Hearing Emergence: Towards Sound-Based Self-Organisation

A fascination for models derived from natural organisation of organisms has a long history of influence in the arts. This paper discusses emergence as a complex behaviour and its manifestations in the sonic domain. We address issues inherent in the use of visual/spatial metaphors for sonic representation and propose an approach based on sound interaction within biological complex systems

Natural Selection: A Stethoscopic Amphibious Installation.

This paper discusses emergence as a complex behaviour in the sound domain and presents a design strategy that was used in the creation of the sound installation Natural Selection to encourage the perception of sonic emergence. The interactions in Natural Selection are based on an algorithm derived from an innately sonic emergent ecological system found in nature, that of mating choices by female frogs within a calling male frog chorus. This paper outlines the design and implementation of the installation and describes the research behind its design, most notably the notion of embodiment within a sonic environment and its importance to the perception of sonic emergence

Gestural control of sonic swarms: Composing with grouped sound objects

This paper outlines an alternative controller designed to diffuse and manipulate a swarm of sounds in 3- dimensional space and discusses the compositional issues that emerge from its use. The system uses an algorithm from a nature-derived model describing the spatial behavior of a swarm. The movement of the swarm is mapped in the 3- dimensional space and a series of sound transformation functions for the sonic agents are implemented. The notion of causal relationships is explored regarding the spatial movement of the swarm and sound transformation of the agents by employing the physical controller as a performance, compositional and diffusion tool

Identity Problems (An Interview with John B. Davis)

In this interview, Professor Davis discusses the evolution of his career and research interests as a philosopher-economist and gives his perspective on a number of important issues in the field. He argues that historians and methodologists of economics should be engaged in the practice of economics, and that historians should be more open to philosophical analysis of the content of economic ideas. He suggests that the history of recent economics is a particularly fruitful and important area for research exactly because it is an open-ended story that is very relevant to understanding the underlying concerns and concepts of contemporary economics. He discusses his engagement with heterodox economics schools, and their engagement with a rapidly changing mainstream economics. He argues that the theory of the individual is “the central philosophical issue in economics” and discusses his extensive contributions to the issue

The extremogram: A correlogram for extreme events

We consider a strictly stationary sequence of random vectors whose finite-dimensional distributions are jointly regularly varying with some positive index. This class of processes includes, among others, ARMA processes with regularly varying noise, GARCH processes with normally or Student-distributed noise and stochastic volatility models with regularly varying multiplicative noise. We define an analog of the autocorrelation function, the extremogram, which depends only on the extreme values in the sequence. We also propose a natural estimator for the extremogram and study its asymptotic properties under $\alpha$-mixing. We show asymptotic normality, calculate the extremogram for various examples and consider spectral analysis related to the extremogram.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/09-BEJ213 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Resource allocation in a university environment : a test of the Ruefli, Freeland, and Davis goal programming decomposition algorithms / BEBR No. 735

Bibliography: p. 20-22

Transformation without Paternalism

Human development is meant to be transformational in that it aims to improve people's lives by enhancing their capabilities. But who does it target: people as they are or the people they will become? This paper argues that the human development approach relies on an understanding of personal identity as dynamic rather than as static collections of preferences, and that this distinguishes human development from conventional approaches to development. Nevertheless, this dynamic understanding of personal identity is presently poorly conceptualized and this has implications for development practice. We identify a danger of paternalism and propose institutionalizing two procedural principles as side constraints on development policies and projects: the principle of free prior informed consent and the principle of democratic development