3,191 research outputs found
Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding
In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)
The Third Gravitational Lensing Accuracy Testing (GREAT3) Challenge Handbook
The GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing 3 (GREAT3) challenge is the third
in a series of image analysis challenges, with a goal of testing and
facilitating the development of methods for analyzing astronomical images that
will be used to measure weak gravitational lensing. This measurement requires
extremely precise estimation of very small galaxy shape distortions, in the
presence of far larger intrinsic galaxy shapes and distortions due to the
blurring kernel caused by the atmosphere, telescope optics, and instrumental
effects. The GREAT3 challenge is posed to the astronomy, machine learning, and
statistics communities, and includes tests of three specific effects that are
of immediate relevance to upcoming weak lensing surveys, two of which have
never been tested in a community challenge before. These effects include
realistically complex galaxy models based on high-resolution imaging from
space; spatially varying, physically-motivated blurring kernel; and combination
of multiple different exposures. To facilitate entry by people new to the
field, and for use as a diagnostic tool, the simulation software for the
challenge is publicly available, though the exact parameters used for the
challenge are blinded. Sample scripts to analyze the challenge data using
existing methods will also be provided. See http://great3challenge.info and
http://great3.projects.phys.ucl.ac.uk/leaderboard/ for more information.Comment: 30 pages, 13 figures, submitted for publication, with minor edits
(v2) to address comments from the anonymous referee. Simulated data are
available for download and participants can find more information at
http://great3.projects.phys.ucl.ac.uk/leaderboard
LSST: Comprehensive NEO Detection, Characterization, and Orbits
(Abridged) The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is currently by far the
most ambitious proposed ground-based optical survey. Solar System mapping is
one of the four key scientific design drivers, with emphasis on efficient
Near-Earth Object (NEO) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) detection,
orbit determination, and characterization. In a continuous observing campaign
of pairs of 15 second exposures of its 3,200 megapixel camera, LSST will cover
the entire available sky every three nights in two photometric bands to a depth
of V=25 per visit (two exposures), with exquisitely accurate astrometry and
photometry. Over the proposed survey lifetime of 10 years, each sky location
would be visited about 1000 times. The baseline design satisfies strong
constraints on the cadence of observations mandated by PHAs such as closely
spaced pairs of observations to link different detections and short exposures
to avoid trailing losses. Equally important, due to frequent repeat visits LSST
will effectively provide its own follow-up to derive orbits for detected moving
objects. Detailed modeling of LSST operations, incorporating real historical
weather and seeing data from LSST site at Cerro Pachon, shows that LSST using
its baseline design cadence could find 90% of the PHAs with diameters larger
than 250 m, and 75% of those greater than 140 m within ten years. However, by
optimizing sky coverage, the ongoing simulations suggest that the LSST system,
with its first light in 2013, can reach the Congressional mandate of cataloging
90% of PHAs larger than 140m by 2020.Comment: 10 pages, color figures, presented at IAU Symposium 23
Phenotypic redshifts with self-organizing maps: A novel method to characterize redshift distributions of source galaxies for weak lensing
Wide-field imaging surveys such as the Dark Energy Survey (DES) rely on
coarse measurements of spectral energy distributions in a few filters to
estimate the redshift distribution of source galaxies. In this regime, sample
variance, shot noise, and selection effects limit the attainable accuracy of
redshift calibration and thus of cosmological constraints. We present a new
method to combine wide-field, few-filter measurements with catalogs from deep
fields with additional filters and sufficiently low photometric noise to break
degeneracies in photometric redshifts. The multi-band deep field is used as an
intermediary between wide-field observations and accurate redshifts, greatly
reducing sample variance, shot noise, and selection effects. Our implementation
of the method uses self-organizing maps to group galaxies into phenotypes based
on their observed fluxes, and is tested using a mock DES catalog created from
N-body simulations. It yields a typical uncertainty on the mean redshift in
each of five tomographic bins for an idealized simulation of the DES Year 3
weak-lensing tomographic analysis of , which is a
60% improvement compared to the Year 1 analysis. Although the implementation of
the method is tailored to DES, its formalism can be applied to other large
photometric surveys with a similar observing strategy.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures; matches version accepted to MNRA
Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design
This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications
Aerospace Medicine and Biology, a continuing bibliography with indexes
This bibliography lists 197 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in November 1984
Beyond the Circle of Life
It seems certain to me that I will die and stay dead. By “I”, I mean me, Greg Nixon, this person, this self-identity. I am so intertwined with the chiasmus of lives, bodies, ecosystems, symbolic intersubjectivity, and life on this particular planet that I cannot imagine this identity continuing alone without them. However, one may survive one’s life by believing in universal awareness, perfection, and the peace that passes all understanding. Perhaps, we bring this back with us to the Source from which we began, changing it, enriching it. Once we have lived – if we don’t choose the eternal silence of oblivion by life denial, vanity, indifference, or simple weariness – the Source learns and we awaken within it. Awareness, consciousness, is universal – it comes with the territory – so maybe you will be one of the few prepared to become unexpectedly enlightened after the loss of body and self. You may discover your own apotheosis – something you always were, but after a lifetime of primate experience, now much more. Since you are of the Source and since you have changed from life experience and yet retained the dream of ultimate awakening, plus you have brought those chaotic emotions and memories back to the Source with you (though no longer yours), your life & memories will have mattered. Those who awaken beyond the death of self will have changed Reality
ASTRAL PROJECTION: THEORIES OF METAPHOR, PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE, AND THE ART O F SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION
This thesis provides an intellectual context for my work in computational
scientific visualization for large-scale public outreach in venues such as digitaldome
planetarium shows and high-definition public television documentaries. In
my associated practicum, a DVD that provides video excerpts, 1 focus especially on
work I have created with my Advanced Visualization Laboratory team at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (Champaign, Illinois) from
2002-2007.
