Size and Power of Extended Gemmating P Pystems

In P systems with gemmation of mobile membranes were ex- amined. It was shown that (extended) systems with eight membranes are as powerful as the Turing machines. Moreover, it was also proved that extended gemmating P systems with only pre-dynamical rules are still computationally complete: in this case nine membranes are needed to obtain this computational power. In this paper we improve the above results concerning the size bound of extended gemmating P systems, namely we prove that these systems with at most ¯ve membranes (with meta-priority relations and without (in=out) communication rules) form a class of universal computing devices, while in the case of extended systems with only pre-dynamical rules six membranes are enough to determine any recursively enumerable language

P Systems with Minimal Left and Right Insertion and Deletion

In this article we investigate the operations of insertion and deletion performed at the ends of a string. We show that using these operations in a P systems framework (which corresponds to using specific variants of graph control), computational completeness can even be achieved with the operations of left and right insertion and deletion of only one symbol

P Systems with Minimal Left and Right Insertion and Deletion

Summary. In this article we investigate the operations of insertion and deletion performed at the ends of a string. We show that using these operations in a P systems framework (which corresponds to using specific variants of graph control), computational completeness can even be achieved with the operations of left and right insertion and deletion of only one symbol.

Tales from the pondscape: Living among the ruins of large-scale aquaculture in Tarakan, Indonesia

Overall, this dissertation is about what to do when livelihoods disappear and resources run dry. When your shrimp pond yield less and less, when former rich fishing grounds one day are depleted, when the loans on your pond or your boat need repayment and there is no more to sell. The dissertation is based on 11 months of fieldwork in and around Tarakan, the only city in the Indonesian province of North Kalimantan, a center for an extensive aquaculture-industry and a home for thousands of fishermen. More specifically, the dissertation is about life in and around what I term the pondscape, a 1500 km2 wide area, transformed in the late 90s from mangrove swamps to an endless sprawl of ponds built towards farming tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon). But the farming of tiger shrimp have started to fail more and more often. Today many, especially older ponds, are abandoned and in spite of new ponds constantly being opened further and further from Tarakan, overall production has stagnated at best. Owners are left indebted and thousands of the sharecropping caretakers in charge of the daily work at the ponds lose their livelihoods. Fishermen living at the periphery of the pondscape started to experience decreasing catches already with the advent of the pondscape, and today most can only keep fishing because of the constantly rising prices of fish. In the ruined pondscape, bereft of a reliable income, the caretakers left in charge of the failing ponds now rely on collecting mangrove crabs (Scylla spp.) for a living. Endemic to the mangroves that were cleared to make way for the pondscape, these bulky creatures are considered pests to shrimp farming, but can be sold, as they are considered delicacies by many. From warehouses in Tarakan, they are shipped alive across the border to Malaysia in great numbers, and from there to buyers all across the metropoles of South East Asia. This trade is contested though, as the (also most valuable) gravid females are illegal to collect and export, and an array of actors are involved in patrolling the narrow stretch of water separating Tarakan from Malaysia. The scarcity of fish has led many of the fishermen living at the periphery of the ruined pondscape to change to more intensive trawl gears, originally introduced to catch wild tiger shrimp. This has created tensions with other fishermen who blame trawls for being too destructive. Additionally, the national government did in 2015 reactivate legislation that banned trawl for those very same reasons. In Tarakan however, fishermen organized by middlemen buyers of fish, protested and lobbied successfully against the newly activated laws, leading to a series of exceptions and exemptions being given by local authorities. To this date, an increasing number of Tarakan fishermen use trawl gears, despite them being illegal. All the while, landings continue to dwindle. .oO0Oo. In this dissertation, I explore themes of extraction, ruination and connection in the context of a faltering resource frontier of farmed shrimp in Indonesia. Looking back at the economic history of the area, I trace past frontiers and resource booms that have taken place in the area, and which have in various ways paved the way for the present. Amidst this disassembling frontier, past choices restrict the possibilities of the future, and in the lives of the people in the upstream parts of global supply and commodity chains, ruins feature actively. Some enable new frontiers – for a while – while others encourage further destruction in the increasingly futile attempts of securing stable livelihoods. I argue that the patron-client relationships that for centuries have fueled resource extraction and connected marginal places with global centers have, just as the crumbling  physical infrastructure of past frontiers, been incorporated and repurposed in the present. Debt based patronage have proved, on the one hand, to be an efficient way to translate between non-capitalistic modes of production and streamlined global supply chains through outsourcing the violent dispossession and environmental destruction of the frontier to opaque arrangements of debt and despair. On the other hand, old webs of patronage and the possibilities they afford, empower some people on the bottom of the commodity chain, by giving them access to new markets and possibly better futures, if but for a while, as a twilight complex of large-scale economic interests and political interests constantly seek to territorialize any such openings. The dissertation is an empiric contribution, to a sparse regional literature, but it also adds to the growing multi-disciplinary debates on ecological collapses, environmental ruination and the restricted possibilities and escalating consequences of living with and within accelerating extraction and increasing societal heterogeneity within connection. Within these debates, the focus on the interplay between capture fisheries and freshwater cultivation is still underexposed, especially when taking into consideration the monumental shifts in the sources of humanity’s consumption of seafood and the destruction being wrought in the process. A destruction taking place as we speak

