The celebrification of farmers: celebrity and the new politics of farming

Michelle Phillipov and Michael K. Goodma

THSim v3.2: The Talking Heads simulation tool

The field of language evolution and computation may benefit from using efficient and robust simulation tools that are based on widely exploited principles within the field. The tool presented in this paper is one that could fulfil such needs. The paper presents an overview of the tool -- THSim v3.2 -- and discusses some research questions that can be investigated with it

The evolution of language: a comparative review

For many years the evolution of language has been seen as a disreputable topic, mired in fanciful "just so stories" about language origins. However, in the last decade a new synthesis of modern linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has begun to make important contributions to our understanding of the biology and evolution of language. I review some of this recent progress, focusing on the value of the comparative method, which uses data from animal species to draw inferences about language evolution. Discussing speech first, I show how data concerning a wide variety of species, from monkeys to birds, can increase our understanding of the anatomical and neural mechanisms underlying human spoken language, and how bird and whale song provide insights into the ultimate evolutionary function of language. I discuss the ‘‘descended larynx’ ’ of humans, a peculiar adaptation for speech that has received much attention in the past, which despite earlier claims is not uniquely human. Then I will turn to the neural mechanisms underlying spoken language, pointing out the difficulties animals apparently experience in perceiving hierarchical structure in sounds, and stressing the importance of vocal imitation in the evolution of a spoken language. Turning to ultimate function, I suggest that communication among kin (especially between parents and offspring) played a crucial but neglected role in driving language evolution. Finally, I briefly discuss phylogeny, discussing hypotheses that offer plausible routes to human language from a non-linguistic chimp-like ancestor. I conclude that comparative data from living animals will be key to developing a richer, more interdisciplinary understanding of our most distinctively human trait: language

Self-Organization: Complex Dynamical Systems in the Evolution of Speech

International audienceHuman vocalization systems are characterized by complex structural properties. They are combinatorial, based on the systematic reuse of phonemes, and the set of repertoires in human languages is characterized by both strong statistical regularities - universals--and a great diversity. Besides, they are conventional codes culturally shared in each community of speakers. What is the origins of the forms of speech? What are the mechanisms that permitted their evolution in the course of phylogenesis and cultural evolution? How can a shared speech code be formed in a community of individuals? This chapter focuses on the way the concept of self-organization, and its interaction with natural selection, can throw light on these three questions. In particular, a computational model is presented and shows that a basic neural equipment for adaptive holistic vocal imitation, coupling directly motor and perceptual representations in the brain, can generate spontaneously shared combinatorial systems of vocalizations in a society of babbling individuals. Furthermore, we show how morphological and physiological innate constraints can interact with these self-organized mechanisms to account for both the formation of statistical regularities and diversity in vocalization systems

Culture and biology in the origins of linguistic structure

Language is systematically structured at all levels of description, arguably setting it apart from all other instances of communication in nature. In this article, I survey work over the last 20 years that emphasises the contributions of individual learning, cultural transmission, and biological evolution to explaining the structural design features of language. These 3 complex adaptive systems exist in a network of interactions: individual learning biases shape the dynamics of cultural evolution; universal features of linguistic structure arise from this cultural process and form the ultimate linguistic phenotype; the nature of this phenotype affects the fitness landscape for the biological evolution of the language faculty; and in turn this determines individuals’ learning bias. Using a combination of computational simulation, laboratory experiments, and comparison with real-world cases of language emergence, I show that linguistic structure emerges as a natural outcome of cultural evolution once certain minimal biological requirements are in place

Parois de soutènement en zones urbaines : Modélisation numérique, paramètres caractéristiques d'interaction

La réalisation des excavations profondes dans les zones urbaines suppose l'utilisation des structures de soutènement afin de protéger les constructions existantes avoisinantes. Même si ces structures sont souvent utilisées en génie civil, le calcul et le dimensionnement ne sont pas simples, les interactions entre le sol, la paroi et les structures avoisinantes étant importantes et leur prise en compte difficile. Différentes méthodes et modèles de calcul sont disponibles aujourd'hui pour les ingénieurs, en partant des plus classiques (équilibre limite), jusqu'aux plus avancées, comme, par exemple, la méthode des éléments finis. Le papier présente une comparaison entre les résultats obtenus par un calcul classique à l'équilibre limite et ceux obtenus par une modélisation numérique 2D par éléments finis d'une paroi de soutènement simplement butonée. Différents paramètres d'interaction sont pris en compte : position et rigidité du bouton, la rigidité relative sol-paroi. Egalement, une modèlisation 3D est réalisée

The cultural evolution of communication in a population of neural networks

Human language is learned, symbolic and exhibits syntactic structure, a set of properties which make it unique among naturally-occurring communication systems. How did human language come to be as it is? Language is culturally transmitted and cultural processes may have played a role in shaping language. However, it has been suggested that the cultural transmission of language is constrained by some language-specific innate endowment. The primary objective of the research outlined in this paper is to investigate how such an endowment would influence the acquisition of language and the dynamics of the repeated cultural transmission of language. To this end, a new connectionist model of the cultural evolution of communication is presented. In this model an individual's innate endowment is considered to be a learning rule with an associated learning bias. The model allows manipulations to be made to this learning apparatus and the impact of such manipulations on the processes of language acquisition and language evolution to be explored. These investigations reveal that an innate endowment consisting of an ability to read the communicative intentions of others and a bias towards acquiring one-to-one mappings between meanings and signals results in the emergence, through purely cultural processes, of optimal communication. It has previously been suggested that humans possess just such an innate endowment. Properties of human language may therefore best be explained in terms of cultural evolution on an innate substrate

Ray differentials and multiresolution geometry caching for distribution ray tracing in complex scenes

When rendering only directly visible objects, ray tracing a few levels of specular reflection from large, lowcurvature surfaces, and ray tracing shadows from point-like light sources, the accessed geometry is coherent and a geometry cache performs well. But in many other cases, the accessed geometry is incoherent and a standard geometry cache performs poorly: ray tracing of specular reflection from highly curved surfaces, tracing rays that are many reflection levels deep, and distribution ray tracing for wide glossy reflection, global illumination, wide soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. Fortunately, less geometric accuracy is necessary in the incoherent cases. This observation can be formalized by looking at the ray differentials for different types of scattering: coherent rays have small differentials, while incoherent rays have large differentials. We utilize this observation to obtain efficient multiresolution caching of geometry and textures (including displacement maps) for classic and distribution ray tracing in complex scenes. We use an existing multiresolution caching scheme (originally developed for scanline rendering) for textures and displacement maps, and introduce a multiresolution geometry caching scheme for tessellated surfaces. The multiresolution geometry caching scheme makes it possible to efficiently render scenes that, if fully tessellated, would use 100 times more memory than the geometry cache size. 1

Thermal separation and bonding of textiles and compound textile materials

Translated from German (Gummi Fasern Kunstst. 1988 v. 41(12) p. 614-619)Available from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:9022.0601(BISI-EM-Trans--293)T / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo