Beyond the Circle of Life

It seems certain to me that I will die and stay dead. By “I”, I mean me, Greg Nixon, this person, this self-identity. I am so intertwined with the chiasmus of lives, bodies, ecosystems, symbolic intersubjectivity, and life on this particular planet that I cannot imagine this identity continuing alone without them. However, one may survive one’s life by believing in universal awareness, perfection, and the peace that passes all understanding. Perhaps, we bring this back with us to the Source from which we began, changing it, enriching it. Once we have lived – if we don’t choose the eternal silence of oblivion by life denial, vanity, indifference, or simple weariness – the Source learns and we awaken within it. Awareness, consciousness, is universal – it comes with the territory – so maybe you will be one of the few prepared to become unexpectedly enlightened after the loss of body and self. You may discover your own apotheosis – something you always were, but after a lifetime of primate experience, now much more. Since you are of the Source and since you have changed from life experience and yet retained the dream of ultimate awakening, plus you have brought those chaotic emotions and memories back to the Source with you (though no longer yours), your life & memories will have mattered. Those who awaken beyond the death of self will have changed Reality

Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences: reincarnation of a 50 year old State Observatory of Nainital

The fifty year old State Observatory, well known as U.P. State Observatory till the formation of Uttaranchal in November 2000, was reincarnated on March 22, 2004 as Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences with acronym ARIES, an autonomous institute, under the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India. The growth of academic and technical activities and new mandate of the Institute are briefly described. In early 60's, the Institute was one of the 12 centres established by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, USA, all over the globe but the only centre in India for imaging artificial earth satellites. Commensurating with its observing capabilities, the Institute started a number of front-line research programmes during the last decade, e.g., optical follow up observations of GRB afterglows, radio and space borne astronomical resources, intra-night optical variability in active galactic nuclei as well as gravitational microlensing and milli-magnitude variations in the rapidly oscillating peculiar A type stars. As a part of atmospheric studies, characterisation of aerosol at an altitude of about 2 km is going on since 2002. ARIES has plans for establishing modern observing facilities equipped with latest backend instruments in the area of both astrophysics and atmospheric science. Formation of ARIES, therefore augurs well for the overall development of astrophysics and atmospheric science in India

A sequentially constructive circuit semantics for Esterel

Static Single Assignment (SSA) is an established concept that facilitates various program optimizations. However, it is typically restricted to sequential programming. We present an approach that extends SSA for concurrent, reactive programming, specifically for the synchronous language Esterel. This extended SSA transformation expands the class of programs that can be compiled by existing Esterel compilers without causality problems. It also offers a new, efficient solution for the well-studied signal reincarnation problem. Finally, our approach rules out speculation/backtracking, unlike the recently proposed sequentially constructive model of computation

Learning and Visceral Temptation in Dynamic Saving Experiments

This paper tests two explanations for apparent undersaving in life cycle models: bounded rationality and a preference for immediacy. Each was addressed in a separate experimental study. In the first study, subjects saved too little initially—providing evidence for bounded rationality—but learned to save optimally within four repeated life cycles. In the second study, thirsty subjects who consume beverage sips immediately, rather than with a delay, show greater relative overspending, consistent with quasi-hyperbolic discounting models. The parameter estimates of overspending obtained from the second study, but not the first, are in range of several empirical studies of saving (with an estimated β = 0.6–0.7)