1 make three main contributions to knowledge within the field of computational
scientific visualization. Firstly, I share the unique process 1 have pioneered for
collaboratively producing and exhibiting this data-driven art when aimed at popular
science education. The message of the art complements its means of production:
Renaissance Team collaborations enact a cooperative paradigm of evolutionary
sympathetic adaptation and co-creation.
Secondly, 1 open up a positive, new space within computational scientific
visualization's practice for artistic expression—especially in providing a theory of
digi-epistemology that accounts for how this is possible given the limitations
imposed by the demands of mapping numerical data and the computational models
derived from them onto visual forms. I am concerned not only with liberating
artists to enrich audience's aesthetic experiences of scientific visualization, to
contribute their own vision, but also with conceiving of audiences as co-creators of
the aesthetic significance of the work, to re-envision and re-circulate what they
encounter there. Even more commonly than in the age of traditional media, on-line
social computing and digital tools have empowered the public to capture and
repurpose visual metaphors, circulating them within new contexts and telling new
stories with them.
Thirdly, I demonstrate the creative power of visaphors (see footnote, p. 1) to
provide novel embodied experiences through my practicum as well as my thesis
discussion. Specifically, I describe how the visaphors my Renaissance Teams and I
create enrich the Environmentalist Story of Science, essentially promoting a
counter-narrative to the Enlightenment Story of Science through articulating how
humanity participates in an evolving universal consciousness through our embodied
interaction and cooperative interdependence within nested, self-producing
(autopoetic) systems, from the micro- to the macroscopic. This contemporary
account of the natural world, its inter-related systems, and their dynamics may be
understood as expressing a creative and generative energy—a kind of
consciousness-that transcends the human yet also encompasses it
Quantum Gravity and Taoist Cosmology: Exploring the Ancient Origins of Phenomenological String Theory
In the author’s previous contribution to this journal (Rosen 2015), a phenomenological string theory was proposed based on qualitative topology and hypercomplex numbers. The current paper takes this further by delving into the ancient Chinese origin of phenomenological string theory. First, we discover a connection between the Klein bottle, which is crucial to the theory, and the Ho-t’u, a Chinese number archetype central to Taoist cosmology. The two structures are seen to mirror each other in expressing the psychophysical (phenomenological) action pattern at the heart of microphysics. But tackling the question of quantum gravity requires that a whole family of topological dimensions be brought into play. What we find in engaging with these structures is a closely related family of Taoist forebears that, in concert with their successors, provide a blueprint for cosmic evolution. Whereas conventional string theory accounts for the generation of nature’s fundamental forces via a notion of symmetry breaking that is essentially static and thus unable to explain cosmogony successfully, phenomenological/Taoist string theory entails the dialectical interplay of symmetry and asymmetry inherent in the principle of synsymmetry. This dynamic concept of cosmic change is elaborated on in the three concluding sections of the paper. Here, a detailed analysis of cosmogony is offered, first in terms of the theory of dimensional development and its Taoist (yin-yang) counterpart, then in terms of the evolution of the elemental force particles through cycles of expansion and contraction in a spiraling universe. The paper closes by considering the role of the analyst per se in the further evolution of the cosmos
The Third Gravitational Lensing Accuracy Testing (GREAT3) Challenge Handbook
The GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing 3 (GREAT3) challenge is the third in a series of image analysis challenges, with a goal of testing and facilitating the development of methods for analyzing astronomical images that will be used to measure weak gravitational lensing. This measurement requires extremely precise estimation of very small galaxy shape distortions, in the presence of far larger intrinsic galaxy shapes and distortions due to the blurring kernel caused by the atmosphere, telescope optics, and instrumental effects. The GREAT3 challenge is posed to the astronomy, machine learning, and statistics communities, and includes tests of three specific effects that are of immediate relevance to upcoming weak lensing surveys, two of which have never been tested in a community challenge before. These effects include many novel aspects including realistically complex galaxy models based on high-resolution imaging from space; a spatially varying, physically motivated blurring kernel; and a combination of multiple different exposures. To facilitate entry by people new to the field, and for use as a diagnostic tool, the simulation software for the challenge is publicly available, though the exact parameters used for the challenge are blinded. Sample scripts to analyze the challenge data using existing methods will also be provided. See http://great3challenge.info and http://great3.projects.phys.ucl.ac.uk/leaderboard/ for more information
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