Towards an aesthetic praxis: Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, and the realm of necessity

2020 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis attempts to put the vast works of Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse in conversation with one another. The study begins by examining the way both interpret the relationship between freedom and necessity, the latter of which is rooted most notably in the work of Karl Marx. Following this interpretation of their works I extract two notable ideas to begin building what I refer to as aesthetic praxis. This combination is centered broadly around Arendt's theory of action and Marcuse's theory of the imagination. The mixture of these ideas serves to investigate three corresponding elements of political affairs: 1.) the connection between the inherent unpredictability of political action and the future-oriented consciousness of political actors, 2.) the role of art, action, and aesthetic expression in times of political and social unrest, and 3.) the relationship between human activity, nature, and the growth of consumerism in the modern world. These pressing and often-overlooked areas of political science, I argue, can be better understood through the lens of an aesthetically driven conception of political action, where the dynamism of political activity and the growth of an aesthetic consciousness promote the development of new methods of self-discovery, thus transforming the realm of politics into a more open, connected, and engaged democratic collective

Controlling DC permeability in cast steels

Annealing (at multiple cooling rates) and quenching (with tempering) was performed on specimens of cast steel of varying composition. The aim was to devise a method for selecting the steel with the highest permeability, from any given range of steels, and then increasing the permeability by heat treatment. Metallographic samples were imaged using optical microscopy to show the effect of the applied heat treatments on the microstructure. Commonly cast steels can have DC permeability altered by the careful selection of a heat treatment. Increases of up to 381% were achieved by annealing using a cooling rate of 6.0 °C/min. Annealing was found to cause the carbon present in the steel to migrate from grain boundaries and from within ferrite crystals into adjacent pearlite crystals. The migration of the carbon resulted in less carbon at grain boundaries and within ferrite crystals reducing the number of pinning sites between magnetic domains. This gives rise to a higher permeability. Quenching then tempering was found to cause the formation of small ferrite crystals with the carbon content of the steel predominately held in the martensitic crystal structures. The results show that with any given range of steel compositions the highest baseline DC permeability will be found with the steel that has the highest iron content and the lowest carbon content. For the samples tested in this paper a cooling rate of 4.5 °C/min resulted in the relative permeability of the sample with the highest baseline permeability, AS4, increasing from 783 to 1479 at 0.5 T. This paper shows how heat treatments commonly applied to hypoeutectoid cast steels, to improve their mechanical performance, can be used to also enhance electromagnetic properties of these alloys. The use of cast steels allows the creation of DC components for electrical machines not possible by the widely used method of stacking of electrical grade sheet steels

DECIPHERINGGLUTAMATERGIC NEUROTRANSMITTER SPECIFICATION IN THE ZEBRAFISH SPINAL CORD

The correct specification of neurotransmitter phenotypes is crucial for properly functioning neuronal circuitry. Neurons specify their neurotransmitter phenotypes via transcription factors that they express as they differentiate. Often, transcription factors that specify neurotransmitter phenotypes are expressed in multiple populations with the same neurotransmitter phenotype. Since, the transcription factors that specify this characteristic are not yet known for all spinal cord glutamatergic populations, we identified additional transcription factors expressed at relatively higher levels in glutamatergic neurons compared to inhibitory neurons. We have functionally tested three of these (Lmx1bb, Skor1a and Skor1b) to determine if they are required for correct spinal, glutamatergic phenotypes. We demonstrate that Lmx1b likely maintains a subset of glutamatergicphenotypes in the spinal cord. In lmx1bb mutant embryos, the number of cells that initially express glutamatergic markers are unchanged but become reduced at 36 h and to a greater degree at 48 h. In contrast, we observe no changes in the total number of dI5 or V0v neurons, which express lmx1bb,nor do we detect elevated levels of apoptosis between 36 h and 48 h in lmx1bb mutants. Lastly, we show that at least some of the cells that lose their glutamatergic neurotransmitter phenotype are likely to be V0v cells.Additionally, we demonstrate that skor1a and skor1b are expressed predominantly by glutamatergic spinal interneurons, many of which are V0v neurons. When skor1a and skor1b are knocked-down, we observe a significant reduction in the number of glutamatergic neurons and no change in the number of inhibitory neurons suggesting that these genesmay be required to specify the glutamatergic neurotransmitter phenotype of a subset of spinal neurons. In parallel studies, it was shown that evx1 and evx2, genes expressed exclusively by V0v spinal neurons, are required to specify the V0v glutamatergic phenotype. Interestingly, we show that lmx1bb, skor1a and skor1b require evx1 and evx2 for their expression. In summary, these results suggest that skor1, skor1b and lmx1bb may function downstream of evx1 and evx2 to specify and/ormaintain the glutamatergic neurotransmitter phenotype ofat least a subset of V0v neurons.NAUpstate Medical UniversityNeuroscience and PhysiologyPh

An Examination of the Interactions of Race and Gender on Sentencing Decisions Using a Trichotomous Dependent Variable

This study examined how race, gender, and age interact to affect defendants’ sentences using a trichotomized dependent variable. The findings indicate that the racial and gender disparity found in sentencing decisions was largely due to Black men’s increased likelihood of receiving jail as opposed to probation. The results also show that being young resulted in increased odds of receiving probation over jail for White men and for women but resulted in decreased odds for Black men. Separate analysis of incarceration terms to jail and prison further reveal that legal factors had a greater impact on prison than on jail sentence length. Overall, the results strongly support the argument that sentencing research needs to consider sentences to jail and prison separately