‘"Buzz Off!": The Killer Bee Movie as Modern Belief Narrative.’

Looks at the sub-genre of the killer bee movies but through the lens of legend studies - specifically looking at these films as belief narratives

Beebots-a-lula, Where's My Honey?: Design Fictions and Beekeeping

The honey bee is a powerful cultural motif that remains an important symbol for the future. Their role as pollinators, alongside a myriad of other species, is critical to the continued diets of humankind. This Future Scenario explores a possible near future where human intervention poses new risks to their survival. Drawing on folklore and contemporary beekeeping practices, Mr Shore's Downfall tells a tale of discovery and loss as a young beekeeper is introduced to the world of honey bees. Three imagined artefacts are revealed through the story and discussed with consideration of their cultural context, desirability and relation to socio-economic factors. Themes from Mr Shore's Downfall are examined, and the potential of writing practice for design fiction practitioners is considered

What the Riddle-Makers Have Hidden Behind the Fire of a Dragon

Classical mythology, folklore, and fairy tales are full of dragons which exhibit fantastic attributes such as breathing fire, hoarding treasure, or possessing more than one head. This study maintains that some of these puzzling phenomena may derive from riddles, and will focus particularly on some plausible answers that refer to a real creature that has for millennia been valued and hunted by man: the honeybee

Writing the unreadable untext: a collaborative autoethnography of #rhizo14

No abstract available

Bee health field tool

The Bee health field tool (related with the most important and actual technical constraint in beekeeping are the technical features related with bee diseases and nutrition) was developed in a format that can be easily used in the field by all beekeepers, independent of their background, using an innovative learning strategy - gamification – that provides an effective, informal learning environment, and helps learners practice real-life situations and challenges in a safe environment. The Bee health field is part of the contents of the MOOC course curriculum allowing to achieve a training skill and specialization in bee health and nutrition. The expected impact is related with the possibility of enabling beekeepers to acquire the best and innovative beekeeping techniques and skills in this area of the production itinerary. This knowledge and skills are essential for the professionalization of beekeepers as the survival of the bees is compromised by the pressures related with these issues. Furthermore, the Bee health is the main factor for improving the beekeeping performance and for increasing the production and quality of the bee products in order to achieve adequate economic profits. It is also expected to have an impact in the active learning sector, by the development and use of gamifications as training tool.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Application of Intermediate Multi-Agent Systems to Integrated Algorithmic Composition and Expressive Performance of Music

We investigate the properties of a new Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for computer-aided composition called IPCS (pronounced “ipp-siss”) the Intermediate Performance Composition System which generates expressive performance as part of its compositional process, and produces emergent melodic structures by a novel multi-agent process. IPCS consists of a small-medium size (2 to 16) collection of agents in which each agent can perform monophonic tunes and learn monophonic tunes from other agents. Each agent has an affective state (an “artificial emotional state”) which affects how it performs the music to other agents; e.g. a “happy” agent will perform “happier” music. The agent performance not only involves compositional changes to the music, but also adds smaller changes based on expressive music performance algorithms for humanization. Every agent is initialized with a tune containing the same single note, and over the interaction period longer tunes are built through agent interaction. Agents will only learn tunes performed to them by other agents if the affective content of the tune is similar to their current affective state; learned tunes are concatenated to the end of their current tune. Each agent in the society learns its own growing tune during the interaction process. Agents develop “opinions” of other agents that perform to them, depending on how much the performing agent can help their tunes grow. These opinions affect who they interact with in the future. IPCS is not a mapping from multi-agent interaction onto musical features, but actually utilizes music for the agents to communicate emotions. In spite of the lack of explicit melodic intelligence in IPCS, the system is shown to generate non-trivial melody pitch sequences as a result of emotional communication between agents. The melodies also have a hierarchical structure based on the emergent social structure of the multi-agent system and the hierarchical structure is a result of the emerging agent social interaction structure. The interactive humanizations produce micro-timing and loudness deviations in the melody which are shown to express its hierarchical generative structure without the need for structural analysis software frequently used in computer music humanization

Farming bees in a dynamic social-ecology: An ethnographic exploration of knowledge practices among commercial bee farmers in the Western Cape, South Africa

