Neurally Implementable Semantic Networks

We propose general principles for semantic networks allowing them to be implemented as dynamical neural networks. Major features of our scheme include: (a) the interpretation that each node in a network stands for a bound integration of the meanings of all nodes and external events the node links with; (b) the systematic use of nodes that stand for categories or types, with separate nodes for instances of these types; (c) an implementation of relationships that does not use intrinsically typed links between nodes.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figure

Disorientation and emergent subjectivity: The political potentiality of embodied encounter

Located in philosophical enquiry, this article considers ways to theorize and articulate the political significance of embodied encounter with the environment. Underlying this discussion is an interrogation of the relationship between presence, embodiment and intersubjectivity, with specific reference to Fisher-Lichte’s proposition of ‘the radical concept of presence’. In doing so, an affinity is proposed between Deleuzian inflected corporeal feminism principally through the work of Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, and somatic-informed movement practice in the environment. It is suggested that both offer a critique of the ‘mind/body’ dualism implicit within humanist understandings of subjectivity. Accordingly, each can be argued to recast subjectivity as an always embodied activity, an inter-corporeal exchange between ‘self’, recast as shifting and multiple, and ‘otherness’. In arguing this point, the article proposes an alternative model of the audience – performer relationship theorized around notions of witness and transformation. Noting the political dimensions of this for issues of difference in performance, the article seeks to elucidate the extent to which existing approaches to performance studies, or that which Melrose terms ‘expert writerly registers’, themselves rooted in a disembodied spectatorship, arguably lack the apparatus to accommodate such understandings

A gift of writing? Choreographer and writer collaborations in the university

This paper investigates certain philosophical implications of asking a dance artist for an account of how she or he works. The research proposes the development of practices of collaborative writing by a dance artist and researcher‐observer (alert to the motivated and implicated positions of each) that are capable of articulating what matters to dance practitioners. Noting that many issues specific to the production and reception of practitioner‐focused writing have a bearing on dance education and on institutional practice‐as‐research frameworks, it is argued that dance academics should be more concerned with the questions an artist might ask before writing

flockOmania 1 exhibition, performance event & catalogue

The shaping of an exhibition programme for a gallery in a university can take on some quite different and interesting perspectives from those that might drive the selection of shows in other sorts of venues. The opportunity we identified in our first discussions about Zoe Robertson using the Lanchester Gallery was to use the exhibition both as a lever, or fulcrum, around which to explore ‘objectiveness’ of her works, and as an event in which performativity could be manifest

The evolution of business continuity management in large Irish enterprises between 2004 and 2009

The research surveys large Irish enterprises in 2004 and again in 2009 with a view to determining how Business Continuity Management (BCM) has evolved during this five year period. Of the fifty two original organizations, forty four were still trading and twenty eight (63%) agreed to participate in the follow up study. In order to explore the findings from the survey interviews were conducted to allow for a more in-depth discussion of the key findings and possible explanations for the various trends identified. The results of the study show that: responsibility for BCM is firmly placed in the realm of senior and middle management with a low level of directorial involvement; computer viruses/bugs are now viewed as the greatest threat to Business Continuity; loss of telecommunications is the most often experienced disruption; external rather than internal pressures drive most BCM activity; 89% of organizations have a regularly exercised BCP; and BS 25999 has not as yet had a wide impact in Irish organizations. On the basis of these findings recommendations were made for national policy formulation and regulation and, at an organizational level, for building organizational resilience

Dancing with dirt and wires; reconciling the embodied and the digital in site responsive collaborative practice

Acknowledging the practitioner-researcher model and collaboration inherent to twenty-first-century contemporary performance practices, this co- authored chapter is offered as an extension of an ongoing collaboration between two dance artists and a photographer working in outdoor performance under the project enter & inhabit. The writing process and resulting chapter moves between a reflection on process, a document of practice and a theorisation around live and digital composition, thus inviting a reconsideration of the relationship between the real and the virtual

An implicit finite-difference solution to the viscous shock layer, including the effects of radiation and strong blowing

An implicit finite-difference scheme is developed for the fully coupled solution of the viscous, radiating stagnation-streamline equations, including strong blowing. Solutions are presented for both air injection and injection of carbon-phenolic ablation products into air at conditions near the peak radiative heating point in an earth entry trajectory from interplanetary return missions. A detailed radiative-transport code that accounts for the important radiative exchange processes for gaseous mixtures in local thermodynamic and chemical equilibrium is utilized in the study. With minimum number of assumptions for the initially unknown parameters and profile distributions, convergent solutions to the full stagnation-line equations are rapidly obtained by a method of successive approximations. Damping of selected profiles is required to aid convergence of the solutions for massive blowing. It is shown that certain finite-difference approximations to the governing differential equations stabilize and improve the solutions. Detailed comparisons are made with the numerical results of previous investigations. Results of the present study indicate lower radiative heat fluxes at the wall for carbonphenolic ablation than previously predicted