This paper presents an in-depth analysis and research on the spatial distribution pattern of the urban landscape in the Central Plains digital landscape form and proposes an optimization scheme. Based on the basic theories of systematics and complexity, this paper analyzes the self-similar characteristics of urban morphology, establishes the concept of schema, and constructs a multiscale and multilevel morphological map research framework by drawing on the “planar pattern” morphological analysis method of the school and the “matrix, patch, and (...) corridor” spatial expression model of landscape ecology. The framework of morphological map research at multiple scales has been established, and the theory and method of describing, understanding, judging, and analyzing morphological evolution have been formed. Cities have self-similarity at different scales, and urban evolution is a process of recursion from small-scale hierarchy to large-scale hierarchy, and hierarchy is a phenomenon presented by the natural evolution of cities. After any morphological process is completed, it can only be transformed into the other two ways, so the static morphological description can be transformed into dynamic morphological process analysis. (shrink)

Studies performed in absence of gravitational constraint show that a living system is unable to choose between two different phenotypes, thus leading cells to segregate into different, alternative stable states. This finding demonstrates that the genotype does not determine by itself the phenotype but requires additional, physical constraints to finalize cell differentiation. Constraints belong to two classes: holonomic (independent of the system's dynamical states, as being established by the space‐time geometry of the field) and non‐holonomic (modified during those biological processes (...) to which they contribute in shaping). This latter kind of “constraints”, in which dynamics works on the constraint to recreate them, have emerged as critical determinants of self‐organizing systems, by manifesting a “closure of constraints.” Overall, the constraints act by harnessing the “randomness” represented by the simultaneous presence of equiprobable events restraining the system within one attractor. These results cast doubt on the mainstream scientific concept and call for a better understanding of causation in cell biology. (shrink)

Few metaphors in biology are more enduring than the idea of Adaptive Landscapes, originally proposed by Sewall Wright (1932) as a way to visually present to an audience of typically non- mathematically savvy biologists his ideas about the relative role of natural selection and genetic drift in the course of evolution. The metaphor, how- ever, was born troubled, not the least reason for which is the fact that Wright presented different diagrams in his original paper that simply can- not (...) refer to the same concept and are therefore hard to reconcile with each other (Pigliucci 2008). For instance, in some usages, the landscape’s non- fitness axes represent combinations of individual genotypes (which cannot sensibly be aligned on a linear axis, and accordingly were drawn by Wright as polyhedrons of increasing dimensionality). In other usages, however, the points on the diagram represent allele or genotypic frequencies, and so are actually populations, not individuals (and these can indeed be coherently represented along continuous axes). (shrink)

The morphological account of landscape aims to overcome the contrast between an objectivist/scientific account of space and the more qualitative/subjective account of place. It does so by actualizing the notion of landscape, which endows a materiality often overlooked in contemporary spatial theories. In this paper, I will discuss what has been called the ‘space-place conundrum’ by referring mostly to the human geography contemporary debate on space and place. In the following, I will retrieve Carl Sauer’s morphological conception of (...) landscape as an alternative framework aimed at rephrasing both the concepts of space and place. Landscape must be freed from the cage of the aesthetic gaze so that it can be understood as a lived and dynamic complex of interacting forms that encompass the embodied subject. In the end, I will outline the main characteristics of a morphological conception of landscape, paving the way for further inquiries. (shrink)

Features of gait are determined at multiple levels, from the selection of the gait itself (e.g. walk or run) through the specific parameters utilized (stride length, frequency, etc.) to the pattern of muscular excitation. The ultimate choices are neurally determined, but what is involved with that decision process? Human locomotion appears stereotyped not so much because the pattern is predetermined, but because these movement patterns are good solutions for providing movement utilizing the machinery available to the individual (the legs and (...) their requisite components). Under different circumstances the appropriate solution may differ broadly (different gait) or subtly (different parameters). Interpretation of the neural decision making process would benefit from understanding the influences that determine the selection of the appropriate solution in any set of circumstances, including that of normal conditions. In this review we survey an array of studies that point to energetic cost as a key input to the gait coordination system, and not just an outcome of the gait pattern implemented. We then use that information to rigorously define the construct proposed by Sparrow and Newell (1998) where the effects of environment, organism and task act as constraints determining the solution set available, and the coordination pattern is then implemented under a pressure for energetic economy. Environment is defined in terms of affordances based on the ecological psychology definition of the concept and organism is defined as classic morphology and physiology based capabilities. We rely on a novel conceptualization of task that recognizes that the task goal needs to be separated from the mechanisms that achieve the goal if the motivation behind the selection of the mechanism strategy is to be exposed and understood. This reformulation of the Sparrow and Newell construct is then linked to the proposed pressure for economy by considering it as an optimization problem, where the most readily selected gait strategy will be that which achieves the task goal at (or near) the energetic minimum. (shrink)

