What is Life?

In searching for life in extraterrestrial space, it is essential to act based on an unequivocal definition of life. In the twentieth century, life was defined as cells that self-replicate, metabolize, and are open for mutations, without which genetic information would remain unchangeable, and evolution would be impossible. Current definitions of life derive from statistical mechanics, physics, and chemistry of the twentieth century in which life is considered to function machine like, ignoring a central role of communication. Recent observations show that context-dependent meaningful communication and network formation (and control) are central to all life forms. Evolutionary relevant new nucleotide sequences now appear to have originated from social agents such as viruses, their parasitic relatives, and related RNA networks, not from errors. By applying the known features of natural languages and communication, a new twenty-first century definition of life can be reached in which communicative interactions are central to all processes of life. A new definition of life must integrate the current empirical knowledge about interactions between cells, viruses, and RNA networks to provide a better explanatory power than the twentieth century narrative

Towards a Re-Definition of Government Interpreters' Agency Against a Backdrop of Sociopolitical and Cultural Evolution: A Case of Premier's Press Conferences in China

The sociopolitical and cultural evolution as a result of the Reform and Opening up in 1978, facilitated not least by the inexorable juggernaut of globalization and technological advancement, has revolutionized the way China engages domestically and interacts with the outside world. The need for more proactive diplomacy and open engagement witnessed the institutionalization of the interpreter-mediated premier's press conferences. Such a discursive event provides a vital platform for China to articulate its discourse and rebrand its image in tandem with the profound changes signaled by the Dengist reform. This chapter investigates critically how political press conference interpreting and interpreters' agency in China are impacted in relation to such dramatic transformations. It is revealed that, while interpreters are confronted with seemingly conflicting expectations, in actual practice they are often able to negotiate a way as highly competent interpreting professionals with the additional missions of advancing China's global engagement and safeguarding China's national interests

Towards a Re-Definition of Government Interpreters' Agency Against a Backdrop of Sociopolitical and Cultural Evolution: A Case of Premier's Press Conferences in China

The sociopolitical and cultural evolution as a result of the Reform and Opening up in 1978, facilitated not least by the inexorable juggernaut of globalization and technological advancement, has revolutionized the way China engages domestically and interacts with the outside world. The need for more proactive diplomacy and open engagement witnessed the institutionalization of the interpreter-mediated premier's press conferences. Such a discursive event provides a vital platform for China to articulate its discourse and rebrand its image in tandem with the profound changes signaled by the Dengist reform. This chapter investigates critically how political press conference interpreting and interpreters' agency in China are impacted in relation to such dramatic transformations. It is revealed that, while interpreters are confronted with seemingly conflicting expectations, in actual practice they are often able to negotiate a way as highly competent interpreting professionals with the additional missions of advancing China's global engagement and safeguarding China's national interests

Theories about architecture and performance of multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems are promising as models of organization because they are based on the idea that most work in human organizations is done based on intelligence, communication, cooperation, and massive parallel processing. They offer an alternative for system theories of organization, which are rather abstract of nature and do not pay attention to the agent level. In contrast, classical organization theories offer a rather rich source of inspiration for developing multi-agent models because of their focus on the agent level. This paper studies the plausibility of theoretical choices in the construction of multi-agent systems. Multi-agent systems have to be plausible from a philosophical, psychological, and organizational point of view. For each of these points of view, alternative theories exist. Philosophically, the organization can be seen from the viewpoints of realism and constructivism. Psychologically, several agent types can be distinguished. A main problem in the construction of psychologically plausible computer agents is the integration of response function systems with representational systems. Organizationally, we study aspects of the architecture of multi-agent systems, namely topology, system function decomposition, coordination and synchronization of agent processes, and distribution of knowledge and language characteristics among agents. For each of these aspects, several theoretical perspectives exist.

The Machine Conception of the Organism in Development and Evolution: A Critical Analysis

This article critically examines one of the most prevalent metaphors in modern biology, namely the machine conception of the organism (MCO). Although the fundamental differences between organisms and machines make the MCO an inadequate metaphor for conceptualizing living systems, many biologists and philosophers continue to draw upon the MCO or tacitly accept it as the standard model of the organism. This paper analyses the specific difficulties that arise when the MCO is invoked in the study of development and evolution. In developmental biology the MCO underlies a logically incoherent model of ontogeny, the genetic program, which serves to legitimate three problematic theses about development: genetic animism, neo-preformationism, and developmental computability. In evolutionary biology the MCO is responsible for grounding unwarranted theoretical appeals to the concept of design as well as to the interpretation of natural selection as an engineer, which promote a distorted understanding of the process and products of evolutionary change. Overall, it is argued that, despite its heuristic value, the MCO today is impeding rather than enabling further progress in our comprehension of living systems

Marketing and Resisting Plastic Surgery: Heteroglossic Voices in the Multimodal Construction of Female Identity

Contemporary consumer culture tends to see personal appearance as the crucial symbolic capital whereby an individual can assert her/his own identity as a member of a socially recognized community. The orders of discourse (as sites of articulated discursive formations; Fairclough 1992: 10, 43 et passim) which naturalize surgical intervention as a means to erase one\u2019s ethnic origins while conforming to globalized Western (viz. US) standards of beauty, dialogically engage with voices arguing for the preservation of one\u2019s physical traits as anchors of traditional culture, ideology and self-identity. This paper explores multimodal strategies of female identity construction and positioning as enacted through bank loans and advertisements for plastic (viz. cosmetic, as opposed to reconstructive) surgery with particular reference to non-Western countries and, more specifically, to Lebanon as a paradigmatic case in point. At the same time, it compares such globalizing, centripetal strategies with the localizing, heteroglossic voices of online communities of Lebanese women who contrast and resist such dominant discourse practices. They do so by \u2018advertising\u2019 for real beauty and encouraging the others to build their social capital on their ethnic and cultural origins and to promote their own real selves, while strategically monitoring the potential negative consequences that this might entail, including shame, stigma and social exclusion. Against the backdrop of an intersemiotic approach integrating multimodal and discourse-as-mediated-action studies, the paper investigates \u201cthe role of the market in shaping a habitus of agency-as-choice\u201d (Kress 2010: 132) and ultimately advocates for shifting the focus of analysis from the individuals involved in communication to social action and social change