The King's many bodies: the self-deconstruction of law's hierarchy

The article connects two strands of the recent sociolegal debate: (1) the empirical discovery of new forms of spontaneous law in die Course of globalization, and (2) the emergence of deconstructive theories of law that undermine the law's hierarchy. The article puts forward the thesis that law's hierarchy has successfully resisted all old and new attempts at its deconstruction; it breaks, however, under the pressures of globalization that produced a global law without the state, as self-created law of global society that has no institutionalized support whatsoever in international poliucs and public international law. Consequently, the article criticizes deconstructive theories for their lack of autological analysis. These theories do not take into account the historical condicions of deconstruction. Accordingly, deconstructive analysis of law would have to look for new legal distinctions that are plausible under the new condicions of a doubly fragmented global society. The article sketches the contours of an emerging polycontextural law

Innocent strategies as presheaves and interactive equivalences for CCS

Seeking a general framework for reasoning about and comparing programming languages, we derive a new view of Milner's CCS. We construct a category E of plays, and a subcategory V of views. We argue that presheaves on V adequately represent innocent strategies, in the sense of game semantics. We then equip innocent strategies with a simple notion of interaction. This results in an interpretation of CCS. Based on this, we propose a notion of interactive equivalence for innocent strategies, which is close in spirit to Beffara's interpretation of testing equivalences in concurrency theory. In this framework we prove that the analogues of fair and must testing equivalences coincide, while they differ in the standard setting.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2011, arXiv:1108.014

Coordination via Interaction Constraints I: Local Logic

Wegner describes coordination as constrained interaction. We take this approach literally and define a coordination model based on interaction constraints and partial, iterative and interactive constraint satisfaction. Our model captures behaviour described in terms of synchronisation and data flow constraints, plus various modes of interaction with the outside world provided by external constraint symbols, on-the-fly constraint generation, and coordination variables. Underlying our approach is an engine performing (partial) constraint satisfaction of the sets of constraints. Our model extends previous work on three counts: firstly, a more advanced notion of external interaction is offered; secondly, our approach enables local satisfaction of constraints with appropriate partial solutions, avoiding global synchronisation over the entire constraints set; and, as a consequence, constraint satisfaction can finally occur concurrently, and multiple parts of a set of constraints can be solved and interact with the outside world in an asynchronous manner, unless synchronisation is required by the constraints. This paper describes the underlying logic, which enables a notion of local solution, and relates this logic to the more global approach of our previous work based on classical logic

Full abstraction for fair testing in CCS (expanded version)

In previous work with Pous, we defined a semantics for CCS which may both be viewed as an innocent form of presheaf semantics and as a concurrent form of game semantics. We define in this setting an analogue of fair testing equivalence, which we prove fully abstract w.r.t. standard fair testing equivalence. The proof relies on a new algebraic notion called playground, which represents the `rule of the game'. From any playground, we derive two languages equipped with labelled transition systems, as well as a strong, functional bisimulation between them.Comment: 80 page

What is an Analogue for the Semantic Web and Why is Having One Important?

This paper postulates that for the Semantic Web to grow and gain input from fields that will surely benefit it, it needs to develop an analogue that will help people not only understand what it is, but what the potential opportunities are that are enabled by these new protocols. The model proposed in the paper takes the way that Web interaction has been framed as a baseline to inform a similar analogue for the Semantic Web. While the Web has been represented as a Page + Links, the paper presents the argument that the Semantic Web can be conceptualized as a Notebook + Memex. The argument considers how this model also presents new challenges for fundamental human interaction with computing, and that hypertext models have much to contribute to this new understanding for distributed information systems

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Preserving today for tomorrow: a case study of an archive of Interactive Music Installations

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοThis work presents the problems addressed and the first results obtained by a project aimed at the preservation of Interactive Music Installations (IMI). Preservation requires that besides all the necessary components for the (re)production of a performance, also the knowledge about these components is kept, so that the original process can be repeated at any given time. This work proposes a multilevel approach for the preservation of IMI. As case studies, the Pinocchio Square (installed in EXPO 2002) and the Il Caos delle Sfere are considered

Towards a declarative approach to constructing dialogue games.

In this paper we sketch a new approach to the development of dialogue games that builds upon the knowledge gained from several decades of dialogue game research across a variety of communities and which leverages the capabilities of the Dialogue Game Description Language as a means to describe the constituent parts of dialogue games. Our ultimate aim is to produce a method for rapidly describing and implementing games that conform to the designer's needs by declaring what is required and then automatically constructing the game from components, called 'fragments', that are distilled from existing dialogue games