Emergent Behavior and Criticality in Online Auctions

The present work studies eBay online auctions as a complex system, where agents in form of sellers and bidders interact in a large number. In contrast to unintelligent agents of physical systems, humans have the choice between different possible rational strategies. The empirical findings in this work are the result of statistical analysis of two major sets of data with more than 200,000 auctions. Probability distribution functions and relations between different variables are studied. Statistical analysis of the eBay data shows that the probability density functions for a wide range of quantities follow rather simple functionalities like exponential and power laws. Similar power-law distributions were observed in physics when studying the behavior of systems at their critical points, related to second order phase transitions. Although lots of relations and distributions could be understood qualitatively and quantitatively, there exists, up to now, no unifying model, which describes all of the observations. As an application we have found that a kind of fraud known as shill bidding leads to significant deviations from the average behavior. eBay regarded as a complex system seems to have features of totally stochastic processes, irrational agents and fully rational agents altogether

Canon Barnett and the first thirty years of Toynbee Hall

PhDThis thesis is a study of the changing role which Toynbee Hall, the first university settlement, played in East London between 1884 and 1914. The first chapter presents a brief biography of Sainiel Augustus Barnett, the founder and first warden of the settlement, and analyzes his social thought in relation to the beliefs which were current in Britain during the period. The second chapter discusses the founding of the settlement, its organization, structure and the aims which underlay its early work. The third chapter, concentrating on three residents, C.R. Ashbee, .H. Beveridge and T. Edmund Harvey, shows the way in which subsequent settlement workers reformulated these aims In accordance with their own social and economic views. The subsequent chapters discuss the accomplishments of the settlement in various fields. The fourth shows that Toynbee Hall's educational program, which was largely an attempt to work out Matthew Arnold's theory of culture, left little impact on the life of East London. The fifth chapter discusses the settlement residents' ineffectual attempts to establish contact with working men's organizations. The final chapter seeks to demonstrate that In the field of philanthropy the residents were far more successful than in any other sphere in adapting the settlement to changing social thought

The scientific way of warfare: Order and chaos on the battlefields of modernity.

The thesis of the present work is that throughout the modern era the dominant corpus of scientific ideas, as articulated around key machine technologies, has been reflected in the contemporary theories and practices of warfare in the Western world. Over the period covered by this thesis - from the ascendancy of the scientific worldview in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to present day - an ever more intimate symbiosis between science and warfare has established itself with the increasing reliance on the development and integration of technology within complex social assemblages of war. This extensive deployment of scientific ideas and methodologies in the military realm allows us to speak of the constitution and perpetuation of a scientific way of warfare. There are however within the scientific way of warfare significant variations in the theories and practices of warfare according to the prevalence of certain scientific ideas and technological apparatuses in given periods of the modern era. The four distinctive regimes I thereupon distinguish are those of mechanistic, thermodynamic, cybernetic, and chaoplexic warfare. Each of these regimes is characterised by a differing approach to the central question of order and chaos in war, on which hinge the related issues of centralisation and decentralisation, predictability and control

An exploration and validation of computer modeling of evolution, natural selection, and evolutionary biology with cellular automata for secondary students.

The Evolutionary Tool Kit, a new software package, is the prototype of a concept simulator providing an environment for students to create microworlds of populations of artificial organisms. Its function is to model processes, concepts and arguments in natural selection and evolutionary biology, using either Mendelian asexual or sexual reproduction, or counterfactual systems such as \u27paint pot\u27 or blending inheritance. In this environment students can explore a conceptual What if? in evolutionary biology, test misconceptions and deepen understanding of inheritance and changes in populations. Populations can be defined either with typological, or with populational thinking, to inquire into the role and necessity of variation in natural selection. The approach is generative not tutorial. The interface is highly graphic with twenty traits set as icons that are moved onto the \u27phenotypes\u27. Activities include investigations of evolutionary theory of aging, reproductive advantage, sexual selection and mimicry. Design of the activities incorporates Howard Gardner\u27s Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Draft of a teacher and student manual are included

From Putsch to Purge. A Study of the German Episodes in Richard Hughes’s The Human Predicament and their Sources

The two last novels by Richard Hughes (1900-1976), the first in his planned The Human Predicament series, are partly set in Germany in the years between the First and the Second World War. Much of the action in The Fox in the Attic (1961) takes part in and around Munich, culminating in a fictional reconstruction of the so-called Hitler Putsch on November 8-9, 1923, the future dictator's aborted early bid for power. In the sequel, The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), the time-span is wider and the places covered are more numerous. The novel's finale is a reconstruction of the so-called Röhm Purge, the internecine Nazi killings of the SA-leaders on June 30, 1934 and the following days. The present study, with its focus on Hughes's German episodes and their sources, is based on extensive research into his unpublished papers in the Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana, and the Reading University holdings of his correspondence with Chatto & Windus, the London publishers. In two postscripts, Hughes acknowledged some of his sources. The list is considerably extended in this study which singles out fifteen of his providers of historical material, while assessing the impact the borrowings have had on his fiction: the Bavarian von Aretin family, distantly related to him; his Welsh friend Goronwy Rees; the Prussian Ernst von Salomon; a certain Captain F. Götz; August Kubizek, Hitler's friend from their youth; three members of the Munich Hanfstaengl family: Ernst, Helene and Egon; the novelist and travel-writer Sir Philip Gibbs; the historians Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Elizabeth Wiskemann and William Manchester; and finally three (former) Nazis: Walter Schellenberg, Kurt G. W. Ludecke and Otto Strasser. The study's narratological considerations of the interplay of fact and fiction in Hughes’s novels make use of some of Gérard Genette's distinctions (intradiegetic focalization, extradiegetic narration, etc), and the question of plagiarism (a term mentioned by Hughes himself) is briefly broached. The final chapters of the study concern Hughes and the German bookmarket, and his unfinished sequel, the torso published as The Twelve Chapters. In conclusion, Hughes's Hitler portrait and the critical response it provoked is discussed. The study quotes liberally from Richard Hughes's hitherto unpublished manuscript material

Older than language : comics as philosophical praxis and heuristic for philosophical canon

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-197).The central task of this dissertation is the exploration of the medium of comics, and its connections to both popular culture and philosophy as a practice conceived in the Western tradition. Comics (at times referred to as both 'graphic literature' and 'sequential art' during this dissertation) constitutes a wholly new object. One that is qualitatively distinct from prose, theater, poetry and cinema. Mimicking the structure of comics wherein two images are juxtaposed to suggest (rather than explicitly state) a coherent sequence in the mind of the reader, this dissertation offers two "images" of its central thesis: one a theoretical element, the other a work of creative fiction. Following on from each other, these "images" interrogate both in their parts and in their sequence, the politics of representation around comics and its connections to philosophy and the popular. In the first "image" a theoretical work is forwarded to examine the various connections that arise between comics, popular culture and philosophy. The central thesis of this element argues for a nuanced understanding in which the medium of comics provides for a clearer interlocutor of Western philosophy's perennial concerns. The works of Galileo, Vico, Descartes, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Foucault and Deleuze are reinterpreted using the aesthetic mechanics of comics as philosophical concept. This dissertation thus asserts that comics functions as "heuristic" for Western philosophy, a method which encodes understanding through practice

CYBER 200 Applications Seminar

Applications suited for the CYBER 200 digital computer are discussed. Various areas of application including meteorology, algorithms, fluid dynamics, monte carlo methods, petroleum, electronic circuit simulation, biochemistry, lattice gauge theory, economics and ray tracing are discussed