The power of writing, a pebble hierarchy and a narrative for the teaching of Automata Theory

In this work we study pebble automata. Those automata constitute an infinite hierarchy of discrete models of computation. The hierarchy begins at the level of finite state automata (0-pebble automata) and approaches the model of onetape Turing machines. Thus, it can be argued that it is a complete hierarchy that covers, in a continuous way, all the models of automata that are important in the theory of computation. We investigate the use of this hierarchy as a narrative for the teaching of automata theory. We also investigate some fundamental questions concerning the power of pebble automata.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

The power of writing, a pebble hierarchy and a narrative for the teaching of Automata Theory

In this work we study pebble automata. Those automata constitute an infinite hierarchy of discrete models of computation. The hierarchy begins at the level of finite state automata (0-pebble automata) and approaches the model of onetape Turing machines. Thus, it can be argued that it is a complete hierarchy that covers, in a continuous way, all the models of automata that are important in the theory of computation. We investigate the use of this hierarchy as a narrative for the teaching of automata theory. We also investigate some fundamental questions concerning the power of pebble automata.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Fictional Practices of Spirituality I: Interactive Media

"Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video games and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations

Gatherings in biosemiotics

http://www.ester.ee/record=b2860486*es

Machines at play: The attraction of automation

Taking as its starting point the ubiquitous nature of automated technology, this research asks how play may be used in an antagonistic form against the regimentation of machines but, conversely, may also be employed to instrumentalise them. The work undertaken specifically focuses on how play (a quality considered here as intrinsic to human culture and nature following Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens) can expose issues of control, agency and authority within a technological context. While automated machines have become increasingly complex over time (synchronous to the trickle-down availability of computing devices to the everyday consumer), the understanding of their function and the means through which they produce, represent or declare forms of ‘knowledge’ are today even more opaque. An automated machine—thought of here as being any set of infinitely repeatable, programmed procedures—raises anxiety as to the human condition. Machina ludens, the figure of the playing machine that I propose, takes this model a step further and uses ‘attractive’ effects to produce (what Huizinga terms) “false play” so as to hide the ramification of any social or political design by its engineer. Following Vilém Flusser and Bruno Latour’s notion of the “black box”, how then can an artist open up an automated machine and its script in order to declare this? The research is undertaken through an interlinked practical and written component. These components use a methodology that undertakes an analysis of the play-element, alongside a technological/engineering analysis of the machine-element in culture. In practice, following a lineage of artists who have similarly made use of technology in the production of machines in their artwork, from Jean Tinguely and the E.A.T. group to Harold Cohen’s AARON, the research examines various forms of the ‘art machine’. Both the written and practical works use the tension (or contention) between disciplines, the researcher overtly taking the position of being simultaneously engineer and artist. As such, this research is a re-reading of Huizinga’s understanding of the play-element of culture through a contemporary, technological lens that bridges the gap between a humanities/philosophical approach and an engineering approach, applying this to contemporary issues surrounding automated ‘art machines’

The Acrobatic Body in Ancient Greek Society

In this thesis I collate the textual, artistic, and material evidence for acrobatics in sport and spectacle in Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greece, and analyze gymnastic performances with regard to their respective socio-cultural contexts. I develop the theoretical perspective that all body movement is socially qualified in order to demonstrate how the extreme manipulations of an acrobatic body carry particular social meaning: in sport, the male acrobatic body approaches superhumanism, and in spectacle the female acrobatic body approaches subhumanism. I argue, on the one hand, that men’s tumbling took place at the early Panathenaia festival in Athens, both in martial dances and in competitions featuring springboards and equestrian acrobatics. Artistic representations emphasize a participant’s controlled aerialism while he wears armour, and thereby express his prowess as a warrior-athlete. On the other hand, acrobatics was also a kind of spectacular ‘wonder-making’, and I argue that the abnormal physical alterity shown by women’s acrobatic bodies rendered the performer a marginalized and unnatural ‘other’. I use two particular feats, namely, tumbling among upright swords and acrobatic stunts on a potter’s wheel, as case studies for my argument that the spectacular acrobat embodied her social inferiority. In this thesis I offer the first complete treatment of Greek acrobatics in which careful consideration is given to the relationship between social realities, text, and art. It is also the first to use sociological theories of the body as a method for approaching ancient Greek representations of acrobats’ extreme physicality

Re-situating the body : history, myth, and the contemporary women's writings in English and Japanese

