16 research outputs found

    Migraine

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    For centuries, people have talked of a powerful bodily disorder called migraine, which currently affects about a billion people around the world. Yet until now, the rich history of this condition has barely been told. In Migraine, award-winning historian Katherine Foxhall reveals the ideas and methods that ordinary people and medical professionals have used to describe, explain, and treat migraine since the Middle Ages. Touching on classical theories of humoral disturbance and medieval bloodletting, Foxhall also describes early modern herbal remedies, the emergence of neurology, and evolving practices of therapeutic experimentation. Throughout the book, Foxhall persuasively argues that our current knowledge of migraine's neurobiology is founded on a centuries-long social, cultural, and medical history. This history, she demonstrates, continues to profoundly shape our knowledge of this complicated disease, our attitudes toward people who have migraine, and the sometimes drastic measures that we take to address pain. Migraine is an intimate look at how cultural attitudes and therapeutic practices have changed radically in response to medical and pharmaceutical developments. Foxhall draws on a wealth of previously unexamined sources, including medieval manuscripts, early-modern recipe books, professional medical journals, hospital case notes, newspaper advertisements, private diaries, consultation letters, artworks, poetry, and YouTube videos. Deeply researched and beautifully written, this fascinating and accessible study of one of our most common, disabling—and yet often dismissed—disorders will appeal to physicians, historians, scholars in medical humanities, and people living with migraine alike

    Estimating Sink Parameters of Stochastic Functional-Structural Plant Models Using Organic Series-Continuous and Rhythmic Development

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    Functional-structural plant models (FSPMs) generally simulate plant development and growth at the level of individual organs (leaves, flowers, internodes, etc.). Parameters that are not directly measurable, such as the sink strength of organs, can be estimated inversely by fitting the weights of organs along an axis (organic series) with the corresponding model output. To accommodate intracanopy variability among individual plants, stochastic FSPMs have been built by introducing the randomness in plant development; this presents a challenge in comparing model output and experimental data in parameter estimation since the plant axis contains individual organs with different amounts and weights. To achieve model calibration, the interaction between plant development and growth is disentangled by first computing the occurrence probabilities of each potential site of phytomer, as defined in the developmental model (potential structure). On this basis, the mean organic series is computed analytically to fit the organ-level target data. This process is applied for plants with continuous and rhythmic development simulated with different development parameter sets. The results are verified by Monte-Carlo simulation. Calibration tests are performed both in silico and on real plants. The analytical organic series are obtained for both continuous and rhythmic cases, and they match well with the results from Monte-Carlo simulation, and vice versa. This fitting process works well for both the simulated and real data sets; thus, the proposed method can solve the source-sink functions of stochastic plant architectures through a simplified approach to plant sampling. This work presents a generic method for estimating the sink parameters of a stochastic FSPM using statistical organ-level data, and it provides a method for sampling stems. The current work breaks a bottleneck in the application of FSPMs to real plants, creating the opportunity for broad applications

    La città, il viaggio, il turismo: Percezione, produzione e trasformazione

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    [English]:The city as a destination of the journey in his long evolution throughout history: a basic human need, an event aimed at knowledge, to education, to business and trade, military and religious conquests, but also related to redundancies for the achievement of mere physical or spiritual salvation. In the frame of one of the world's most celebrated historical city, the cradle of Greek antiquity, myth and beauty, travel timeless destination for culture and leisure, and today, more than ever, strongly tending to the conservation and development of their own identity, this collection of essays aims to provide, in the tradition of AISU studies, a further opportunity for reflection and exchange between the various disciplines related to urban history./ [Italiano]:La città come meta del viaggio nella sua lunga evoluzione nel corso della storia: un bisogno primario dell'uomo, un evento finalizzato alla conoscenza, all'istruzione, agli affari e agli scambi commerciali, alle conquiste militari o religiose, ma anche legato agli esodi per il conseguimento della mera salvezza fisica o spirituale. Nella cornice di una delle città storiche più celebrate al mondo, culla dell'antichità greca, del mito e della bellezza, meta intramontabile di viaggi di cultura e di piacere, e oggi, più che mai, fortemente protesa alla conservazione e alla valorizzazione della propria identità, questa raccolta di saggi intende offrire, nel solco della tradizione di studi dell'AISU, un'ulteriore occasione di riflessione e di confronto tra i più svariati ambiti disciplinari attinenti alla storia urbana

