Output feedback : a geometric approach

Imperial Users onl

Cognitive Innovation, Irony and Collaboration

What seems clear from the experiences of researchers in CogNovo is that the concept of cognitive innovation offered a new vocabulary, and thus a clear space, within which creativity could be explored free from the baggage of prior conflicting definitions. The concept was, from its inception, intrinsically ironic in the sense that Rich⁠ard Rorty developed the term. Although initially we did not fully appreciate the potential this offered, approaching creativity under the rubric of cognitive innova⁠tion led to novel ideas that would not have emerged if we had taken a more con⁠ven⁠tional discipline-led approach. One example was expressing creativity as a mathematical function and as a media form in a parallel text. The absurdity of describing a process of such complexity in this form did not pass us by. However, this self-conscious irony, not a common rhetorical strategy in the sciences, clarified our understanding of cognitive innovation as a recursive function that allowed us to express a continuity between the basic life processes of exploration, innovation and the construction of the self, and the social and cultural ramifications of these processes; creativity. It led us to conclude that cognitive innovation furnishes a view of the self as a dynamic entity, for whom reality and novelty are contingent on one’s current state, both of which can change and be changed, and offers a means for enhancing the rigor of the current debate on what counts as creative. It also reveals the value of irony in not disavowing the inevitability of multiple perspectives and prospectives on reality, and consequently offers a way to avoid unnecessary reductivism. In this paper, we will argue, as we take the insights of CogNovo forward, that irony offers a hitherto unappreciated strategy for collaborative research

Identifying the Burdens and Opportunities for Tribes and Communities in Federal Facility Cleanup Activities: Environmental Remediation Technology Assessment Matrix For Tribal and Community Decision-Makers

The cleanup of this country's federal facilities can affect a wide range of tribal and community interests and concerns. The technologies now in use, or being proposed by the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and other federal agencies can affect tribal treaty protected fishing, hunting and other rights, affect air and water quality thereby requiring the tribe to bear the burden of increased environmental regulation. The International Institute for Indigenous Resource Management developed a tribal and community decision-maker's Environmental Remediation Technology Assessment Matrix that will permit tribes and communities to array technical information about environmental remediation technologies against a backdrop of tribal and community environmental, health and safety, cultural, religious, treaty and other concerns and interests. Ultimately, the matrix will allow tribes and communities to assess the impact of proposed technologies on the wide range of tribal and community interests and will promote more informed participation in federal facility cleanup activities

Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Pensacola

In the spring of 1828 Pensacola, Florida suffered a serious crime wave. The Escambia County Grand Jury with a highly laudable determination to do their duty, found twenty bills of indictment after a most laborious session of thirteen days. The panel indicted two men named Alvarez and Gray for murder, though both remained at large throughout the entire session. Convicted mail robber Martin Hutto escaped for the second time with a convicted burglar named Enoch Hoye who received the customary punishment for thieves: thirty-nine lashes (with ten extra stripes thrown in for good measure) and two hours on the pillory. The postmaster offered a $50 reward for Hutto\u27s arrest, Overall, Benjamin D. Wright, U. S. Attorney for the Western Judicial District of Florida, secured seven convictions on twenty indictments with fines totaling$106.

Evaluating the roles of directed breeding and gene flow in animal domestication

Peer reviewedPostprin

Geostatistical spatiotemporal modelling with application to the western king prawn of the Shark Bay managed prawn fishery

Geostatistical methodology has been employed in the modelling of spatiotemporal data from various scientific fields by viewing the data as realisations of space-time random functions. Traditional geostatistics aims to model the spatial variability of a process so, in order to incorporate a time dimension into a geostatistical model, the fundamental differences between the space and time dimensions must be acknowledged and addressed. The main conceptual viewpoint of geostatistical spatiotemporal modelling identified within the literature views the process as a single random function model utilising a joint space-time covariance function to model the spatiotemporal continuity. Geostatistical space-time modelling has been primarily data driven, resulting in models that are suited to the data under investigation, usually survey data involving fixed locations. Space-time geostatistical modelling of fish stocks within the fishing season is limited as the collection of fishery-independent survey data for the spatiotemporal sampling design is often costly or impractical. However, fishery-dependent commercial catch and effort data, throughout each season, are available for many fisheries as part of the ongoing monitoring program to support their stock assessment and fishery management. An example of such data is prawn catch and effort data from the Shark Bay managed prawn fishery in Western Australia. The data are densely informed in both the spatial and temporal dimensions and cover a range of locations at each time instant. Both catch and effort variables display an obvious spatiotemporal continuity across the fishing region and throughout the season. There is detailed spatial and temporal resolution as skippers record their daily fishing shots with associated latitudinal and longitudinal positions. In order to facilitate the ongoing management of the fishery, an understanding of the spatiotemporal dynamics of various prawn species within season is necessary. A suitable spatiotemporal model is required in order to effectively capture the joint space-time dependence of the prawn data. An exhaustive literature search suggests that this is the first application of geostatistical space-time modelling to commercial fishery data, with the development and evaluation of an integrated space-time geostatistical model that caters for the commercial logbook prawn catch and effort data for the Shark Bay fishery. The model developed in this study utilises the global temporal trend observed in the data to standardise the catch rates. Geostatistical spatiotemporal variogram modelling was shown to accurately represent the spatiotemporal continuity of the catch data, and was used to predict and simulate catch rates at unsampled locations and future time instants in a season. In addition, fishery-independent survey data were used to help improve the performance of catch rate estimates

The Florida Cracker Before the Civil War As Seen Through Travelers\u27 Accounts

Lieutenant Colonel John Wilder of the Union occupation force was stationed for most of the Civil War in Key West. A week after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox he visited Cedar Key. Located near the mouth of the Suwannee River, Cedar Key was an important rendezvous point for refugees, Union troops, Confederate deserters, and Unionist sympathizers. On April 20, 1865, Wilder wrote his mother that when he arrived there were about 2,000 white refugees, a “great curiosity; crackers most of them— that is poor whites, not more intelligent or virtuous than the negroes.” He described them as “pale, cadaverous, ignorant, and many of them fierce.” Some of the group had joined the Federal army. “Most of them,” he claimed, “have been persecuted by” the Rebels “and are very implacable. They are splendid rifle shots and go about all over the state. They talk of killing this man or that, when they go out as a matter of course— not in fight, but in murdering him.

Why Was Antebellum Florida Murderous? A Quantitative Analysis of Homicide in Florida, 1821-1861

Before the Civil War, Florida was one of the most murderous places in the United States. Its homicide rate was rivaled only by Texas and California.1 When it came to murders of or by blacks, Florida was typical for a slave state. But its white citizens killed each other at an extraordinary rate-usually three or four times the rate in most other slave states and eight to ten times the prevailing rate during the Second Seminole War, 1835-42, and the secession crisis, 1858-61