This thesis analyses contemporary literary attempts by Western and Japanese writers to defy patriarchal control over the female body. Situating the female body through myth, religion, and various forms of art as "grotesque" is Western culture's means of control over nature. Contrary to this, Japanese culture originally had more harmonious concepts of the mind and body, but was transformed into a similar pattern to that of the West. During the period of cultural transformation, one example of literary resistance by woman writers appeared as the Tale of Genji, arguably the first novel in the world, which uses an ambiguous narrative method and the concept of the grotesque body. Contemporary women's writings still employ similar strategies, though more direct and effective. From the beginning of the twentieth century and through the development of consumer society, more bodies are regarded as "grotesque" but there are also cultural exchanges in the world which seek to subvert such tendencies. Despite unmistakable cultural differences between western and Japanese representations, they often influence each other and draw on similar strategies. Both use the motif of the grotesque body to create a reverse discourse, and to re-situate the body, as the symbol of the retrieval of a "natural" and sexual body which is found in Japanese Myth. English and Japanese women writers also manoeuvre to strike a balance between fantastic and more conventional narrative modes. Though the majority of Japanese writers are still working within a broadly realistic mode, those writers analysed here use fantastic mode as a weapon of formal and ideological subversion. The writers analysed include Angela Carter (who lived in Japan), Margaret Atwood, Fay Weldon, Muriel Spark, Yuko Matsumoto, Rieko Matsuura, Yoriko Shono, Yumiko Kurahashi. Their work is situated in relation to earlier imaginative writing, myth, legend and examples of the Gothic mode

Blasphemous bodies: Transgressive morality as cultural interrogation in romance fiction of the long nineteenth century

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on May 13, 2011Dissertation advisor: Jennifer PhegleyVitaIncludes bibliographical references (p. 291-312)Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dept of English Language and Literature and Center for Religious Studies. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2011The long nineteenth century was characterized by advances in medical, biological and technological knowledge that often complicated definitions of human life and blurred the lines between life and death. These changes impacted both beliefs and practices surrounding the human body and epistemological concepts relating to human nature and the cosmos. British fiction of the period participated in an interdiscursive tradition that was deeply informed by these discussions of the body. Romance writers in particular often engaged with these ideas in imaginative and innovative ways. Among the more provocative forms of engagement with these ideas is one that arises among romance writers who mingled new scientific knowledge with a popular tradition of physical immortality. These writers produced an array of texts treating a theme I have identified as “amortality”, a form of bodily immortality that is characterized by a transgression of death's bounds either through artificial prolongevity or reanimation. These texts posit a normative standard of mortality, and the amortal characters—figures who have avoided or escaped the grave—are presented as disruptive and often destructive, their unnatural or “blasphemous” bodies locating them outside the bounds of the religious, medical and/or socio-political orthodoxy and allowing them to serve as a locus for social examination and critique. The Western cultural imagination has long found immortality an intriguing and problematic subject for exploration. Both idealized and horrific visions of immortality have served as a locus for reflecting, legitimating, and contesting cultural values. Amortality continues and complicates this tradition of immortality as a cultural signifier. Arguing that amortality or transgressive mortality serves to mark the limits of the permissible—socially, politically, medically or religiously—whether in order to reinforce and naturalize those limits or to illuminate them as arbitrary and unjust, I examine these characters and texts as participants in the social issues of the time. Using an eclectic combination of approaches, including literary close reading, genre analysis, feminist criticism, and post-colonial theory, I examine a range of canonical, moderately well-known and unfamiliar texts and authors. Texts examined include William Godwin's St. Leon (1799), Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni (1842), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and “The Mortal Immortal” (1833), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), Jane Webb Loudon's The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), H. Rider Haggard's She (1887) and Ayesha: The Return of She (1904-5), and Ludwig Achim von Arnim's Isabella of Egypt (1812). Despite the significance of embodied immortality as an imaginative construct, this aspect of romance fiction has been neglected or treated as a peripheral characteristic of the genre, adding to the uncanny effect of the texts, but without critical significance. My study attempts to rectify this oversight by demonstrating the prevalence of this motif throughout the period and its adaptability to a wide range of critical purposes.College of Arts and SciencesIntroduction: intimations of amortality -- The flawed ideal: immortality, irony, impatience and the critique of revolutionary change -- Posthumous lives: amortality and the problems of womanhood -- Romances of the fourth dimension: Amortality and a politics of womanhood -- Living words: amortality, materialism and homo logos -- Conclusion: viewing the tapestrymonographi

2014 GREAT Day Program

SUNY Geneseo’s Eighth Annual GREAT Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1008/thumbnail.jp