    Unconventional programming: non-programmable systems

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    Die Forschung aus dem Bereich der unkonventionellen und natürlichen Informationsverarbeitungssysteme verspricht kontrollierbare Rechenprozesse in ungewöhnlichen Medien zu realisieren, zum Beispiel auf der molekularen Ebene oder in Bakterienkolonien. Vielversprechende Eigenschaften dieser Systeme sind das nichtlineare Verhalten und der hohe Verknüpfungsgrad der beteiligten Komponenten in Analogie zu Neuronen im Gehirn. Da aber Programmierung meist auf Prinzipien wie Modularisierung, Kapselung und Vorhersagbarkeit beruht sind diese Systeme oft schwer- bzw. unprogrammierbar. Im Gegensatz zu vielen Arbeiten über unkonventionelle Rechensysteme soll in dieser Arbeit aber nicht hauptsächlich nach neuen rechnenden Systemen und Anwendungen dieser gesucht werden. Stattdessen konzentriert sich diese Dissertation auf unkonventionelle Programmieransätze, die sowohl für unkonventionelle Computer als auch für herkommliche digitale Rechner neue Perspektiven eröffnen sollen. Hauptsächlich in Bezug auf ein Modell künstlicher chemischer Neuronen werden Ansätze für unkonventionelle Programmierverfahren, basierend auf Evolutionären Algorithmen, Informationstheorie und Selbstorganisation bis hin zur Selbstassemblierung untersucht. Ein spezielles Augenmerk liegt dabei auf dem Problem der Symbolkodierung: Oft gibt es mehrere oder sogar unendlich viele Möglichkeiten, Informationen in den Zuständen eines komplexen dynamischen Systems zu kodieren. In Neuronalen Netzen gibt es unter anderem die Spikefrequenz aber auch Populationskodes. In Abhängigkeit von den weiteren Eigenschaften des Systems, beispielsweise von der Informationsverarbeitungsaufgabe und dem gewünschten Eingabe-Ausgabeverhalten dürften sich verschiedene Kodierungen als unterschiedlich nützlich erweisen. Daher werden hier Methoden betrachtet um die verschiedene Symbolkodierungmethoden zu evaluieren, zu analysieren und um nach neuen, geeigneten Kodierungen zu suchen.Unconventional and natural computing research offers controlled information modification processes in uncommon media, for example on the molecular scale or in bacteria colonies. Promising aspects of such systems are often the non-linear behavior and the high connectivity of the involved information processing components in analogy to neurons in the nervous system. Unfortunately, such properties make the system behavior hard to understand, hard to predict and thus also hard to program with common engineering principles like modularization and composition, leading to the term of non-programmable systems. In contrast to many unconventional computing works that are often focused on finding novel computing substrates and potential applications, unconventional programming approaches for such systems are the theme of this thesis: How can new programming concepts open up new perspectives for unconventional but hopefully also for traditional, digital computing systems? Mostly based on a model of artificial wet chemical neurons, different unconventional programming approaches from evolutionary algorithms, information theory, self-organization and self-assembly are explored. A particular emphasis is given on the problem of symbol encodings: Often there are multiple or even an unlimited number of possibilities to encode information in the phase space of dynamical systems, e.g. spike frequencies or population coding in neural networks. But different encodings will probably be differently useful, dependent on the system properties, the information transformation task and the desired connectivity to other systems. Hence methods are investigated that can evaluate, analyse as well as identify suitable symbol encoding schemes