The micro blogging platform Twitter is actively used by millions of people. By using the geo tags of the messages sent a virtual landscape of online activity at a certain place is generated to visualize the interface between the real-world location and the virtual activity. These New City Landscapes (NCL) visualize the amount of activity as density surfaces with hills, peaks and valleys. Across a set of different cities from around the world the resulting landscape morphologies are compared and (...) characterized as types. This article focuses on temporal narratives and how they travel through the urban fabric via the virtual landscape in different cities around the world. The findings are discussed as cross comparisons according to activity in time and space. (shrink)

. This paper investigates the mechanisms of knowledge production of twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology. How robotics influences investigations into the structure, development, and change of organic forms? Which definition of form is presupposed by this new approach to the study of form? I answer these questions by investigating how robots are used to understand and generate new questions about the locomotion of extinct animals in the first case study and in high-performance fishes in the second case study. After having illustrated (...) the landscape of twentieth-century morphology, I will reflect on the definition of form adopted in twenty-first century robotics-inspired morphology as well as on the differences between this approach to the study of form and the so-called nature-inspired disciplines, such as bionics or biomimetics. In the conclusion, I suggest that we are now in a material turn in morphology, characterized by the coexistence of the robotic, the virtual, and the real, which enables an understanding of how the structures and dynamics of shapes change over time. (shrink)

Metaphors play a crucial role in both science in particular and human discourse in gen- eral. Plato’s story of the cave—about people shackled to a wall and incapable of perceiv- ing the world as it really is—has stimulated thinking about epistemology and the nature of reality for more than two millennia. But metaphors can also be misleading: being too taken with Plato’s story has cost philosophers endless discussions about how to access the world “as it is,” until Kant showed us (...) that it is just not going to happen, ever. (shrink)

This paper explores how touch is key to understanding education—not as an achievement or an instrument of acquisition, but as a process through which one becomes a subject capable of both living and leading a life that matters for ourselves and others. As a process, it is concerned with how we encounter things and others in the world and not solely with what we encounter. In particular, it argues that the dynamics of touch-as both a touching and being touched by-are (...) central for understanding educational encounters as sensory landscapes of contact. This paper turns first to Aristotle’s understanding of touch as central to life itself in order to contemplate how it is not merely one of the senses but signifies as the primary mode of all bodily contact with the world. This vital aspect will then be examined in relation to the specific ways bodies experience contact, through their membranes, morphological make up and their movements. Here, I draw on a number of philosophers and theorists, such as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Juhani Pallasmaa and Erin Manning, and a recent art installation The Boarding School by Sisters Hope to demonstrate how bodies matter to the very practices of education. I conclude with some thoughts on what morphologies, membranes and movements can specifically offer to a sensuous understanding of education. (shrink)

Through statistical analysis of datasets describing single cell shape following systematic gene depletion, we have found that the morphological landscapes explored by cells are composed of a small number of attractor states. We propose that the topology of these landscapes is in large part determined by cell‐intrinsic factors, such as biophysical constraints on cytoskeletal organization, and reflects different stable signaling and/or transcriptional states. Cell‐extrinsic factors act to determine how cells explore these landscapes, and the topology of (...) the landscapes themselves. Informational stimuli primarily drive transitions between stable states by engaging signaling networks, while mechanical stimuli tune, or even radically alter, the topology of these landscapes. As environments fluctuate, the topology of morphological landscapes explored by cells dynamically adapts to these fluctuations. Finally we hypothesize how complex cellular and tissue morphologies can be generated from a limited number of simple cell shapes. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aims to defend the dialogical nature of the landscape. Working in between the borders of the Bakhtinian philosophy of language and cultural studies on landscape, we defend that landscape study should not be studied without considering the cultural forms of communication in the different domains of social organization– the speech genres; that landscape is a semiotic encounter with a concrete otherness; that the interpreter who emerges when an area enters a relationship of representation is necessarily characterized as (...) a chronotope; that every landscape is a chronotopic representation; that cultural geography recognizes that the semiotic aspects of the landscape are as material as its morphology. We start from the hypothesis that landscape is a chronotopic representation that is always made possible by means of some speech genre, because it is always a communicative process, and an encounter with another in a situation of socially organized interrelation – it is concrete dialogue. To find the deeper meaning of a landscape, one must recognize and understand its material, historical, geographical, and dialogic nature. RESUMO O artigo objetiva defender a índole dialógica da paisagem. Trabalhando na fronteira entre a filosofia bakhtiniana da linguagem e os estudos culturais da paisagem, defendemos que a paisagem não seja estudada sem considerar as formas culturais de comunicação nos diferentes domínios da organização social – os gêneros discursivos; que toda paisagem é encontro semiótico com uma alteridade concreta; que o intérprete que emerge quando uma área entra em relação de representação é necessariamente caracterizado por um cronotopo; que toda paisagem é representação cronotópica; que a geografia cultural reconheça que os aspectos semióticos da paisagem são tão materiais quanto sua morfologia. Partimos da hipótese de que a paisagem é uma representação cronotópica que sempre se realiza através de algum gênero discursivo, pois sempre é um processo comunicativo e de encontro com o outro em uma situação de inter-relação socialmente organizada – é diálogo concreto. Para adentrar à profundeza de seus sentidos, precisa-se reconhecer e compreender sua índole material, histórica, geográfica e dialógica. (shrink)

