Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński

Hierarchical representations for spatio-temporal visual attention: modeling and understanding

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorDentro del marco de la Inteligencia Artificial, la Visión Artificial es una disciplina científica que tiene como objetivo simular automaticamente las funciones del sistema visual humano, tratando de resolver tareas como la localización y el reconocimiento de objetos, la detección de eventos o el seguimiento de objetos....Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Multimedia y ComunicacionesPresidente: Luis Salgado Álvarez de Sotomayor.- Secretario: Ascensión Gallardo Antolín.- Vocal: Jenny Benois Pinea

Fuzzy Systems

This book presents some recent specialized works of theoretical study in the domain of fuzzy systems. Over eight sections and fifteen chapters, the volume addresses fuzzy systems concepts and promotes them in practical applications in the following thematic areas: fuzzy mathematics, decision making, clustering, adaptive neural fuzzy inference systems, control systems, process monitoring, green infrastructure, and medicine. The studies published in the book develop new theoretical concepts that improve the properties and performances of fuzzy systems. This book is a useful resource for specialists, engineers, professors, and students

The significance of silence. Long gaps attenuate the preference for ‘yes’ responses in conversation.

In conversation, negative responses to invitations, requests, offers and the like more often occur with a delay – conversation analysts talk of them as dispreferred. Here we examine the contrastive cognitive load ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses make, either when given relatively fast (300 ms) or delayed (1000 ms). Participants heard minidialogues, with turns extracted from a spoken corpus, while having their EEG recorded. We find that a fast ‘no’ evokes an N400-effect relative to a fast ‘yes’, however this contrast is not present for delayed responses. This shows that an immediate response is expected to be positive – but this expectation disappears as the response time lengthens because now in ordinary conversation the probability of a ‘no’ has increased. Additionally, however, 'No' responses elicit a late frontal positivity both when they are fast and when they are delayed. Thus, regardless of the latency of response, a ‘no’ response is associated with a late positivity, since a negative response is always dispreferred and may require an account. Together these results show that negative responses to social actions exact a higher cognitive load, but especially when least expected, as an immediate response

Radiopharmaceuticals

Radiopharmaceuticals - Current Research for Better Diagnosis and Therapy discusses the importance of radiopharmaceuticals and their environmental, pharmaceutical, diagnostic, therapeutic, and research applications. Chapters address such topics as the fundamentals of radiopharmaceutical chemistry and preparation, fabrication, materials manipulation, and characterization of radiopharmaceuticals, applications of radiopharmaceuticals in preclinical studies, radiopharmaceuticals in modern cancer therapy, and new trends in preparation, biodistribution, and pharmacokinetics of radiopharmaceuticals in diagnosis and research

Understanding and Modeling Residential Electricity Demand in India

Residential electricity demand arises from the need for households to meet various end-use energy services. This demand has seen consistent growth over the last decade currently accounting for close to a quarter of the total electricity consumption in the country. In developing economies like India this sector will also be a key contributor to future greenhouse emissions given that we are starting from a comparatively low base. But our understanding of this sector is still limited. To gain a better understanding of this space, we approach this problem in two parts. In the first part, we outline a methodology to design and conduct a representative survey by presenting the case study of a primary survey we conducted of Bengaluru. Using the survey, we model appliance ownership and usage patterns identifying key contributing end-use categories and variations in patterns of electricity consumption across households. Next, we develop a bottom-up, end-use model, disaggregated by regions, to project growth in end-use energy service categories. We identify growth in ownership of key appliances and changes in consumption driven by this growth. We model changes in consumption patterns at different regional disaggregation identifying key demand drivers. Based on model insights from the primary survey and national model, we identify key policy amendments and suggest some new policy directions to manage the growth of demand from the residential sector

Transforming Biodiversity Governance

This book outlines a governance approach that prioritizes ecocentric, compassionate and sustainable development, and stresses the importance of addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity loss. It is ideal for academics, policy makers and practitioners. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Post Memes

Art-form, send-up, farce, ironic disarticulation, pastiche, propaganda, trololololol, mode of critique, mode of production, means of politicisation, even of subjectivation -- memes are the inner currency of the internet’s circulatory system. Independent of any one set value, memes are famously the mode of conveyance for the alt-right, the irony left, and the apoliticos alike,  and they are impervious to many economic valuations: the attempts made in co-opting their discourse in advertising and big business have made little headway, and have usually been derailed by retaliative meming. Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production takes advantage of the meme’s subversive adaptability and ripeness for a focused, in-depth study. Pulling together the interrogative forces of a raft of thinkers at the forefront of tech theory and media dissection, this collection of essays paves a way to articulating the semiotic fabric of the early 21st century’s most prevalent means of content posting, and aims at the very seizing of the memes of production for the imagining and creation of new political horizons.With contributions from Scott and McKenzie Wark, Patricia Reed, Jay Owens, Thomas Hobson and Kaajal Modi, Dominic Pettman, Bogna M. Konior, and Eric Wilson, among others, this essay volume offers the freshest approaches available in the field of memes studies and inaugurates a new kind of writing about the newest manifestations of the written online. The book aims to become the go-to resource for all students and scholars of memes, and will be of the utmost interest to anyone interested in the internet’s most viral phenomenon