    A Practical Hardware Implementation of Systemic Computation

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    It is widely accepted that natural computation, such as brain computation, is far superior to typical computational approaches addressing tasks such as learning and parallel processing. As conventional silicon-based technologies are about to reach their physical limits, researchers have drawn inspiration from nature to found new computational paradigms. Such a newly-conceived paradigm is Systemic Computation (SC). SC is a bio-inspired model of computation. It incorporates natural characteristics and defines a massively parallel non-von Neumann computer architecture that can model natural systems efficiently. This thesis investigates the viability and utility of a Systemic Computation hardware implementation, since prior software-based approaches have proved inadequate in terms of performance and flexibility. This is achieved by addressing three main research challenges regarding the level of support for the natural properties of SC, the design of its implied architecture and methods to make the implementation practical and efficient. Various hardware-based approaches to Natural Computation are reviewed and their compatibility and suitability, with respect to the SC paradigm, is investigated. FPGAs are identified as the most appropriate implementation platform through critical evaluation and the first prototype Hardware Architecture of Systemic computation (HAoS) is presented. HAoS is a novel custom digital design, which takes advantage of the inbuilt parallelism of an FPGA and the highly efficient matching capability of a Ternary Content Addressable Memory. It provides basic processing capabilities in order to minimize time-demanding data transfers, while the optional use of a CPU provides high-level processing support. It is optimized and extended to a practical hardware platform accompanied by a software framework to provide an efficient SC programming solution. The suggested platform is evaluated using three bio-inspired models and analysis shows that it satisfies the research challenges and provides an effective solution in terms of efficiency versus flexibility trade-off

    Library buildings around the world

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    "Library Buildings around the World" is a survey based on researches of several years. The objective was to gather library buildings on an international level starting with 1990

    The Adaptive City

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    Shifting Interfaces: art research at the intersections of live performance and technology

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    Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/809 on 08.20.2017 by CS (TIS)This collection of published works is an outcome of my practice-led inter-disciplinary collaborative artistic research into deepening understanding of creative process in the field of contemporary dance. It comprises thirty written works published from 1999 to 2007 in various formats and platforms. This collection is framed by a methodological discussion that provides insight into how this research has intersected over time with diverse fields of practice including contemporary dance, digital and new media arts and non-art domains such as cognitive and social science. Fields are understood in the context of this research to be largely constituted out of the expert practices of individual collaborators. This research starts from an interest in the Impact of new media technologies on dance making/ choreography. The collection of works show evidence, established in the first two publications, of an evolving engagement with two concepts related to this interest: (1) the 'algorithm' as a process-level connection or bridge between dance composition and computation; (2) the empirical study of movement embedded as a 'knowledge base' in the practices of both computer animation and dance and thus forming a special correspondence between them. This collection provides evidence of this research through a period of community-building amongst artists using new media technologies in performance, and culminates in the identification of an emerging 'community of practice' coming together around the formation of a unique body of knowledge pertaining to dance. The late 1990s New Media Art movement provided a supportive context for Important peer-to-peer encounters with creators and users of software tools and platforms in the context of inter-disciplinary art-making. A growing interest in software programming as a creative practice opened up fresh perspectives on possible connections with dance making. It became clear that software's utility alone, including artistic uses of software, was a limited conception. This was the background thinking that informed the first major shift in the research towards the design of software that might augment the creative process of expert choreographers and dancers. This shift from software use to its design, framed by a focus on the development of tools to support dance creation, also provided strong rationale to deepen the research into dance making processes. In the second major phase of the research presented here, scientific study is brought collaboratively to bear on questions related to choreographic practice. This lead to a better understanding of ways in which dancers and choreographers, as 'thinking bodies', interact with their design tools and each other in the context of creation work. In addition to this collection, outcomes of this research are traceable to other published papers and art works it has given rise to. Less easily measureable, but just as valuable, are the sustained relations between individuals and groups behind the 'community of practice' now recognised for its development of unique formats for bringing choreographic ideas and processes into contact, now and in the future, with both general audiences and other specialist practices

    An Algebra of Quantum Processes

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    We introduce an algebra qCCS of pure quantum processes in which no classical data is involved, communications by moving quantum states physically are allowed, and computations is modeled by super-operators. An operational semantics of qCCS is presented in terms of (non-probabilistic) labeled transition systems. Strong bisimulation between processes modeled in qCCS is defined, and its fundamental algebraic properties are established, including uniqueness of the solutions of recursive equations. To model sequential computation in qCCS, a reduction relation between processes is defined. By combining reduction relation and strong bisimulation we introduce the notion of strong reduction-bisimulation, which is a device for observing interaction of computation and communication in quantum systems. Finally, a notion of strong approximate bisimulation (equivalently, strong bisimulation distance) and its reduction counterpart are introduced. It is proved that both approximate bisimilarity and approximate reduction-bisimilarity are preserved by various constructors of quantum processes. This provides us with a formal tool for observing robustness of quantum processes against inaccuracy in the implementation of its elementary gates
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