Exhale - Learning to Be Okay

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Contingency and necessity : human agency in Musil's the man without qualities

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Contingency and Necessity: Human Agency in Musil’s The Man Without Qualities

This paper argues that the problem of how to act in the face of radical contingency is of central importance in Musil’s novel and intimately connected to what Musil calls the sense of possibility. There is a variety of different strategies by which individuals, and the state of Kakania as a whole, deal with contingency, and they all involve a claim to a kind of grounding or necessity; for example, the Parallel Campaign is one big attempt to ground Kakania in what can be perceived as a form of metaphysical necessity. With the figure of Ulrich, Musil radicalizes the problem by showing the consequences of viewing even the relationship one has to one’s own self as contingent – the ultimate outcome of which is self-alienation

The Energy Benefits of the Pantograph Wing Mechanism in Flapping Flight: Case Study of a Gull

Bird wings generally contain a 4-bar pantograph mechanism in the forearm that enables the wrist joint to be actuated from the elbow joint thus reducing the number of wing muscles and hence reducing the wing inertia and inertial drag. In this paper we develop a theoretical model of inertial power for flapping flight to estimate the advantage of the 4-bar pantograph mechanism by comparing the inertial power required for the case where wrist muscles are present in the forearm with the case where wrist muscles are not present in the forearm. It is difficult to predict how wrist muscles would look when there is no pantograph mechanism. Therefore a lower bound and upper bound case are defined. The lower bound case involves redistributing the elbow muscles with no increase in wing mass. The upper bound case involves replicating the biceps-triceps muscles near the wrist joint. At minimum power speed the model estimates that the 4-bar pantograph mechanism reduces the inertial power for the gull from between 6.1%-12.3% and reduces the overall power by 0.6%-1.2%. When account is taken of the tight margins involved in the design of a flying vehicle, the energy savings produced by the pantograph mechanism are significant. A ring-billed gull was chosen for the case study and an adult specimen was obtained to gather morphometric data. Lessons for the design of flapping micro air vehicles are discussed

The Effects of Timbering on Plethodon hubrichti over 12 Years

Clearcuts have been shown to adversely affect salamander populations, whereas impacts from milder forms of timbering are more variable. We determined the effects of clearcuts and shelterwood cuts on populations of the Peaks of Otter Salamander (Plethodon hubrichti) using counts of surface active salamanders found during multiple night collections. Sampling was done prior to and then periodically after timbering for 12 yr. Overall, the long-term trends in mean number of P. hubrichti at reference and shelterwood cut sites were not significantly different. In contrast, means at clearcut sites declined 41% during the first year posttimbering and then declined over the next three years to a low of 75% below pretimbering means. The means stabilized at 45% below pre-timbering means for the remainder of the study. Immediately after timbering 41% of the salamanders moved from transects established at the edge of clearcuts to reference transects that were 3–9 m away. Clearcuts had less canopy closure and dead leaf cover than reference and shelterwood cuts which likely degraded habitat for salamanders. Therefore, clearcutting forests is not advisable because of adverse impacts on salamanders, but forms of timbering that retain a portion of the forest canopy may be acceptable if it can be shown that the timbering method does not reduce salamander populations

Higher Homotopies in a Hierarchy of Univalent Universes

For Martin-Lof type theory with a hierarchy U(0): U(1): U(2): ... of univalent universes, we show that U(n) is not an n-type. Our construction also solves the problem of finding a type that strictly has some high truncation level without using higher inductive types. In particular, U(n) is such a type if we restrict it to n-types. We have fully formalized and verified our results within the dependently typed language and proof assistant Agda.Comment: v1: 30 pages, main results and a connectedness construction; v2: 14 pages, only main results, improved presentation, final journal version, ancillary files with electronic appendix; v3: content unchanged, different documentclass reduced the number of pages to 1