This thesis explores some of the ethical issues pertaining to the use of so-called radical enhancement technology. Key concepts analyzed include “normal function”, “human being”, and “personhood.” I argue that the use of these key concepts in the debate thus far has lacked philosophical rigor, and that a reexamination of...
Hume’s division of truth into agreement with matters of fact or relations of ideas casts doubt on our capacity to have moral knowledge, as moral propositions do not seem to fall obviously into either category. This thesis looks at how two views, ‘descriptive moral functionalism’ and ‘moral concept essentialism’, try...
In this thesis, in order to understand why Buddhists in Southeast Asia protect rainforests and to establish a solid foundation for Buddhist environmental ethic, my first two tasks are to draw a clear picture regarding two major environmental concepts--nature and anthropocentrism--in Buddhism and to defend the claims that the Buddhist...
The extended-Lifshitz-Kosevitch formalism (ELK) unifies the treatment of
the de Haas-van Alphen (dHvA) effect, allowing it to transcend its traditional roles
of mapping Fermi surfaces and measuring effective masses. Here we exploit the
capabilities of dHvA as a probe of many-body effects to examine heavy-fermion su-
perconductivity. ELK successfully describes...
The purpose of this study was to compare the changes in the
perception of the university environment that occurred in four selected
.groups of freshmen residence hall students: females residents in
single-sex halls (N = 150), female residents in coeducational halls
(N = 89), male residents in single-sex halls (N...
By implementing a series of mass-conserving nested high-resolution models down to approximately 1 km resolution that have realistic bathymetry, coastline, wind forcing and river run-off, the winter 1996-1997 shelf flow near Cape Mendocino, California, is simulated and compared with available observations from the Strata Formation on Margins (STRATAFORM) marine geology...
A sensitive ion chamber-electrometer system was used to determine
the Oregon State University TRIGA III reactor's ⁴¹Ar production
rate as a function of steady state reactor power and production of ⁴¹Ar
due to reactivity pulses up to $3.00. The relative contributions of the
argon duct effluent and the pneumatic transfer...
A method for measuring chemical reaction rates in order to
distinguish between different reaction mechanisms is presented.
This method was used to study zero -, first- and second -order reactions
by analyzing the output response to a sinusoidal input of
reactant concentrations in an isothermal continuous stirred tank
reactor.
The...