individually or combined-can explain the pattern of electrical failure in VF-SCA. Third, I investigated the effect of increasing metabolic demand on electrical failure during VF-SCA through increased p-adrenergic stimulation and excitation rate. The findings point toward a necessity to reexamine current resuscitation protocols. Specifically, the use of epinephrine (an α-and β-adrenergic agonist) may promote electrical failure during treatment of VF-SCA leading to increased mortality

Laboratory Experimentation and Numerical Modeling to Enhance Drainage in Geotextile Tubes

ABSTRACT Laboratory Experimentation and Numerical Modeling to Enhance Drainage in Geotextile Tubes Jonah G. Tyson Geotextile fabrics are commonly used in the dewatering and filtration of high-water content geomaterials. Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) sludge is a geomaterial and has increasing production volumes in West Virginia. The WVDEP has large sludge storage sites for dewatering and long-term disposal. Currently the AMD is treated then transferred by pumping the material into geobags for long-term disposal in tubular shape geotextile bags that dewater the sludge. The current design of the geobags limit the pathways for the water to filter out due to the quality of the material. This research investigates the geotextile fabrics currently used and explores options to insert internal lateral drains to shorten drainage paths and accelerate dewatering. AMD sludge was collected from the field to determine the current geotextile filtration and dewatering efficiencies with and without polymer additives. Analysis of column filtration tests concluded that a nonwoven geotextile exhibited the highest filtration efficiency (\u3e91%) and a relatively efficient drainage hydraulic conductivity (1.5x10-3 cm/s) for all permutations tested. The influence of polymer dosing on the AMD sludge indicated that for the no-polymer dose condition and a woven geotextile, the sludge hydraulic conductivity stabilized at 3x10-4 cm/s after approximately 50 hrs but had a filtration efficiency of 75 % particle retention. In contrast, the 20 ppm cation polymer dosed sludge exhibited a hydraulic conductivity at 3x10-5 cm/s within 150 hrs and a filtration efficiency of 91%. The polymer dosed sludge is preferred for minimizing solids pass through for environmental permit compliance. Field in situ moisture and total solids percentage testing was performed on several AMD sludge filled geobags. Results indicated that dewatering trends are not consistent between bags and there was no clear placement location or position for installing internal lateral drains to enhance drainage

New and Old Tests of Cosmological Models and Evolution of Galaxies

We describe the classical cosmological tests, such as the Log$N$-Log$S$, redshift-magnitude and angular diameter tests, and propose some new tests of the evolution of galaxies and the universe. Most analyses of these tests treat the problem in terms of a luminosity function and its evolution which can lead to incorrect conclusions when dealing with high redshift sources. We develop a proper treatment in three parts. In the first part we describe these tests based on the isophotal values of the quantities such as flux, size or surface brightness. We show the shortcomings of the simple point source approximation based solely on the luminosity function and consideration of the flux limit. We emphasize the multivariate nature of the problem and quantify the effects of other selection biases due to the surface brightness and angular size limitations. In these considerations the surface brightness profile plays a critical role. In the second part we show that considerable simplification over the complicated isophotal scheme is achieved if these test are carried out in some sort of metric scheme, for example that suggested by Petrosian (1976). This scheme, however, is limited to well resolved sources. Finally, we describe the new tests, which use the data to a fuller extent than the isophotal or metric based tests, and amount to simply counting the pixels or adding their intensities as a function of the pixel surface brightness, instead of dealing with surface brightness, sizes and fluxes of individual galaxies. We show that the data analysis and its comparison with the theoretical models of the distributions and evolution of galaxies has the simplicity of the metric test and utilizes the data more fully than the isophotal test.Comment: 29 pages including 8 figures. http://www-bigbang.stanford.edu/~vahe/papers/finals/newtest.ps. To appear in ApJ, Oct. 199