Corporate culture in Japan – a Western view

Kultura korporacyjna w każdym kraju stanowi pochodną kultury narodowej. Autorka wskazuje na fakt, że znajomość kultury kraju, z którym utrzymywane są stosunki ekonomiczne, kontakty handlowe i inwestycyjne, jest nie do przecenienia. Ponad 300 japońskich firm na stałe wpisało się już w gospodarczy krajobraz Polski, dając zatrudnienie więcej niż 40 tys. pracowników, dlatego też problematyka artykułu jest tak istotna. W tekście zostały przedstawione poglądy naukowców z dziedziny teorii organizacji, socjologii, psychologii, m.in. Geerta Hofstede, Alfonsa Trompenaarsa oraz ekspertów z dziedziny praktyki gospodarczej (Denise Pirrotti-Hummel). G. Hofstede, w pionierskich badaniach, prześledził opinie ponad 1600 respondentów – pracowników IBM z 70 krajów. Pytania dotyczyły „cech narodowych”, zdaniem Hofstede, różnicujących poszczególne kultury biznesu. Jako determinanty tych różnic uwzględnił: hierarchiczność struktur i stosunek do kwestii nierówności społecznych, postawy wobec ryzyka i niepewności, indywidualizm (priorytet jednostki albo grupy), a także stopień maskulinizacji społeczeństwa. W toku późniejszych badań autor dodał do wyżej wymienionych „papierków lakmusowych” pragmatyzm oraz samoocenę. Z kolei A. Trompenaars w latach 1886–1993, na podstawie ankiet skierowanych do 15 tysięcy menedżerów z 50 krajów, określił, jego zdaniem, zestaw najważniejszych cech specyficznych, przesądzających o odmienności narodowych kultur korporacyjnych. W artykule omówiono niektóre z nich: (1) uniwersalizm kontra partykularyzm; (2) opanowanie kontra emocjonalność; (3) ocena ex post według faktycznych osiągnięć kontra przypisanie znaczenia ex ante; (4) synchroniczność kontra sekwencyjność w pojmowaniu czasu. I wreszcie ostatni z wymienionych na wstępie badaczy kultury biznesowej, Denise Pirrotti-Hummel, zwraca uwagę na szczególne, jej zdaniem, cechy japońskich partnerów gospodarczych: długi horyzont podejmowania decyzji (planowanie), pełna akceptacja zasady starszeństwa, czy niewerbalny charakter komunikacji międzyludzkiej. Autorka artykułu nie tylko zapoznaje czytelnika z wieloma determinantami zachowań Japończyków w biznesie, ale i poddaje krytycznej analizie konsekwencje, jakie mogą one mieć dla przebiegu negocjacji w dziedzinie gospodarki oraz w procesach decyzyjnych.The organizers of the conference wish to acknowledge the National Bank of Poland’s generous funding of this publication

Graphing the Self: An application of graph theory to memetic self-mapping in psychotherapy

The benefits of using mathematical concepts are frequently overlooked in qualitative inquiry. In this paper Graph Theory (GT) is applied to a series of two dimensional representations of the self used to illustrate the therapeutic progress of a suicidal youth and to a young mother coping with depression.  These self-maps are shown to be equivalent to GT networks with the memes of the self-maps corresponding to GT vertices, the pair-wise relationships between memes corresponding to GT edges, and the time evolution of the self-mapping diagrams corresponding to GT sequence analysis. Consideration is given to the notion that the self so mapped functions as a small world network with emotive psychological triggers serving as “long range” connections. The advantages of using an interactive Graphical User Interface and GT metrics for client centered therapy and future research applications in social science are discussed

SyncCharts in C

Statecharts are a well-established visual formalism for the description of reactive real-time systems. The SyncCharts dialect of Statecharts, which builds on the synchrony hypothesis, has a sound formal basis and ensures deterministic behavior. This report presents SyncCharts in C (SC), an approach on how to seamlessly and efficiently embed SyncCharts constructs into a conventional imperative programming language. SC offers deterministic concurrency and preemption via a simulation of multi-threading, inspired by reactive processing. SC can be used as a regular programming language, requiring just a C compiler; no special tools or hardware are needed. However SC's conciseness, completeness and semantic closeness to SyncCharts make it an attractive candidate in a number of other scenarios: 1) as an intermediate target language for synthesizing graphical SyncChart models into executable code, in a more traceable manner than the traditional path through Esterel; 2) as instruction set architecture for programming precision timed (PRET) or reactive architectures; or 3) as a virtual machine instruction set. A reference implementation of SC, based on light-weight C macros, is available as open source code