RDF, the semantic web, Jordan, Jordan and Jordan

This collection is addressed to archivists and library professionals, and so has a slight focus on implications implications for them. This chapter is nonetheless intended to be a more-or-less generic introduction to the Semantic Web and RDF, which isn't specific to that domain

Hylomorphism and Resurrection

Hylomorphism provides an attractive framework for addressing issues in philosophical anthropology. After describing a hylomorphic theory that dovetails with current work in philosophy of mind and in scientific disciplines such as biology and neuroscience, I discuss how this theory meshes with Christian eschatology, the doctrine of resurrection in particular

A Master's Thesis Has No Name: A study on personal names in fantasy literature

Denne masteroppgåva handlar om personnamn i fantasy-seriane A Song of Ice and Fire av George R.R. Martin og The Stormlight Archive av Brandon Sanderson. Oppgåva sitt mål er undersøke korleis personnamna frå desse seriane er bygd opp, eller velt ut, samanlikna med korleis engelske personnamn generelt ser ut. I tillegg ser oppgåva på ulike motivasjonar for oppbygginga av binamn i seriane. Trass i at fantasy sjangeren er ein svært namnerik sjanger har den ofte blitt oversett og den har blitt via overraskande lite merksemd. Sjanger er særleg interessant å utforske med tanke på den store fridommen som forfattarane har når det gjeld å velje ut og finne opp namn. Kort oppsummert peikar oppgåva på ulike namnestrategiar som er nytta i seriane. Oppgåva ser òg på korleis kjønn er markert i namna og korleis ‘frammandheit’ er reflektert i namna. Felles for begge seriane er at namna har funksjonar utover rolla som identifiseringsmarkørar. Dei litterære personnamna reflekterer både karakterstikkar ved dei som berer namnet og plasserer namneberarane i dei ulike etniske gruppene som ein finn i seriane. Seriane er ellers ulike når det gjeld kva type namnestrategiar som er blitt brukt. Oppgåva ser òg på ulike motivasjonar som ligg bak namngjevinga. Funna dreiar seg hovudsakleg om at binamn ofte baserer seg på fysiske og mental trekk ved karakterane, i tillegg blir sosial funksjonar t.d. yrke eller sosial status, og situasjonsbestemte hendingar brukt som grunnlag for binamn. Oppgåva ser tilslutt kort på korleis identitet og namnegjeving heng tett saman og korleis endringa av namn som regel òg fører med seg endringar i personlegdom.Engelsk mastergradsoppgåveMAHF-LÆFRMAHF-ENGMPENGLZMPHFFAKENG35

On the functional origins of essentialism

This essay examines the proposal that psychological essentialism results from a history of natural selection acting on human representation and inference systems. It has been argued that the features that distinguish essentialist representational systems are especially well suited for representing natural kinds. If the evolved function of essentialism is to exploit the rich inductive potential of such kinds, then it must be subserved by cognitive mechanisms that carry out at least three distinct functions: identifying these kinds in the environment, constructing essentialized representations of them, and constraining inductive inferences about kinds. Moreover, there are different kinds of kinds, ranging from nonliving substances to biological taxa to within-species kinds such as sex, and the causal processes that render these categories coherent for the purposes of inductive generalization vary. If the evolved function of essentialism is to support inductive generalization under ignorance of true causes, and if kinds of kinds vary in the implicit assumptions that support valid inductive inferences about them, then we expect different, functionally incompatible modes of essentialist thinking for different kinds. In particular, there should be differences in how biological and nonbiological substances, biological taxa, and biological and social role kinds are essentialized. The functional differences between these kinds of essentialism are discussed

Tradition and monotheism in eastern Indonesia

Nusa Tenggara Timor, a south-eastern province of Indonesia, is populated mainly by Christians. The Alor-Pantar Archipelago has a majority of Protestant inhabitants who were baptized by Dutch Calvinists in the first half of the twentieth century. In addition, there are some coastal enclaves that have been inhabited by Muslims for centuries. In some areas, such as in the headland of Muna (Tanjung Muna) forming the northeast of Pantar Island, there is an even greater diversity of monotheistic religions, with some Catholic families living next to Protestants and Muslims. All adherers of the three religious faiths living at Tanjung Muna share core elements of the local adat, which consists of core rules relating to social behavior. It is believed that the ancestors will notice transgressions of these rules, and may use their supernatural power to punish their human descendants. In Indonesia, the term adat was first used by Muslims to distinguish the non-Islamic practices from Muslim faith (Keane 1997:260-261). This is definitely not the case in the village of Pandai at the coast of Tanjung Muna, where Islam tolerates ancestral worship. The same is true for the Catholics in the inland village of Helangdohi, who do not only tolerate but even support such customs. Some villagers from Helangdohi had become acquainted with this kind of Catholicism on the nearby island of Flores, where ancestral worship is encouraged by the missionaries of the Societas Verbi Divini (SVD). The attitude of Protestantism, at least in the Alor Archipelago, is quite the contrary of the permissive views held by Catholicism and Islam. In the 1930s the Protestant-Calvinist missionaries banned any kind of ancestral worship and destroyed most relics (Dalen 1928: Picture 1). These drastic measures demanded the disavowal of the ancestors, including the destruction of heirlooms and omitting of rituals

Flowers, leaves or both? How to obtain suitable images for automated plant identification

Background: Deep learning algorithms for automated plant identification need large quantities of precisely labelled images in order to produce reliable classification results. Here, we explore what kind of perspectives and their combinations contain more characteristic information and therefore allow for higher identification accuracy. Results: We developed an image-capturing scheme to create observations of flowering plants. Each observation comprises five in-situ images of the same individual from predefined perspectives (entire plant, flower frontal- and lateral view, leaf top- and back side view). We collected a completely balanced dataset comprising 100 observations for each of 101 species with an emphasis on groups of conspecific and visually similar species including twelve Poaceae species. We used this dataset to train convolutional neural networks and determine the prediction accuracy for each single perspective and their combinations via score level fusion. Top-1 accuracies ranged between 77% (entire plant) and 97% (fusion of all perspectives) when averaged across species. Flower frontal view achieved the highest accuracy (88%). Fusing flower frontal, flower lateral and leaf top views yields the most reasonable compromise with respect to acquisition effort and accuracy (96%). The perspective achieving the highest accuracy was species dependent. Conclusions: We argue that image databases of herbaceous plants would benefit from multi organ observations, comprising at least the front and lateral perspective of flowers and the leaf top view