Language, Culture and Symbolic Forms

As Ernst Cassierer introduced in his “Philosophie der symbolischen Formen” in 1923, he specifically mentioned “language” as well as a way of symbolic forms. In 1991, the self declared “researcher on human sciences”, Norbert Elias, published his work called “The Symbol Theory” where he mainly writes about language as an application of symbolic forms and symbols. Elias does not make any reference to Cassirer at all, but states that languages are a part of a civilization process and part of cultur

Vilem Flusser, the 21st Century and the Interactive Technologies

When Vilem Flusser developed his idea of the technical \ud images, he could not foresee how far the technical development of producing images would go. The technical image has become an important part of the perception of the public, eventhough it still remains purely virtual. In the media the technical image is omnipresent and is also used as to manipulate society and its members in favor of political \ud mainstreams or to create an atmosphere for or against something or somebody. A future ideal society, the telematic society, is created out of the generation of information by technical images

Generative Image Modeling Using Spatial LSTMs

Modeling the distribution of natural images is challenging, partly because of strong statistical dependencies which can extend over hundreds of pixels. Recurrent neural networks have been successful in capturing long-range dependencies in a number of problems but only recently have found their way into generative image models. We here introduce a recurrent image model based on multi-dimensional long short-term memory units which are particularly suited for image modeling due to their spatial structure. Our model scales to images of arbitrary size and its likelihood is computationally tractable. We find that it outperforms the state of the art in quantitative comparisons on several image datasets and produces promising results when used for texture synthesis and inpainting

Poincare' dual of D=4 N=2 Supergravity with Tensor Multiplets

We study, in an arbitrary even number D of dimensions, the duality between massive D/2 tensors coupled to vectors, with masses given by an arbitrary number of ``electric'' and ``magnetic'' charges, and (D/2-1) massive tensors. We develop a formalism to dualize the Lagrangian of D=4, N=2 supergravity coupled to tensor and vector multiplets, and show that, after the dualization, it is equivalent to a standard D=4, N=2 gauged supergravity in which the Special Geometry quantities have been acted on by a suitable symplectic rotation.Comment: 15 pages, JHEP3 class, v2 typos corrected, references adde