Review of ARNO ROS: Materie und Geist - Eine philosophische Untersuchung (Matter and Mind - A Philosophical Investigation)

Among the many fascinating questions that have driven our kind to perform science and philosophy, the question of the nature of the mind (or in an older terminology: the soul) is certainly the most exciting one. What are the relations between physical and mental events? Do animals have a mind? Do we have a free will or are all our actions just determined by neuro-physiologic mechanisms? Those questions form the background, in front of which Arno Ros has written a profound philosophical investigation. Organized in six parts, his new book Materie und Geist – Eine philosophische Untersuchung [Matter and Mind – A Philosophical Investigation] offers an extensive as well as exciting analysis of the field of issues often called the mind-body problem. He characterizes possible versions of the problem together with the methods of their proper solutions. An extended review of this book is given in the following

Computational Visualistics: Dealing with Pictures in Computer Science

Building blocks from many disciplines have to be integrated into a general science of images. Computational visualistics has been formed as a contributing field embracing all aspects of dealing with images computationally. Two basic concepts of computer science are introduced. Applied to the concept "image", they determine the methodological core of computational visualistics. As the contribution of computer science to the subject of image theory, interactive pictures are examined. Finally, relations to other "image sciences" are sketched. * * * Bausteine vieler Disziplinen müssen in eine allgemeine Bildwissenschaft integriert werden. Als Beitrag aus der Informatik versteht sich die Computervisualistik, die alle Aspekte rechnergestützten Umgangs mit Bildern umfaßt. Zwei Grundbegriffe der Informatik werden vorgestellt und bestimmen, auf den Begriff "Bild" angewendet, den methodologischen Kern der Computervisualistik. Als Beitrag der Informatik zum Gegenstand der Bildtheorie werden interaktive Bilder betrachtet. Schließlich werden die Beziehungen zu anderen "Bildwissenschaften" kurz umrissen

Charles Correa e il Mandala. Un altro mindset / Charles Correa and the Mandala. Another mindset

A partire dall’hyper-local Correa intercetta l’innovazione e lascia la sua lectio. “Usando con disinvoltura l’antico mandala come base per un edificio contemporaneo, è possibile arrivare ad un concetto completamente nuovo di organizzazione di sequenze Starting from the hyper-local Charles Correa intuit the innovation and leaves his lectio. "Using the ancient mandala as the freewheeling basis of a contemporary building, made possible a completely new way of structuring spatial sequences, unlike anything else we had done..

Algebraic structural analysis of a vehicle routing problem of heterogeneous trucks. Identification of the properties allowing an exact approach.

Although integer linear programming problems are typically difficult to solve, there exist some easier problems, where the linear programming relaxation is integer. This thesis sheds light on a drayage problem which is supposed to have this nice feature, after extensive computational experiments. This thesis aims to provide a theoretical understanding of these results by the analysis of the algebraic structures of the mathematical formulation. Three reformulations are presented to prove if the constraint matrix is totally unimodular. We will show which experimental conditions are necessary and sufficient (or only sufficient or only necessary) for total unimodularity

Virtual Institutes: Between Immersion and Communication

In the two expressions "virtual reality" and "virtual community", the term "virtual" has different meanings. A virtual reality is a depiction or, more generally speaking, a sensuous representation of reality that allows - mainly by means of interactivity - to experience various features of reality without actually being in contact with the reality depicted. Therefore, any interactive depiction that is able to imitate reality to such an extent that a high degree of sensory-motor immersion becomes possible is called a virtual reality (Heim 1998, 6f). Since reality is always much more complex than its depiction and full of unpredictable surprises, hardly ever a user has doubts about the difference between the depiction and the thing depicted. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for preferring the imitation to the reality: at least, the imitation is usually not as dangerous as reality sometimes turns out to be. Accordingly, quite different platforms for virtual institutes may be used emphasizing either the immersion aspect or the communication aspect. The decision for a platform depends on the goals pursued with the institute: text-based chat systems allow virtual communities to flourish, single-user VRML scenes convey a highly immersive 3D impression to its users. This is particularly true for virtual institutes realized as a 3D environment, as well as for corresponding virtual communities since 3D environments are adequate for certain tasks only. As an overall framework for the evaluation it is helpful to distinguish three major application areas: research, presentation, and communicative work. The Virtual Institute for Image Science (VIB), which we would like to describe in the following (3) as a case study, is almost exclusively designed for the third task: communicative working. It intends to provide a working space persons can share for joint projects despite being physically separated. Before describing the VIB in more detail we would like to give an overview of virtual institutes between the poles of realistic immersion and of communication in a community (2). The discussion of the case study leads to some more general considerations about the balance virtual institutes must find along that bi-polar dimension (4). In the concluding remarks we focus on the technical tools for virtual communities in 3D presently available

A Study to Determine the Effect of Technology Education on the Career Choices of Middle School Students

The goals of this research paper are to: 1) determine if students take technology education courses as an elective or whether they are genuinely interested in technology education; 2) determine if technology education classes influence the students in their career choices; 3) determine the ratio of females to males taking the technology education classes irrespective of their future educational plans; 4) determine the percentage of technology education students who plan on attending college

Compositional changes in developing almond kernels in relation to rootstock and water supply

The investigations conducted on almond trees (Prunus amygdalus, cv Texas), showed differences due to rootstocks in the rate of oil accumulation but not on oil content at maturity; water supply resulted in an increase of kernel moisture and free fatty acids in the oil. Neither the rootstock nor water supply significantly affected fatty acid composition or the oil spectrophotometric indices

An application of a generalized Korn inequality to energies studied in general relativity giving the smoothness of minimizers

We combine a Korn type inequality with Widman’s hole filling technique to prove the interior regularity of minimizers for energies occurring in General Relativity. In addition we provide a new variant of this Korn type inequality valid for the nonquadratic case