Why don't the modules dominate - Investigating the Structure of a Well-Known Modularity-Inducing Problem Domain

Wagner's modularity inducing problem domain is a key contribution to the study of the evolution of modularity, including both evolutionary theory and evolutionary computation. We study its behavior under classical genetic algorithms. Unlike what we seem to observe in nature, the emergence of modularity is highly conditional and dependent, for example, on the eagerness of search. In nature, modular solutions generally dominate populations, whereas in this domain, modularity, when it emerges, is a relatively rare variant. Emergence of modularity depends heavily on random fluctuations in the fitness function, with a randomly varied but unchanging fitness function, modularity evolved far more rarely. Interestingly, high-fitness non-modular solutions could frequently be converted into even-higher-fitness modular solutions by manually removing all inter-module edges. Despite careful exploration, we do not yet have a full explanation of why the genetic algorithm was unable to find these better solutions

Music, emotion and auditory processing : towards new models of musical expression and cognition.

This study represents an interdisciplinary investigation of music cognition from both theoretical and empirical perspectives drawing principally from research in neuropsychology, and philosophy. The main aim of the thesis is to produce a coherent model of music cognition, reconciling empirical findings, current accounts of musical expression, and broader cognitive models. With this aim the investigation divides into two parts: first, examining musical expression of emotion, and second, exploring music cognition as a whole and its place within global models of cognition. A particular focus is the subdivision and independence of music subsystems, notably the separation of music and language and to what extent these are functionally, and neuro-anatomically separate cognitive systems

Altruistically Inclined?: The Behavioral Sciences, Evolutionary Theory, and the Origins of Reciprocity

Altruistically Inclined? examines the implications of recent research in the natural sciences for two important social scientific approaches to individual behavior: the economic/rational choice approach and the sociological/anthropological. It considers jointly two controversial and related ideas: the operation of group selection within early human evolutionary processes and the likelihood of modularity—domain-specific adaptations in our cognitive mechanisms and behavioral predispositions. Experimental research shows that people will often cooperate in one-shot prisoner\u27s dilemma (PD) games and reject positive offers in ultimatum games, contradicting commonly accepted notions of rationality. Upon first appearance, predispositions to behave in this fashion could not have been favored by natural selection operating only at the level of the individual organism. Emphasizing universal and variable features of human culture, developing research on how the brain functions, and refinements of thinking about levels of selection in evolutionary processes, Alexander J. Field argues that humans are born with the rudiments of a PD solution module—and differentially prepared to learn norms supportive of it. His emphasis on failure to harm, as opposed to the provision of affirmative assistance, as the empirically dominant form of altruistic behavior is also novel. The point of departure and principal point of reference is economics. But Altruistically Inclined? will interest a broad range of scholars in the social and behavioral sciences, natural scientists concerned with the implications of research and debates within their fields for the conduct of work elsewhere, and educated lay readers curious about essential features of human nature.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1325/thumbnail.jp

Property and Precaution

Property in land suffers from an unacknowledged precautionary deficit. Ownership is dispensed in standardized blocks of monopoly control that are routinely retained in their entirety until someone raises an issue regarding an actual or potential incompatible land use. This arrangement, which encourages owners to take sustained, unpriced draws against a limited stock of future flexibility, sets the stage for future impasse as inconsistent plans develop. It also makes property an unnecessarily accident-prone institution, given the role that bargaining failure plays in producing costly land use conflicts. Expanding the slate of potential precautions beyond owners\u27 locational and operational choices to include their choices about the strength and content of their own entitlements offers new traction on land use disputes. It also presents interesting institutional and theoretical challenges. In this essay, I propose using a local option exchange to confront owners with the opportunity costs of maintaining veto power over unused, low-valued rights. Enabling owners to relinquish property-rule protection of such rights before conflicts arise could make property more flexible and communicative, and hence reduce the costs of incompatible land uses. This approach requires rethinking the limits of customization in property bundles and the potential for owner participation in entitlement definition