LSST optical beam simulator

We describe a camera beam simulator for the LSST which is capable of illuminating a 60mm field at f/1.2 with realistic astronomical scenes, enabling studies of CCD astrometric and photometric performance. The goal is to fully simulate LSST observing, in order to characterize charge transport and other features in the thick fully depleted CCDs and to probe low level systematics under realistic conditions. The automated system simulates the centrally obscured LSST beam and sky scenes, including the spectral shape of the night sky. The doubly telecentric design uses a nearly unit magnification design consisting of a spherical mirror, three BK7 lenses, and one beam-splitter window. To achieve the relatively large field the beam-splitter window is used twice. The motivation for this LSST beam test facility was driven by the need to fully characterize a new generation of thick fully-depleted CCDs, and assess their suitability for the broad range of science which is planned for LSST. Due to the fast beam illumination and the thick silicon design [each pixel is 10 microns wide and over 100 microns deep] at long wavelengths there can be effects of photon transport and charge transport in the high purity silicon. The focal surface covers a field more than sufficient for a 40x40 mm LSST CCD. Delivered optical quality meets design goals, with 50% energy within a 5 micron circle. The tests of CCD performance are briefly described.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Corrigendum: hypoxic induced decrease in oxygen consumption in cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) Is Associated with minor increases in Mantle Octopine but no changes in markers of protein turnover

Corrige o artigo http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/10858 [This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2017.00344.].info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Characterising Usage Patterns and Privacy Risks of a Home Security Camera Service

Home security cameras (HSCs) are becoming increasingly important in protecting people's household property and caring for family members. As an emerging type of home IoT devices, HSCs are distinct from traditional IoT devices in that they are often installed in intimate places, detecting movements constantly. Such close integration with users' daily life may result in distinct user behavioral patterns and privacy concerns. To explore this, we perform a detailed measurement study based on a large-scale service log dataset from a major HSC service provider. Our analysis reveals unique usage patterns of HSCs, including significant wasted uploads, asymmetrical upload and download traffic, skewed user engagement, and limited watching locations. We further identify three types of privacy risks in current HSC services using both passive logs and active measurements. These risks can be exploited by attackers, through observing only the traffic rates of HSCs, to infer the working state of cameras and even the daily activity routine in places where the camera is installed. Moreover, we find the premium users who pay an extra fee are especially vulnerable to such privacy inferences. We propose countermeasures from the perspectives of susceptible users and HSC providers to mitigate the risks

Operator-Schmidt decompositions and the Fourier transform, with applications to the operator-Schmidt numbers of unitaries

The operator-Schmidt decomposition is useful in quantum information theory for quantifying the nonlocality of bipartite unitary operations. We construct a family of unitary operators on C^n tensor C^n whose operator-Schmidt decompositions are computed using the discrete Fourier transform. As a corollary, we produce unitaries on C^3 tensor C^3 with operator-Schmidt number S for every S in {1,...,9}. This corollary was unexpected, since it contradicted reasonable conjectures of Nielsen et al [Phys. Rev. A 67 (2003) 052301] based on intuition from a striking result in the two-qubit case. By the results of Dur, Vidal, and Cirac [Phys. Rev. Lett. 89 (2002) 057901 quant-ph/0112124], who also considered the two-qubit case, our result implies that there are nine equivalence classes of unitaries on C^3 tensor C^3 which are probabilistically interconvertible by (stochastic) local operations and classical communication. As another corollary, a prescription is produced for constructing maximally-entangled operators from biunimodular functions. Reversing tact, we state a generalized operator-Schmidt decomposition of the quantum Fourier transform considered as an operator C^M_1 tensor C^M_2 --> C^N_1 tensor C^N_2, with M_1 x M_2 = N_1 x N_2. This decomposition shows (by Nielsen's bound) that the communication cost of the QFT remains maximal when a net transfer of qudits is permitted. In an appendix, a canonical procedure is given for removing basis-dependence for results and proofs depending on the "magic basis" introduced in [S. Hill and W. Wootters, "Entanglement of a pair of quantum bits," Phys Rev. Lett 78 (1997) 5022-5025, quant-ph/9703041 (and quant-ph/9709029)].Comment: More formal version of my talk at the Simons Conference on Quantum and Reversible Computation at Stony Brook May 31, 2003. The talk slides and audio are available at http://www.physics.sunysb.edu/itp/conf/simons-qcomputation.html. Fixed typos and minor cosmetic