Patterns in Nature: Waves and Spirals. Patterns In Nature: Waves and Spirals by Douglas Barnes The information here will be instructive regarding the functioning of the universe (of which the designer should have at least a rough grasp). It is useful when considering the temporal aspects of growth (i.e. how things grow over time), but is only marginally useful as a physical design template. It does, however, happen to be really fascinating. In Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual there is a passing reference to “Winfree’s ‘doped’ chemicals" that long ago caught my eye. The chemicals Arthur Winfree was working on were, in fact, the Belousov Zhabotinsky Reaction, which is what is known as a reaction-diffusion system.
As we'll see, such systems govern many of the biological and physical systems we see in nature. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s start with Boris Belousov. Later, Anatoly Zhabotinsky took a look at Belousov’s work, and expanded on it. Your heart operates this way, for instance. Galaxies? Microplexes | URBAGRAM. This is a transcript of a talk delivered at the Bartlett school of Architecture on March 24th 2010, as part of a series of seminars held by the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London. This is my first academic seminar, in which I lay out some of my research aims and their conceptual underpinnnings. You can see the original presentation in the format it was delivered here. Hello. My talk is called microplexes. It’s a presentation on how very small complex systems can show us how to grow large urban systems. Today I want to talk about scale. Fig. 1 Scales of knowledge (a very rough sketch from my notebook). This is one of the first sketches I put in my notebook when I started my PhD 6 months ago.
I want to show you how network topologies give us a means of analysing and comparing spatial systems at disparate scales, how network science gives us a vocabulary for talking about any spatial system and what the limitations of that vocabulary might be. Microchips. Www.danerwin.com/research/pdf/enrichment_and_brain_cell_growth.pdf. Steroids. Dark matter (astronomy) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Turing's Neural Networks. By Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot © Copyright B.J. Copeland, D. Proudfoot September 2000 Modern Connectionism Connectionism is the emerging science of computing with networks of artificial neurons. A natural neural network. The Golgi method of staining brain tissue renders the neurons and their interconnecting fibres visible in silhouette. At the present stage of development of connectionism, reserachers simulate neurons and their interconnections using an ordinary digital computer (just as an engineer may use a computer to simulate an aircraft wing or a weather analyst to simulate a storm system).
In a vivid demonstration of connectionism's potential, James McClelland and David Rumelhart have trained a network of 920 neurons to form the past tenses of English verbs. Each of the 460 neurons in the input layer is connected to each of the 460 neurons in the output layer Modern connectionists look back on Frank Rosenblatt as the founder of their approach. Turing's B-Type Neural Networks. Have you tried to understand your network? - Random generation of network models | ProbaPerception. Have you ever played the board game "Guess who?
". For those who have not experienced childhood (because it might be the only reason to ignore this board game), this is a game consisting in trying to guess who the opponent player is thinking of among a list of characters - we will call the one he chooses the "chosen character". These characters have several characteristics such as gender, having brown hair or wearing glasses. To find out, you are only allowed to ask questions expecting a yes-no answer. This game has been expanded to a further complexity through the funny and impressive website: Akinator. The software tries to guess who we are thinking of by asking yes-no questions. With a friend/colleague/classmate of mine, Pierre Cordier, we wondered how it worked and what would be the fastest way to find the answer. To answer this mysterious question, we had a neural network approach. We have first randomly generated this matrix, and then computed two strategies. . # Who s who. Gnucleus_graph_large.gif (960×934)
The Internet map. Nuclei. © Else C .Vellinga Lab Original publication: Mycena News, April 2009 Birth, copulation, and death. That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks” (T.S. Elliot), but not when you are a mushroom. Mushrooms are unique in many ways but no other organism has a life cycle like a fungus.
As if the standard fungal life cycle were not fascinating enough, the exceptions are even more mind boggling. Let’s recapitulate the standard life cycle (see Fig. 1), starting with the spores. Fungal spores are single cells, each with one nucleus containing one set of chromosomes—that’s called haploid. A mating type can be compared to gender as we know it in animals, but in many cases there are not just two mating types in equal proportions, but many, increasing the possibility of meeting a mate. The two nuclei in the cells of the dikaryon work together to get the cell’s machinery going. We do know, just from observations, that there are quite a few exceptions to the standard life cycle described above. Life-cycle.jpg (640×687) Ken Wilber. Kenneth Earl "Ken" Wilber II (born January 31, 1949, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) is an American writer and public speaker.
