07. Richard Richards is a Gay Scientist

A little recognized and under-appreciated fact about the august Richard Richards is that he is a gay scientist. I know what you may be thinking—Richard’s never shagged dudes, and if he has, it’s shitty to out him in an essay that’s meant to honor him. That’s strictly his business. Or you may be thinking that that Richard identifies as a philosopher, not a physicist, biologist, or even (egads!) a psychologist. As far as I know, you would be right in both cases—and it would be terrible to call him out--despite the fact that this will hardly rise to the level of an essay. No, what I mean is that Richard Richards practices the sort of approach to philosophy that Nietzsche prescribes in The Gay Science. Now, I won’t pretend to know fuckall about Nietzsche—but that’s okay because there are roughly 7,500 budding philosophy majors lurking in coffee shops, craft breweries, and organic grocery stores around the country who’ve got him figured out and would be delighted to expound on my ignorance. If you are genuinely curious about whether I’ve got Nietzsche right, ask one of them. Or read some Nietzsche. In any case, I’m not entirely convinced that getting philosophers “right” is the point; rather, good philosophers plunder brilliant ideas from better philosophers or scientists, looting those concepts for their own ends–just ask Schopenhauer—and I think Richard might agree with this (c.f., his devotion to Provine and incongruity theory). [excerpt

Embeddings into outer models

We explore the possibilities for elementary embeddings $j : M \to N$, where $M$ and $N$ are models of ZFC with the same ordinals, $M \subseteq N$, and $N$ has access to large pieces of $j$. We construct commuting systems of such maps between countable transitive models that are isomorphic to various canonical linear and partial orders, including the real line $\mathbb R$

A State Observer Design for Simultaneous Estimation of Charge State and Crossover in Self-Discharging Disproportionation Redox Flow Batteries

This paper presents an augmented state observer design for the simultaneous estimation of charge state and crossover flux in disproportionation redox flow batteries, which exhibits exponential estimation error convergence to a bounded residual set. The crossover flux of vanadium through the porous separator is considered as an unknown function of the battery states, model-approximated as the output of a persistently excited linear system. This parametric model and the simple isothermal lumped parameter model of the battery are combined to form an augmented space state representation suitable for the observer design, which is carried out via Lyapunov stability theory including the error-uncertainty involved in the approximation of the crossover flux. The observer gain is calculated by solving a polytopic linear matrix inequality problem via convex optimization. The performance of this design is evaluated with a laboratory flow battery prototype undergoing self-discharge.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1903.0407

Intake at the out-patient department of the Washingtonian Hospital as shown in twenty-seven cases

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Jackson, Mississippi, Contested: The Allied Struggle for Civil Rights and Human Dignity

Utilizing monthly reports and correspondence of civil rights organizations, in addition to newspaper coverage, oral histories; and memoirs, this study shows that a grassroots, community-driven movement mobilized in Mississippi\u27s capital to challenge institutionalized discrimination. Yet, racial identity did not dictate exclusively how White and Black Mississippians responded to the unfolding Civil Rights Movement. Conflicting and shifting motivations shaped the nature, extent, and pace by which Blacks and Whites challenged or protected status quo discrimination. The Jackson Movement began as early as 1955 and sustained protest activity into the 1960s. By the summer of 1965, Jackson\u27s Black community secured most of its original demands for nondiscriminatory service and employment, but competing socioeconomic interests increasingly limited the pace of further social change in Jackson and in the broader Mississippi Movement

ProCD, Inc. v. Zeindenberg: An Emerging Trend in Shrinkwrap Licensing?

The author discusses the implications of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit\u27s decision in ProCD, Inc. v. Zeindenberg. As Monroe explains, until this decision, the courts have been reluctant to uphold the legal consequences of shrinkwrap licenses. Monroe provides an analysis of the interplay between contract law and copyright law to provide a thorough understanding of this emerging trend in intellectual property

Modeling And Control For Robotic Assistants: Single And Multi-Robot Manipulation

As advances are made in robotic hardware, the complexity of tasks they are capable of performing also increases. One goal of modern robotics is to introduce robotic platforms that require very little augmentation of their environments to be effective and robust. Therefore the challenge for a roboticist is to develop algorithms and control strategies that leverage knowledge of the task while retaining the ability to be adaptive, adjusting to perturbations in the environment and task assumptions. This work considers approaches to these challenges in the context of a wet-lab robotic assistant. The tasks considered are cooperative transport with limited communication between team members, and robot-assisted rapid experiment preparation requiring pouring reagents from open containers useful for research and development scientists. For cooperative transport, robots must be able to plan collision-free trajectories and agree on a final destination to minimize internal forces on the carried load. Robot teammates are considered, where robots must reach consensus to minimize internal forces. The case of a human leader, and robot follower is then considered, where robots must use non-verbal information to estimate the human leader\u27s intended pose for the carried load. For experiment preparation, the robot must pour precisely from open containers with known fluid in a single attempt. Two scenarios examined are when the geometries of the pouring and receiving containers and behaviors are known, and when the pourer must be approximated. An analytical solution is presented for a given geometry in the first instance. In the second instance, a combination of online system identification and leveraging of model priors is used to achieve the precision-pour in a single attempt with considerations for long-term robot deployment. The main contributions of this work are considerations and implementations for making robots capable of performing complex tasks with an emphasis on combining model-based and data-driven approaches for best performance