Life is an Adventure! An agent-based reconciliation of narrative and scientific worldviews\ud

The scientific worldview is based on laws, which are supposed to be certain, objective, and independent of time and context. The narrative worldview found in literature, myth and religion, is based on stories, which relate the events experienced by a subject in a particular context with an uncertain outcome. This paper argues that the concept of “agent”, supported by the theories of evolution, cybernetics and complex adaptive systems, allows us to reconcile scientific and narrative perspectives. An agent follows a course of action through its environment with the aim of maximizing its fitness. Navigation along that course combines the strategies of regulation, exploitation and exploration, but needs to cope with often-unforeseen diversions. These can be positive (affordances, opportunities), negative (disturbances, dangers) or neutral (surprises). The resulting sequence of encounters and actions can be conceptualized as an adventure. Thus, the agent appears to play the role of the hero in a tale of challenge and mystery that is very similar to the "monomyth", the basic storyline that underlies all myths and fairy tales according to Campbell [1949]. This narrative dynamics is driven forward in particular by the alternation between prospect (the ability to foresee diversions) and mystery (the possibility of achieving an as yet absent prospect), two aspects of the environment that are particularly attractive to agents. This dynamics generalizes the scientific notion of a deterministic trajectory by introducing a variable “horizon of knowability”: the agent is never fully certain of its further course, but can anticipate depending on its degree of prospect

Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

Design Mechanism as Territorial Strategic Capability

The current exigencies that a territory must faced in order to its’ optimal positioning in future regional competition requires the ability to design the appropriate mechanism which better valorize the territory capability. Such a construct is vital for territorial sustainable development and supposes the creation of a specific body of knowledge from distinctive local resource exploitation and unique value creation and allocation. Territorial mechanism design is a typical management decision about identification, ownership and control of specific strategic capabilities and their combination in a distinctive territorial portfolio. The most difficult responsibility is to allocate the territorial value added which is a source of conflict among territorial components. Our current paper research covers the basics of two complementary territorial pillars-rural and tourism potential and proves the lack of specific design mechanisms which explain the current diminishing value of Galati Braila region. The proposed management system, relying upon territorial control mechanism, will ensure knowledge sharing process via collaborative learning, with the final role of appropriate territorial attractivity signals, reinforcing identity as key factor of territorial attractability. Our paper is fully documented on there years of data analyzing from territorial area of interest. This offers us the necessary empiric contrasting for our proposed solution.territorial disruptive typicity, coordination design mechanism, sustainable development, collaborative learning, territorial change

Life in 2.5D: Animal Movement in the Trees

The complex, interconnected, and non-contiguous nature of canopy environments present unique cognitive, locomotor, and sensory challenges to their animal inhabitants. Animal movement through forest canopies is constrained; unlike most aquatic or aerial habitats, the three-dimensional space of a forest canopy is not fully realized or available to the animals within it. Determining how the unique constraints of arboreal habitats shape the ecology and evolution of canopy-dwelling animals is key to fully understanding forest ecosystems. With emerging technologies, there is now the opportunity to quantify and map tree connectivity, and to embed the fine-scale horizontal and vertical position of moving animals into these networks of branching pathways. Integrating detailed multi-dimensional habitat structure and animal movement data will enable us to see the world from the perspective of an arboreal animal. This synthesis will shed light on fundamental aspects of arboreal animals’ cognition and ecology, including how they navigate landscapes of risk and reward and weigh energetic trade-offs, as well as how their environment shapes their spatial cognition and their social dynamics

Spatial Reconstruction of Biological Trees from Point Cloud

Trees are complex systems in nature whose topology and geometry ar

Firm Tunrover and the Rate of Macroeconomic Growth - Simulating the Macroeconomic Effects of Schumpeterian Creative Destruction

The positive effects of new innovative entry and fast and efficient allocation of resources are balanced against the efficiency of price signaling in markets in a non-linear micro based simulation model of an Experimentally Organized Economy (EOE). In this model increasingly rapid reallocation of resources over markets, moved by innovative new entry and competitive exit (the rate of firm turnover) generates faster growth in output, but eventually, if too fast, is shown to affect the reliability of price signaling in markets and to raise the frequency of investment mistakes. Beyond a certain level of the rate of firm turnover the aggregate effects at the macro level, therefore, turn negative. This optimal growth trajectory depends on the balance between the rates of entry and exit and on the performance of new firms compared to incumbents, their size compared to incumbents and the variation in the same characteristics.Business Mistakes; Economic Systems Stability; Endogenous Growth; Experimentally Organized Economy (EOE); Firm Turnover