In recent years theorists have challenged the certainty that there is one universally 'right' system of knowledge, arguing that there exists a diversity or plurality of ways of knowing the world (Turnbull 1997; Green 2008). Western scientific research has been reframed by these 'relational ontologists' as a set of knowledge practices that tend to produce and reinforce a dualistic view of the world. In particular, 'scientific', positivist accounts of nature have historically positioned mind and body, human beings and nature, humans and non-humans as essentially different or separate from each other (Thrift 2004; Haraway 2008). The methodological recommendation is that, as social theorists, we carefully observe knowledge practices and allow ourselves to be surprised or challenged by what we find rather than constantly performing these preconceived ways of knowing the world through our research (Law 2004; Lien & Law 2010). Farming bees commercially in the Western Cape, South Africa involves a high degree of skill and intimate daily engagements with plants, animals, landscapes and weather-worlds. As such it is an ideal case study for interrogating dualistic framings of human-environment relations through an ethnographic exploration of environmental knowledge practices. Commercial bee farmers that participated in this study raised a range of concerns about complex dynamics influencing their businesses, including challenges accessing viable land for bee sites and accessibility and security of the flowering plants upon which bees depend for food. I argue that, in practice, these challenges involved relational entanglements of farmers and other 'more-than-human' actors (Whatmore 2006) in what I refer to as a dynamic social-ecology (Ingold 2000; Berkes & Jolly 2001; Ommer et al. 2012). I argue that pollination and honey were co-produced by meshworks of more-than-human actors (Ingold 2011; Cohen 2013) and that knowledges were grounded in farmer's physical bodies and performed through practical skills. Farmers embodied multiple roles (such as farmer-businessman and farmer-researcher) and were able to move fluidly between different assemblages of skilled practices and ways of knowing in their engagements with plants, bees and other people (Turnbull 2000; Mol 2002). These insights are used to interrogate dualistic framings of inter-species relationality as well as to critically develop a relational understanding of environmental knowledge practices

The Iconography of the Honey Bee in Western Art

This master’s thesis studies the ways in which the honey bee is used as a symbol in Western art, specifically between the 1st century AD and the 17th century. Artists have had a close relationship with honey bees since they first drew scenes of life on cave walls; since then, honey bees have been a recurring image featured in artworks spanning centuries, cultures, and religions. During the Renaissance in Europe, the honey bee was adapted from a symbol associated with fertility and polytheistic cult rituals to become a symbol of eloquence in Christianity. The community-based, diligent nature of the honey bee resulting in the surplus of sweet honey helps to explain the continued representation of the honey bee in art. Considering the complex nature of the honey bee’s role in human life, it is plain to see why artists have gravitated towards the honey bee for use as a symbol for centuries. By studying the symbolism of the bee in several works of art from the Renaissance and before – Artemis of Ephesus from the 2nd century CE, Venus With Cupid Stealing Honey by Lucas Cranach the Elder from 1472, The Miracle of the Bees by Juan de Valdes Leal painted in 1673, and finally the tomb of Pope Urban VIII sculpted by Gianlorenzo Bernini between 1627 and 1647 — I intend to explore the meanings behind the relationship between the honey bee and the culture that produced these works of art and the way that it continues to steadily evolve and adapt to suit the time and the artist’s portrayal

Telling the bees: a collection of poems with a critical preface

Telling the Bees: A Collection of Poems with a Critical Preface is an anthology of fifty poems with an introductory preface. The poems represent an individual journey in writing poetry. The preface examines closely the sustained process of writing the poems. It offers a phenomenological account of an apprenticeship as a developing poet, taking into account the many and varied sources of inspiration, as well as exploring the specific role of memory as a catalyst for the poetic imagination. In the first chapter, divided into three parts, I examine the creative process in relation to the poems in the anthology, with a focus on the development of a poetic voice and personal sources of inspiration. Chapters Two and Three consider in detail the specific influence of Seamus Heaney and Virginia Woolf, both of whom have deepened my understanding of the transformation of everyday experience into poetic language. Their respective critical and autobiographical writing provides an important insight into the mind of the writer, and a further illumination of the creative process. I do not attempt to make explicit links between their works, except loosely in the context of imagist theory and fictionalisation of memory. In the final chapter, I reflect on what I have learnt during my long journey towards becoming a poet, drawing together the common threads that best illustrate the various complexities of writing poetry, including the craftsmanship it requires. The collection of poems is divided into four sections with separate themes that sometimes overlap and engage with each other on different levels. The first section, Observations, centres on Virginia Woolf and traces key events in her life based on her letters and diaries. The second section, Telling the Bees, is an experiment in writing poetry with an autobiographical focus on family relationships, memories, loss and reconciliation. The third section, A Moon Calendar, is a sequence of twelve poems that chart the changing nature of the seasons through the archaic names for each full moon, taken from different cultures. Some of these poems also have an autobiographical reference. The final section, An Indifferent Camera, looks at our transitory relationships with the natural world, and concludes with a short series of poems inspired by photographs, paintings and artefacts

Emotion in flocking

Behavioral animation is a category of computer animation that enables objects to determine their own actions. This saves an animator from having to determine every detail of movement for each object in the animation. As the number of objects within an animation increases, specifying the position of each object becomes increasingly difficult. Flocking is an example of behavioral animation. Some examples of flocking can be seen in movies, such as the stampede of the antelopes in The Lion King, the herds of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and the massive battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings. In this project, I have enhanced flocking to convey emotion. This is achieved using only the movement of objects in relationship to one another. The effectiveness of the flock s motion in conveying a given emotion is judged by human observers via an on-line flocking system. This system allows users to rate how well an emotion is conveyed by the flock. User feedback is used to further adjust motion parameters with the goal of obtaining the best representative motion for each emotion