Francis Bacon and the practice of painting

This article addresses the question about why painting continues to be relevant in our contemporary cultural climate. A key reason can be located in the means by which the material of paint can be utilized, manipulated, and perceived through entire sensory and bodily mechanisms. As the practice of Francis Bacon (1909–1992) demonstrates, it is within the elusive behaviour and handling of pigment that the full transformative potential of painting can be released. In fact it can activate a whole field of sensory responses on the part of painter and viewer. The painter can manipulate the material to achieve a variety of effects but needs also to acknowledge how the material can potentially assume an independent life of its own, an almost unruly character. The strength and enduring quality of painting which links modern to postmodern practice, lies in its potential to utilise the painter's tacit skills as well as releasing the inherent and ‘unruly’ qualities of the pigment. The potential of painting practice lies within the orbit of the individual painter who can recognize implicitly how to let the paint ‘work’ according to the needs of the image being constructed

Before-Commit Client State Management Services for AJAX Applications

Heavily script-based browser applications change the manner in which users interact with Web browsers. Instead of downloading a succession of HTML pages, users download a single application and use that application for a long period of time. The application is not a set of HTML pages, but rather a single page that can possible modify its own presentation based on data exchanged with a server. In such an environment, it is necessary to provide some means for the client to manage its own state. We describe the initial results of our work in providing client-side state management services for these script-based applications. We focus on browser-based services that can help the user before any data is committed on the server. Our services include state checkpointing, property binding, operation logging, operational replay, ATOM/RSS data updates, and application-controlled persistence

Opinion Polarization by Learning from Social Feedback

We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social environment, is treated as a positive feedback which reinforces the value associated to this opinion. In connected networks of sufficiently high modularity, different groups of agents can form strong convictions of competing opinions. Linking the social feedback process to standard equilibrium concepts we analytically characterize sufficient conditions for the stability of bi-polarization. While previous models have emphasized the polarization effects of deliberative argument-based communication, our model highlights an affective experience-based route to polarization, without assumptions about negative influence or bounded confidence.Comment: Presented at the Social Simulation Conference (Dublin 2017

On First-Order μ-Calculus over Situation Calculus Action Theories

In this paper we study verification of situation calculus action theories against first-order mu-calculus with quantification across situations. Specifically, we consider mu-La and mu-Lp, the two variants of mu-calculus introduced in the literature for verification of data-aware processes. The former requires that quantification ranges over objects in the current active domain, while the latter additionally requires that objects assigned to variables persist across situations. Each of these two logics has a distinct corresponding notion of bisimulation. In spite of the differences we show that the two notions of bisimulation collapse for dynamic systems that are generic, which include all those systems specified through a situation calculus action theory. Then, by exploiting this result, we show that for bounded situation calculus action theories, mu-La and mu-Lp have exactly the same expressive power. Finally, we prove decidability of verification of mu-La properties over bounded action theories, using finite faithful abstractions. Differently from the mu-Lp case, these abstractions must depend on the number of quantified variables in the mu-La formula

A general framework for positioning, evaluating and selecting the new generation of development tools.

This paper focuses on the evaluation and positioning of a new generation of development tools containing subtools (report generators, browsers, debuggers, GUI-builders, ...) and programming languages that are designed to work together and have a common graphical user interface and are therefore called environments. Several trends in IT have led to a pluriform range of developments tools that can be classified in numerous categories. Examples are: object-oriented tools, GUI-tools, upper- and lower CASE-tools, client/server tools and 4GL environments. This classification does not sufficiently cover the tools subject in this paper for the simple reason that only one criterion is used to distinguish them. Modern visual development environments often fit in several categories because to a certain extent, several criteria can be applied to evaluate them. In this study, we will offer a broad classification scheme with which tools can be positioned and which can be refined through further research.

COEL: A Web-based Chemistry Simulation Framework

The chemical reaction network (CRN) is a widely used formalism to describe macroscopic behavior of chemical systems. Available tools for CRN modelling and simulation require local access, installation, and often involve local file storage, which is susceptible to loss, lacks searchable structure, and does not support concurrency. Furthermore, simulations are often single-threaded, and user interfaces are non-trivial to use. Therefore there are significant hurdles to conducting efficient and collaborative chemical research. In this paper, we introduce a new enterprise chemistry simulation framework, COEL, which addresses these issues. COEL is the first web-based framework of its kind. A visually pleasing and intuitive user interface, simulations that run on a large computational grid, reliable database storage, and transactional services make COEL ideal for collaborative research and education. COEL's most prominent features include ODE-based simulations of chemical reaction networks and multicompartment reaction networks, with rich options for user interactions with those networks. COEL provides DNA-strand displacement transformations and visualization (and is to our knowledge the first CRN framework to do so), GA optimization of rate constants, expression validation, an application-wide plotting engine, and SBML/Octave/Matlab export. We also present an overview of the underlying software and technologies employed and describe the main architectural decisions driving our development. COEL is available at http://coel-sim.org for selected research teams only. We plan to provide a part of COEL's functionality to the general public in the near future.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, 1 tabl

Cross-domain priming from mathematics to relative-clause attachment: a visual-world study in French

Human language processing must rely on a certain degree of abstraction, as we can produce and understand sentences that we have never produced or heard before. One way to establish syntactic abstraction is by investigating structural priming. Structural priming has been shown to be effective within a cognitive domain, in the present case, the linguistic domain. But does priming also work across different domains? In line with previous experiments, we investigated cross-domain structural priming from mathematical expressions to linguistic structures with respect to relative clause attachment in French (e.g., la fille du professeur qui habitait à Paris/the daughter of the teacher who lived in Paris). Testing priming in French is particularly interesting because it will extend earlier results established for English to a language where the baseline for relative clause attachment preferences is different form English: in English, relative clauses (RCs) tend to be attached to the local noun phrase (low attachment) while in French there is a preference for high attachment of relative clauses to the first noun phrase (NP). Moreover, in contrast to earlier studies, we applied an online-technique (visual world eye-tracking). Our results confirm cross-domain priming from mathematics to linguistic structures in French. Most interestingly, different from less mathematically adept participants, we found that in mathematically skilled participants, the effect emerged very early on (at the beginning of the relative clause in the speech stream) and is also present later (at the end of the relative clause). In line with previous findings, our experiment suggests that mathematics and language share aspects of syntactic structure at a very high-level of abstraction