Naturalism, Evolution and Culture

In my essay, I will argue that evolution does not undermine naturalism. This is because Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism rests on a false and unmotivated premise and is thus invalid. My argument consists of two parts: In the expository part, I outline Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in considerable detail (section 2). In the argumentative part, I firstly pose William Ramsey’s challenge to Plantinga’s probabilistic claim that the reliability of human cognitive faculties is low and critically examine Plantinga’s response in order to reinforce it (section 3). Secondly, I attack Plantinga’s understanding of human evolution, which motivates his cognitive skepticism, as being unduly narrow (section 4)

Evidence of surface loss as ubiquitous limiting damping mechanism in SiN micro- and nanomechanical resonators

Silicon nitride (SiN) micro- and nanomechanical resonators have attracted a lot of attention in various research fields due to their exceptionally high quality factors ($Q$s). Despite their popularity, the origin of the limiting loss mechanisms in these structures has remained controversial. In this paper we propose an analytical model combining acoustic radiation loss with intrinsic loss. The model accurately predicts the resulting mode-dependent $Q$s of a low-stress silicon-rich and a high-stress stoichiometric SiN membrane. The large acoustic mismatch of the low-stress membrane to the substrate seems to minimize radiation loss and $Q$s of higher modes ($n \wedge m \geq 3$) are limited by intrinsic losses. The study of these intrinsic losses in low-stress membranes with varying lengths $L$ and thicknesses $h$ reveals an inverse linear dependence of the intrinsic loss with $h$ for thin resonators independent of $L$. This finding was confirmed by comparing the intrinsic dissipation of arbitrary (membranes, strings, and cantilevers) SiN resonators extracted from literature, suggesting surface loss as ubiquitous damping mechanism in thin SiN resonators with $Q_{surf} = \beta \cdot h$ and $\beta = 6\times10^{10} \pm4\times 10^{10}$~m$^{-1}$. Based on the intrinsic loss the maximal achievable $Q$s and $Q\cdot f$ products for SiN membranes and strings are outlined

The PS-Battles Dataset - an Image Collection for Image Manipulation Detection

The boost of available digital media has led to a significant increase in derivative work. With tools for manipulating objects becoming more and more mature, it can be very difficult to determine whether one piece of media was derived from another one or tampered with. As derivations can be done with malicious intent, there is an urgent need for reliable and easily usable tampering detection methods. However, even media considered semantically untampered by humans might have already undergone compression steps or light post-processing, making automated detection of tampering susceptible to false positives. In this paper, we present the PS-Battles dataset which is gathered from a large community of image manipulation enthusiasts and provides a basis for media derivation and manipulation detection in the visual domain. The dataset consists of 102'028 images grouped into 11'142 subsets, each containing the original image as well as a varying number of manipulated derivatives.Comment: The dataset introduced in this paper can be found on https://github.com/dbisUnibas/PS-Battle

Parton Shower and NLO-Matching uncertainties in Higgs Boson Pair Production

We perform a detailed study of NLO parton shower matching uncertainties in Higgs boson pair production through gluon fusion at the LHC based on a generic and process independent implementation of NLO subtraction and parton shower matching schemes for loop-induced processes in the Sherpa event generator. We take into account the full top-quark mass dependence in the two-loop virtual corrections and compare the results to an effective theory approximation. In the full calculation, our findings suggest large parton shower matching uncertainties that are absent in the effective theory approximation. We observe large uncertainties even in regions of phase space where fixed-order calculations are theoretically well motivated and parton shower effects expected to be small. We compare our results to NLO matched parton shower simulations and analytic resummation results that are available in the literature

Short-term Effects of Shallow Sphagnum Moss Biomass Harvesting on the Runoff Water Quality

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