Ivan is a gifted pianist, but spends most of his time at the keyboard playing simple blues progressions over and over. Sarah is fluent in French, but avoids every opportunity to converse in that language. Greg lives in a household whose kitchen offers an assortment of tantalizing foods, yet he never eats anything except bagels and cream cheese. Melinda has many friends, with whom she would enjoy socializing, but she forgoes their company to devote all her free time to video (...) games. Clive is a champion mountain climber, but has lately taken to never venturing out of the house. Esther has a masters degree in comparative literature, but now reads nothing but Harlequin romances. And Phil is partial to the Allegros in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti, but only as background music for dancing, not as something to listen to with attention. (shrink)

As the least expensive category of high-slope roofing in the U.S., shingles are found on the roofs of about 80% of U.S. homes, and constitute about 80% of this market. Shingles are also among the least reflective high-slope roofing products, with few cool options on the market. The widespread use of cool roofs in the two warmest U.S. climate zones could reduce annual residential cooling energy use in these zones by over 7%. This project targets the development of high-performance cool (...) shingles with initial solar reflectance at least 0.40 and a cost premium not exceeding US$0.50/ft². Phase 1 of the current study explored three approaches to increasing shingle reflectance. Method A replaces dark bare granules by white bare granules to enhance the near-infrared reflectance attained with cool pigments. Method B applies a white basecoat and a cool-color topcoat to a shingle surfaced with dark bare granules. Method C applies a visually clear, NIR-reflecting surface treatment to a conventionally colored shingle. Method A was the most successful, but our investigation of Method B identified roller coating as a promising top-coating technique, and our study of Method C developed a novel approach based on a nanowire mesh. Method A yielded red, green, brown, and black faux shingles with solar reflectance up to 0.39 with volumetric coloration. Since the base material is white, these reflectances can readily be increased by using less pigment. The expected cost premium for Method A shingles is less than our target limit of $0.50/ft², and would represent less than a 10% increase in the installed cost of a shingle roof. Using inexpensive but cool iron oxide pigments to volumetrically color white limestone synthesized from sequestered carbon and seawater appears to offer high albedo at low cost. In Phase 2, we plan to refine the cool shingle prototypes, manufacture cool granules, and manufacture and market high-performance cool shingles. (shrink)

A laboratory method to simulate natural exposure of roofing materials has been reported in a companion article. In the current article, we describe the results of an international, nine-participant interlaboratory study conducted in accordance with ASTM Standard E691-09 to establish the precision and reproducibility of this protocol. The accelerated soiling and weathering method was applied four times by each laboratory to replicate coupons of 12 products representing a wide variety of roofing categories, bare metal, field-applied coating, asphalt shingle, modified-bitumen cap (...) sheet, clay tile, and concrete tile). Participants reported initial and laboratory-aged values of solar reflectance and thermal emittance. Measured solar reflectances were consistent within and across eight of the nine participating laboratories. Measured thermal emittances reported by six participants exhibited comparable consistency. For solar reflectance, the accelerated aging method is both repeatable and reproducible within an acceptable range of standard deviations: the repeatability standard deviation sr ranged from 0.008 to 0.015 and the reproducibility standard deviation sR ranged from 0.022 to 0.036. The ILS confirmed that the accelerated aging method can be reproduced by multiple independent laboratories with acceptable precision. This study supports the adoption of the accelerated aging practice to speed the evaluation and performance rating of new cool roofing materials. (shrink)

In “Artistic Worth and Personal Taste,” Jerrold Levinson develops a problem for those who think we should strive to be “ideal critics” in our aesthetic lives. He then offers several solutions to this problem. I argue that his solutions miss the mark and that the problem he characterizes may not be genuine after all.

In this article, I examine whether Jerrold Levinson's intentional-historical definition of art can successfully accommodate revolutionary art. For Levinson, an item is art if it was intended to be regarded as some prior art was regarded. But revolutionary art involves a regard that is “completely distinct” from preexisting art regards. I consider and reject Levinson's proposed solutions to the problem of accommodating revolutionary art. I then defend an alternative account of transgressive art regard. Unfortunately for the intentional-historical (...) definition, the acceptance of transgressive art regard in conjunction with some recent theories of the development of human behavioral modernity may commit the definition to including nonart, prehistoric tools. (shrink)

Trigonometric polynomials are widely used for the approximation of a smooth function $f$ from a set of nonuniformly spaced samples $\{f\}_{j=0}^{N-1}$. If the samples are perturbed by noise, controlling the smoothness of the trigonometric approximation becomes an essential issue to avoid overfitting and underfitting of the data. Using the polynomial degree as regularization parameter we derive a multi-level algorithm that iteratively adapts to the least squares solution of optimal smoothness. The proposed algorithm computes the solution in at most $\cal{O}$ operations (...) by solving a family of nested Toeplitz systems. It is shown how the presented method can be extended to multivariate trigonometric approximation. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm by applying it in echocardiography to the recovery of the boundary of the Left Ventricle. (shrink)

Aesthetic Pursuits is Jerrold Levinson’s newest collection of essays and is marketed as a complement to his 2015 volume Musical Concerns. Whereas Musical Concerns was comprised exclusively of essays on music, Aesthetic Pursuits consists of essays on a variety of topics. As the broad title suggests, these topics are relatively disparate and wide-ranging, including issues of film, humour, literature, beauty and the emotions. All the essays, with one exception, were written after 2006 and offer a view into Levinson’s (...) thinking over the last decade. As a result, the collection features a more critical engagement with contemporary aestheticians than his previous volumes. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the role played by context in art. In this regard I examine three theories linked to the names of J. Levinson, G. Currie and D. Davies. Levinson’s arguments undermine the structural theory. He finds it objectionable because it makes the individuation of artworks independent of their histories. Secondly, such a consequence is unacceptable because it fails to recognise that works are created rather than discovered. But, if certain general features of provenance are (...) always work-constitutive, as it seems that Levinson is willing to claim, these features must always be essential properties of works. On the other hand, consideration of our modal practice suggests that whether a given general feature of provenance is essential or non-essential depends upon the particular work in question or is “work relative”. D. Davies builds his performance theory on the basis of the critical evaluation of Currie’s action-type hypotheses (ATH). Performances, says Davies, are not to be identified with “basic actions” to which their times belong essentially, but with “doings” that permit of the sorts of variation in modal properties required by the work-relativity of modality. He is also a fierce critic of the contextualist account. Contextualism is in his view unable to reflect the fact that aspects of provenance bear upon our modal judgements with variable force. In the second part of the paper I consider Davies’s “modality principle”. Davies is inclined to defend the claim that labels used for designation of works are rigid designators. Such a view offers a ground for discussion about the historicity of art. What has been meant when people claim that art is an historical concept? I argue that any historical theory implies a two-dimensional notion of “art”. At the end of the paper I suggest that Davies should embrace the theory of contingent identity and not the colocationist view about the relationship that exists between a particular artwork and its physical bearer. (shrink)

In a recent essay, Jerrold Levinson defends his version of hypothetical intentionalism, which is a theory of literary interpretation, from two criticisms. The first, argued by Stephen Davies, is that it is equivalent to the value-maximizing view. The second, argued by Robert Stecker, is that there are straightforward counterexamples to HI. We will argue that Levinson does not successfully fend off either criticism, and further, that in the process of attempting to do so, creates another dilemma for his (...) view. (shrink)