He has written and lectured about mysticism, philosophy, ecology, and developmental psychology. His work formulates what he calls Integral Theory.[1] In 1998 he founded the Integral Institute.[2] Biography[edit] Wilber was born in 1949 in Oklahoma City. In 1967 he enrolled as a pre-med student at Duke University.[3] He became inspired, like many of his generation, by Eastern literature, particularly the Tao Te Ching. He left Duke and enrolled in the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, completing a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology and a master's degree in biochemistry.[4][unreliable source?] In 1973 Wilber completed his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness,[5] in which he sought to integrate knowledge from disparate fields.
In 1983 Wilber married Terry "Treya" Killam who was shortly thereafter diagnosed with breast cancer. Theory[edit] Holons[edit] Hunger of Memory : The Education of Richard Rodriguez: Richard Rodriguez: 9780553272932: Amazon.com. The Uses of Literacy (Media, Communication, and Culture in America): Richard Hoggart, Andrew Goodwin, John Corner: 9780765804211: Amazon.com. Richard Hoggart. Herbert Richard Hoggart FRSL (born 24 September 1918) is a British academic whose career has covered the fields of sociology, English literature and cultural studies, with emphasis on British popular culture.
Career[edit] He was born in Leeds and educated at Cockburn High School and the University of Leeds. He served with the Royal Artillery during World War II and was demobilised as a Staff Captain. He was a Staff Tutor at the University of Hull from 1946 to 1959 and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester from 1959 to 1962. The Uses of Literacy [1] (1957) is Hoggart's most cited work. Partly autobiography, it was interpreted as lamenting the loss of an authentic popular culture and denouncing the imposition of a mass culture by the culture industries. While Professor of English at Birmingham University (1962–1973), he founded the institution's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964 and was its director until 1969.
He now suffers from dementia.[2] The Uses of Literacy. The Uses of Literacy is a book written by Richard Hoggart and published in 1957, examining the influence of mass media in the United Kingdom. The book has been described as a key influence in the history of English and Media Studies and in the founding of Cultural Studies.[1][2] Massification of Culture[edit] The Uses of Literacy was an attempt to understand the changes in culture in Britain caused by "massification".
It has been described as marking a "watershed in public perception of culture and class and shifted academic parameters".[3] Hoggart's argument is that "the mass publicists" were made "more insistently, effectively and in a more comprehensive and centralised form today than they were earlier" and "that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture, that the remnants of what was at least in part an urban culture 'of the people' are being destroyed".[4] The "drift"[edit] Sources[edit]
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (ISBN 0-553-27293-4) is a 1982 autobiography by Chicano intellectual Richard Rodriguez. The book, written as several separate essays, narrates Rodriguez's educational history. In general, Rodriguez laments that as he furthered his education, eventually finishing a Ph.D. in English Literature, he became increasingly alienated from his family. As his interests grew, his family's generally did not, resulting in a diverse gap in shared interests. Having become fluent in the language of the intellectual community, he lost touch with the cultural values that he once held in common with his family. His autobiography also includes an instance where he turned down a potentially lucrative job offer due to the implication that it was extended on the basis of his race and not his scholarship.
The Scottish Chapbook Project -- What is a Chapbook? Growing out of an earlier tradition of inexpensive ballad literature, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chapbooks were small publications that contained songs, poems, political treatises, folk stories, religious tracts, and all manner of short texts. Their (often anonymous) printers produced what they thought would sell, even if that meant "borrowing" from other sources. (The eighteenth-century poet Allan Ramsay wrote in his "Address to the Town Council of Edinburgh" of the chapbook printer "Lucky Reid" who "spoil'd my sense, and staw my cash. ") Printers sold their chapbooks to itinerant peddlers called "chapmen," who in turn sold them to consumers. These chapmen, who hawked all manner of small goods for their livelihood, were often roguish figures who lived on the margins of society.
In general, chapbooks were inexpensive publications designed for the poorer literate classes. Closely related to the chapbook were two other forms also hawked in the streets during the same period.