Digital découpage: reading and prototyping the material poetics and queer ephemera of the Edwin Morgan scrapbooks, 1931-1966

My thesis takes as its object of study sixteen scrapbooks compiled between 1931 and 1966 by Scots Makar Edwin Morgan (1920-2010), which are currently housed in the University of Glasgow Library Special Collections. I focus on reading the Morgan scrapbooks through two paradigms. Firstly, I approach the scrapbooks as materiallyspecific texts that demand close readings not only of their content, but of their forms and format. Specifically, I read the material practices and poetics of Morgan’s scrapbooking through queer theories of ephemera and temporalities, even in cases where the contents of the scrapbooks are not themselves overtly queer, and argue that these queer poetics extend as an influence throughout Morgan’s broader literary corpus. I also argue that the scrapbooks speak through “language[s] of juxtaposition” (Garvey, Writing with Scissors 131) that can be productively unfolded through close readings informed by Bruno Latour’s sociological theories. Secondly, I approach the Morgan scrapbooks as a test case to demonstrate the value of using digital humanities and visualization methods to engage ephemeral archival items in ‘research through design’ processes. My thesis interprets the Morgan scrapbooks through the creation of custom-built databases and prototypical interfaces that make discoverable the scrapbooks’ rich metadata, while also arguing that Morgan’s scrapbooks are particularly open to such digital interventions due to their reliance on intermediation and their documentation of technological innovations. The three visual prototypes resulting from my project are not intended to reproduce faithfully or replace the scrapbooks, but rather to experiment with how the media specificities of the digital can be put into conversation with Morgan’s materially-complex and technologically-aware scrapbooks. The prototypes also enable explorations of the productive points of contact that exist between scrapbooks, databases, and prototypes as forms of information management and tools of interpretation. Collectively, these two approaches demonstrate the value of, and need for, close readings and innovative digital remediations for scrapbooked (hi)stories like Morgan’s, as well as for many other ephemeral and marginalized material archives

Rise of the curator: archiving the self in contemporary American fiction

Concurrent with a bloom of interest in the archive within academic discourse, an intense cultural fascination with museums, archives, and memorials to the past has flourished within the United States. The ascendency of digital technologies has contributed to and magnified this “turn” by popularising and habituating the archive as a personal memory tool, a key mechanism through which the self is negotiated and fashioned. This dissertation identifies a sustained exploration of the personal archive and its place in contemporary life by American novelists in the twenty-first century. Drawing on theories of the archive and the collection, this dissertation analyses the parameters of the curated self through close-readings of recent novels by five US authors. The first two chapters read Paul Auster’s Sunset Park through trauma theory and Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved through psychoanalysis, noting that in each the system of archiving generates moments of catharsis. The two chapters argue that, for the subject shattered by trauma, archiving activates and fulfils psychoanalytic processes that facilitate the self’s reintegration and prompts a discursive revelation about the painful past. The texts, thus, discover in the archive strategies for achieving, however provisionally, a kind of stability amongst unexpected change. The next two chapters reveal the complicity of archival formations with threats posed in the digital age and articulate alternative forms of self-curation that counteract these pernicious forces. To ward off information overload, E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley advocates the ethical flexibility of “blind” narration that, wending through time, accommodates a broad range of perspectives by refusing to fantasise about its own ultimate and total claim to accuracy. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, meanwhile, diagnoses the cultural anxiety over increasingly invasive surveillance measures. While the novel situates the digital archive, or database, at the heart of this new dataveillance, it recommends investing the self in material collections, where personal meaning is rendered in the inscrutable patois of objects that disintegrate over time. For Egan, the material archive thereby skirts the assumed readability and fixity of data on which this surveillance thrives. The conclusion analyses Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, observing within it and the other novels a consistent concern with archival destruction, erosion, and stagnation. Together, the texts suggest that the personal archive is persistently stalked by disintegration and failure. Yet, within this contemporary moment in which curation has become a widespread means of self-fashioning, they also show how these hazards can be creatively circumvented or actively courted, can threaten the subject or be harnessed by it

On the power and size of extended gemmating P systems

In [3] P systems with gemmation of mobile membranes were examined. It was shown that (extended) systems with eight membranes are as powerful as the Turing machines. Moreover, it was proved that extended gemmating P systems with only pre-dynamical rules are still computationally complete: In this case nine membranes are needed to obtain this computational power. In this paper we improve the above results concerning the size bound of extended gemmating P systems, namely we prove that these systems with at most five membranes (with meta-priority relations and without communication rules) form a class of universal computing devices, while in the case of extended systems with only pre-dynamical rules six membranes are enough to determine any recursively enumerable language