Property and Precaution

Property in land suffers from an unacknowledged precautionary deficit. Ownership is dispensed in standardized blocks of monopoly control that are routinely retained in their entirety until someone raises an issue regarding an actual or potential incompatible land use. This arrangement, which encourages owners to take sustained, unpriced draws against a limited stock of future flexibility, sets the stage for future impasse as inconsistent plans develop. It also makes property an unnecessarily accident-prone institution, given the role that bargaining failure plays in producing costly land use conflicts. Expanding the slate of potential precautions beyond owners\u27 locational and operational choices to include their choices about the strength and content of their own entitlements offers new traction on land use disputes. It also presents interesting institutional and theoretical challenges. In this essay, I propose using a local option exchange to confront owners with the opportunity costs of maintaining veto power over unused, low-valued rights. Enabling owners to relinquish property-rule protection of such rights before conflicts arise could make property more flexible and communicative, and hence reduce the costs of incompatible land uses. This approach requires rethinking the limits of customization in property bundles and the potential for owner participation in entitlement definition

The emergence of language as a function of brain-hemispheric feedback

This text posits the emergence of language as a function of brain-hemispheric feedback, where “emergence” refers to the generation of complex patterns from relatively simple interactions, “language” refers to an abstraction-based and representational-recombinatorial-recursive mapping-signaling system, “function” refers to an input-output relationship described by fractal algorithms, “brain-hemispheric” refers to complementary (approach-abstraction / avoidance-gestalt) cognitive modules, and “feedback” refers to self-regulation driven by neural inhibition and recruitment. The origin of language marks the dawn of human self-awareness and culture, and is thus a matter of fundamental and cross-disciplinary interest. This text is a synthesized research essay that constructs its argument by drawing diverse scholarly voices into a critical, cross-disciplinary intertextual narrative. While it does not report any original empirical findings, it harnesses those made by others to offer a tentative, partial solution—one that can later be altered and expanded—to a problem that has occupied thinkers for centuries. The research contained within this text is preceded by an introductory Section 1 that contextualizes the problem of the origin of language. Section 2 details the potential of evolutionary theory for addressing the problem, and the reasons for the century-long failure of linguistics to take advantage of that potential. Section 3 reviews the history of the discovery of brain lateralization, as well as its behavioral and structural characteristics. Section 4 discusses evolutionary evidence and mechanisms in terms of increasing adaptive complexity and intelligence, in general, and tool use, in particular. Section 5 combines chaos theory, brain science, and semiotics to propose that, after the neotenic acquisition of contingency-based abstraction, language emerged as a feedback interaction between the left-hemisphere abstract word and the right-hemisphere gestalt image. I conclude that the model proposed here might be a valuable tool for understanding, organizing, and relating data and ideas concerning human evolution, language, culture, and psychology. I recommend, of course, that I present this text to the scholarly community for criticism, and that I continue to gather and collate relevant data and ideas, in order to prepare its next iteration

Essays on Business Value Creation in Digital Platform Ecosystems

Digital platforms and the surrounding ecosystems have garnered great interest from researchers and practitioners. Notwithstanding this attention, it remains unclear how and when digital platforms create business value for platform owners and complementors. This three-essay dissertation focuses on understanding business value creation in digital platform ecosystems. The first essay reviews and synthesizes literature across disciplines and offers an integrative framework of digital platform business value. Advised by the findings from the review, the second and third essays focus on the value creation for platform complementors. The second essay examines how IT startups entering a platform ecosystem at different times can strategically design their products (i.e., product diversification across platform architectural layers and product differentiation) to gain competitive advantages. Longitudinal evidence from the Hadoop ecosystem demonstrates that product diversification has an inverted U-shaped relationship with complementors success, and such an effect is more salient for earlier entrants than later entrants. Earlier entrants should develop products that are similar to other ecosystem competitors to reduce uncertainty whereas later entrants are advised to explore market niche and differentiate their products.The third essay investigates how platform complementors strategies and products co-evolve over time in the co-created ecosystem network environment. Our longitudinal analysis of the Hadoop ecosystem indicates that complementors technological architecture coverage and alliance exploration strategies increase their product evolution rate. In turn, complementors with faster product evolution are more likely to explore new partners but less likely to cover a wider range of the focal platforms technological layers in subsequent periods. Network density, co-created by all platform complementors, weakens the effects of complementors strategies on their product evolution but amplifies the effects of past product evolutions on strategies.This three-essay dissertation uncovers various understudied competitive strategies in the digital platform context and enriches our understanding of business value creation in digital platform ecosystems

Investigations into controllers for adaptive autonomous agents based on artificial neural networks.

