Driven vortices in confined geometry: the Corbino disk

The fabrication of artificial pinning structures allows a new generation of experiments which can probe the properties of vortex arrays by forcing them to flow in confined geometries. We discuss the theoretical analysis of such experiments in both flux liquids and flux solids, focusing on the Corbino disk geometry. In the liquid, these experiments can probe the critical behavior near a continuous liquid-glass transition. In the solid, they probe directly the onset of plasticity.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Invited talk presented at M2S-HTSC-VI, Houston, February 200

The Journey of the Mute Frankenstein of Thomas Potter Cooke. Towards a language for a new science

In 1923 at the Royal Theatre English Opera House of London started the journey of the mute Frankenstein of Thomas Potter Cook. On that stage the creature born from the encounter between science and romantic genius definitively lost his voice to progressively assume more and more the appearance of a body that speaks for itself, beyond literary fact, and above all beyond verbal language. If in the novel by Mary Shelley the acquisition of a language is the main tool of identity emancipation for the indefinable 'product' of contemporary scientific culture, on stage the actor Cooke, who played that silent character 365 times, laid the foundations of one of the myths of modernity. The article questions the way in which the creature of Dr. Victor Frankenstein came into the midst of 1820s European popular culture, contributing on the one hand to preparing public imagination for the debate on Darwinism that would take place forty years later; revealing on the other a new fundamental aesthetic perception, because the discoveries of the new sciences (chemistry, physics, physiology, etc.) became a common experience that can be found empirically

Two Varieties of Moral Exemplarism

References to moral exemplars run deep into the history of philosophy, as we find them featured in rather disparate context and approaches which span from virtue ethics to moral perfectionism, from existentialism to moral particularism. In the varied and growing contemporary literature on moral exemplarism, we find a number of options that can be brought down to the two rather broad yet distinctive categories of theoretical and anti-theoretical approaches. In the paper, I showcase and contrast these two varieties by taking the views of Zagzebski and Rorty as representative of, respectively, the reference to exemplars as most perfect beings to aspire to and get guidance from, and the use of them as next yet foreign beings to experiment with and get provocation from. Finally, I will draw some consequences for a conception of moral education hinged on unsettlement and transformation rather than on imitation and reproduction

The European Neighbourhood Policy. Foreign Policy at the EU’s Periphery. ZEI Discussion Papers C158, 2006

The French political scientist, physician, and author Jean-Christophe Rufin once stated that the “democratic civilisation cultivates the delicate privilege to know itself more mortal than all others.”(1) While his depiction of Western democracies as hypochondriacs appears to be somewhat far-reaching at first sight, the statement illustrates precisely one of the most prominent moods currently en vogue all over Europe, a Europe that does not yet seem to have overcome its identity crisis of the fin de millénaire. However widespread this mood might be, its assumptions are all but true. Europe, as one of the figureheads of democracy, has lived through manifold crises during the past decades but has eventually resolved all of them successfully.(2) Despite this strength, the European Union is only slowly adopting a more active international role, by spreading its values and influence piecemeal – but spreading them all the same

Jamesian Liberalism and the Self

Despite he did not write any full-fledge and comprehensive treatise of the kind Thomas Jefferson, Walter Lippman, or John Rawls did, William James is among the great American liberal philosophers. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson before him, and John Dewey and Richard Rorty after him, James was in fact highly skeptical of the opportunity of theorizing upon such matter – and much else –, mostly because of his wider distrust of top-down, idealized approaches in philosophical and political matters alike. As a consequence, and consistently with the pragmatist line he was part of, throughout his works we find a wealth of bottom-up, non-ideal insights about how to picture and exercise this particular option. In what follows I shall briefly present James’s distinctive understanding of liberalism, highlighting the two key features of it that in my opinion are still very much relevant for us today, placing them in some historical context: namely, the ethical feature of liberalism and its grounding in a conception of the self as contingent and mobil

Unfamiliar habits: James and the ethics and politics of self-experimentation

The article critically surveys William James's understanding of habit in the light of his wider ethical and political concerns, showcasing its import for a contemporary philosophical usage of the term

Building Prediction Models for Dementia: The Need to Account for Interval Censoring and the Competing Risk of Death

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Context. Prediction models for dementia are crucial for informing clinical decision making in older adults. Previous models have used genotype and age to obtain risk scores to determine risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, one of the most common forms of dementia (Desikan et al., 2017). However, previous prediction models do not account for the fact that the time to dementia onset is unknown, lying between the last negative and the first positive dementia diagnosis time (interval censoring). Instead, these models use time to diagnosis, which is greater than or equal to the true dementia onset time. Furthermore, these models do not account for the competing risk of death which is quite frequent among elder adults. Objectives. To develop a prediction model for dementia that accounts for interval censoring and the competing risk of death. To compare the predictions from this model with the predictions from a naïve analysis that ignores interval censoring and the competing risk of death. Methods. We apply the semiparametric sieve maximum likelihood (SML) approach to simultaneously model the cumulative incidence function (CIF) of dementia and death while accounting for interval censoring (Bakoyannis, Yu, & Yiannoutsos, 2017). The SML is implemented using the R package intccr. The CIF curves of dementia are compared for the SML and the naïve approach using a dataset from the Indianapolis Ibadan Dementia Project. Results. The CIF from the SML and the naïve approach illustrated that for healthier individuals at baseline, the naïve approach underestimated the incidence of dementia compared to the SML, as a result of interval censoring. Individuals with a poorer health condition at baseline have a CIF that appears to be overestimated in the naïve approach. This is due to older individuals with poor health conditions having an elevated risk of death. Conclusions. The SML method that accounts for the competing risk of death along with interval censoring should be used for fitting prediction/prognostic models of dementia to inform clinical decision making in older adults. Without controlling for the competing risk of death and interval censoring, the current models can provide invalid predictions of the CIF of dementia