Unified Analysis of Collapsible and Ordered Pushdown Automata via Term Rewriting

We model collapsible and ordered pushdown systems with term rewriting, by encoding higher-order stacks and multiple stacks into trees. We show a uniform inverse preservation of recognizability result for the resulting class of term rewriting systems, which is obtained by extending the classic saturation-based approach. This result subsumes and unifies similar analyses on collapsible and ordered pushdown systems. Despite the rich literature on inverse preservation of recognizability for term rewrite systems, our result does not seem to follow from any previous study.Comment: in Proc. of FRE

Evolution of Biological Complexity

In order to make a case for or against a trend in the evolution of complexity in biological evolution, complexity needs to be both rigorously defined and measurable. A recent information-theoretic (but intuitively evident) definition identifies genomic complexity with the amount of information a sequence stores about its environment. We investigate the evolution of genomic complexity in populations of digital organisms and monitor in detail the evolutionary transitions that increase complexity. We show that because natural selection forces genomes to behave as a natural ``Maxwell Demon'', within a fixed environment genomic complexity is forced to increase.Comment: LaTeX 19 pages, incl. 4 fig

Undead Pedagogy: How a Zombie Simulation Can Contribute to Teaching International Relations

A global zombie outbreak constitutes a hypothetical event in world politics that could likely lead to the collapse of civilization. At the same time, the very threat of such a global catastrophe offers a unique experimental terrain on which to investigate various possible changes and developments in human interaction in social, economic, and political processes. In this article, we discuss our experience with using a global zombie outbreak-based simulation in International Relations teaching and our attempt at measuring the learning outcomes, taking our point of departure in the existing literature on active learning. Following an outline of the objectives, setup, and parameters of the simulation, we evaluate the results of the survey we conducted of the student participants and discuss the learning outcomes discerned

Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

‘Postmodernism’ was the final instalment of a 12-year series of V&A exhibitions exploring 20th-century design. It examined a diverse collection of creative practices in art, architecture, design, fashion, graphics, film, performance and pop music/video, which the curators, Pavitt and Adamson (V&A/RCA), identified under the common theme of ‘postmodernism’. The exhibition assessed the rise and decline of postmodern strategies in art and style cultures of the period, exploring their radical impact as well as their inextricable links with the economics and effects of late-capitalist culture. The exhibition comprised over 250 objects, including large-scale reconstructions and archive film/video footage, drawn from across Europe, Japan and the USA. It was the first exhibition to bring together this range of material and to foreground the significance of pop music and performance in the development of postmodernism. Pavitt originated and co-curated the exhibition with Adamson. They shared intellectual ownership of the project and equal responsibility for writing and editing the accompanying 320-page book (including a 40,000-word jointly written introduction), but divided research responsibilities according to geography and subject. The research was conducted over four years, with Pavitt leading on European and British material. This involved interviewing artists, designers and architects active in the period and working with collections and archives across Europe. The research led to the acquisition of c.80 objects for the V&A’s permanent collections, making it one of the most significant public collections of late-20th-century design in the world. The exhibition was critically reviewed worldwide. For the Independent, ‘bright ideas abound at the V&A’s lucid show’ (2011). It attracted 115,000 visitors at the V&A (15% over the Museum’s target) and travelled in 2012 to MART Rovereto, Italy (50,000 visitors) and Landesmuseum Zürich, Switzerland (70,000 visitors). Pavitt was invited to speak about the exhibition in the UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (2010-12)

Fusing Both Arts to an Inseparable Unity: Frank O\u27Hara as a Visual Artist

Frank O’Hara, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a published poet in the 1950s and 60s, was an exemplary yet enigmatic figure in both the literary and art worlds. While he published poetry, wrote art criticism, and curated exhibitions—on Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock—he also collaborated on numerous projects with visual artists, including Larry Rivers, Michael Goldberg, Grace Hartigan, Joe Brainard, Jane Freilicher, and Norman Bluhm. Scholars who study O’Hara fail to recognize his work with the aforementioned visual artists, only considering him a “Painterly Poet” or a “Poet Among Painters,” but never a poet and a visual artist. Through W.J.T. Mitchell’s “imagetext” model, I apply a hybridized literary and visual analysis to understand O’Hara’s artistic work in a new way. I highlight O’Hara’s previously under-acknowledge artistic collaborations that secure his place as both a poet and an artist

Using a categorisation structure to understand interaction in children’s books

Children’s books can vary greatly in the type of and depth of interaction that is required from the reader. The types of interaction demanded by different types of books can be explored using contrasting paradigms. Previously Timpany & Vanderschantz (2012) proposed a categorisation of interactive children’s books that used two continuums that took into consideration Physical Enhancement and Content Sequencing. This paper looks at those categorisations made by Timpany & Vanderschantz (2012) and considers how the multitude of formats addresses either the physical or intellectual aspects of children’s reading and how this then may be used to engage the reader. To do this, a database of 132 books was audited to assess the interactivity of these books against those categorisation systems. The range of books surveyed is discussed in terms of what methods are used to create the interaction within each of the interactivity levels and across types of books. Findings from this audit demonstrate interesting interactions between age, physical enhancement versus content sequencing, and the relationship of these to mechanisms for interactivity such as paper engineering, illustration and story structure. The majority of the books in the sample have no interactive qualities on one of the two-categorisation scales. Physically enhanced books were marginally more highly represented on the scale at higher levels of interactivity. Counter intuitively, the physically interactive pop up books were seen to fall predominantly in lower categories (1 or 2) for physical enhancement, while books requiring image search, an intellectual activity, were also predominantly in the lower categories (1 or 2) for content sequencing