This thesis reports the development and study of novel architectures for the simulation of adaptive behaviour based on artificial neural networks. There are two distinct levels of enquiry. At the primary level, the initial aim was to design and implement a unified architecture integrating sensorimotor learning and overall control. This was intended to overcome shortcomings of typical behaviour-based approaches in reactive control settings. It was achieved in two stages. Initially, feedforward neural networks were used at the sensorimotor level of a modular architecture and overall control was provided by an algorithm. The algorithm was then replaced by a recurrent neural network. For training, a form of reinforcement learning was used. This posed an intriguing composite of the well-known action selection and credit assignment problems. The solution was demonstrated in two sets of simulation studies involving variants of each architecture. These studies also showed: firstly that the expected advantages over the standard behaviour-based approach were realised, and secondly that the new integrated architecture preserved these advantages, with the added value of a unified control approach. The secondary level of enquiry addressed the more foundational question of whether the choice of processing mechanism is critical if the simulation of adaptive behaviour is to progress much beyond the reactive stage in more than a trivial sense. It proceeded by way of a critique of the standard behaviourbased approach to make a positive assessment of the potential for recurrent neural networks to fill such a role. The findings were used to inform further investigations at the primary level of enquiry. These were based on a framework for the simulation of delayed response learning using supervised learning techniques. A further new architecture, based on a second-order recurrent neural network, was designed for this set of studies. It was then compared with existing architectures. Some interesting results are presented to indicate the appropriateness of the design and the potential of the approach, though limitations in the long run are not discounted

Affording expertise: integrating the biological, cultural and social sites of disciplinary skills and knowledge

The coherence of the concept of mental representations is increasingly in question, and hence accounts of expertise based on mental representation. I argue that such mental representational accounts are, at best, inadequate, and propose that turning to ecological psychology and affordance could provide the answer. However, there is no fully agreed understanding of affordance and so the thesis undertakes three main interrelated tasks: First, I review James J. Gibson's writings on affordance before setting out a revised account of affordance using Jacques Derrida's discussion of differance. Differance, as the generation of differences with the deferral of the meanings of those differences is adopted as a model for affordance. Second, affordance - as differance or difference and deferral - is taken as the minimal form of material agency. Drawing upon the process philosophy of Whitehead, agency is understood to be coextensive with material composition, and on this understanding an ontology of agency in medias res, considered as agency that develops within a pre-existing medium or milieu, is developed as an integrating framework within which biological, cultural and social phenomenon are combined in human agency in medias res. Third, human agency in medias res is explored through the process of acquiring expertise. As affordance is the primary ontology of all material reality. All human activity encompassing tools and instruments, representations and language is a concatenation of such constituents, hence expertise as the normative performance of disciplinary activities to disciplinary standards, is founded upon the proper concatenation of constituent affordance. Gaining expertise, meanwhile, precedes through the development of an ecological relation within activity that is founded upon specialised training and practice, and upon the social institution of someone who is socially legitimated as a master of their domain. By ecological relation, I mean to draw attention to the agency that develops and is sustained within the formation and maintenance of ritualised, instrumental, and discursive configurations that come to be identified as a particular domain of knowledge. The closely interrelated themes of affordance and agency in medias res are brought together in a case study of the development of expertise in archaeology by focusing on learning to identify (type) pottery, and on learning to excavate. In learning to type pottery, a novice is inculcated into the language-games of pottery. The formulation of typologies, meanwhile, shows how such language-games form, and how these language-games afford a semantic field that supports archaeologically mundane communications between archaeologists. The event of an excavation is used to focus on social dynamics seen from a perspective of agency in medias res and to demonstrate how wider social, economic and political influences intervene within archaeological discourse and practice to alter the agency of archaeologists in terms of the cognitive authority, and that of archaeology as discipline