The performative turn in aesthetics is paralleled by a similar transformation in the epistemology of geography with the rise of the so-called non-representational theory. This paper focuses on the connection between non-representational geography and the morphological approaches to landscape elaborated by Humboldt in the XIX century and Carl Sauer in the XX century. At stake there is the possibility to establish a virtuous relationship between aesthetics and geographical knowledge, which have often been separated despite their indisputable kinships and liaison (...) points. (shrink)

This note presents a simple, novel diagnostic for determining the phrase structural status of negative markers cross-linguistically, a topic of enduring interest (for recent approaches and references see Haegeman; Zanuttini; Giannakidou, Landscape and Polarity). If the sentential negative marker in a given language is phrasal (an XP, generally adverbial), it will occur in the collocation why not?; if it is a head (an X 0, generally clitic-like), it will not. In the latter languages, the word for ‘no’ can sometimes be (...) used, itself (presumably) a phrasal negative adverb. (A fortiori, languages with possibly word-internal morphological markers for sentential negation, such as Turkish, will not allow these markers in the collocation.) The first group of languages, those with XP negative markers, is given in 1: (1) a. English why not? * why no?1 b. German warum nicht? * warum nein? c. Dutch waarom niet? * waarom nee? d. Danish hvorfor ikke? * hvorfor nej? e. Icelandic hverfor ekki? * hvarfor nej? f. French pourquoi pas? * pourquoi non?2 g. Tsez shida anu? * shida ey? The second class of languages, those with X0 negative markers, is given in 2. (shrink)

There is a problem of incision of rivers. To solve it, it is necessary to obtain and analyze objective information about the processes of incision and related processes of changes in morphology, structure, functioning of the flow-channel system, the young river landscape. The next step in solving the problem is an objective analysis of possible factors of incision. The main factor in the studied objects is the extraction of river alluvium for many decades. It is also important to identify and (...) study the consequences and extent of changes in the young river landscape, to assess its condition. We propose a method of analysis of processes and factors of incision that can be applied to other rivers, it can also be supplemented and developed. It allows to put in perspective the situation and justify the necessary solutions in the process of planning integrated management of the young river landscape as an important component of the river basin system. Significantly anthropogenically altered sections of rivers, their channels and floodplains may occur as a result of incision. They need special public attention to restore the environmental properties of capacity building. This is an integral part of the culture of interaction between society and rivers, which primarily includes objective quality monitoring, availability and quality of all necessary information as a basis for effective decision-making. An important conclusion is the feasibility of monitoring changes in the vertical position of channels and floodplains, as well as changes in alluvial deposits as part of hydromorphological monitoring in general. In particular, conducting GPS surveillance. (shrink)

The dominant paradigm in biomedicine focuses on genetically‐specified components of cells and their biochemical dynamics, emphasizing bottom‐up emergence of complexity. Here, I explore the biomedical implications of a complementary emerging field: diverse intelligence. Using tools from behavioral science and multiscale neuroscience, we can study development, regenerative repair, and cancer suppression as behaviors of a collective intelligence of cells navigating the spaces of possible morphologies and transcriptional and physiological states. A focus on the competencies of living material—from molecular to organismal scales—reveals (...) a new landscape for interventions. Such top‐down approaches take advantage of the memories and homeodynamic goal‐seeking behavior of cells and tissues, offering the same massive advantages in biomedicine and bioengineering that reprogrammable hardware has provided information technologies. The bioelectric networks that bind individual cells toward large‐scale anatomical goals are an especially tractable interface to organ‐level plasticity, and tools to modulate them already exist. This suggests a research program to understand and tame the software of life for therapeutic gain by understanding the many examples of basal cognition that operate throughout living bodies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:is There a White Gift?: A Pragmatist Response to the Problem of Whiteness Terrance A. MacMullan Introduction Lucius Outlaw and Shannon SuUivan are prominent contemporary philosophers of race who follow in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois as they search for a theoretical understanding of race and a political solution to the problem of racism. They agree that the solution to racism is not found in the elimination of (...) the idea of race from our discourses as suggested by Naomi Zack and Anthony Appiah, but in a critical conservation of race that is nonhierarchical and committed to addressing the suffering of non-white racial groups.1 This moral and critical conservation of race makes Sullivan and Outlaw standard bearers for Du Bois's idea of the racial gift, which John Shuford writes is rooted in the conviction that, "'race' and race-consciousness are not the causes of racism and racial injustice, [and] that 'race' may be employed toward collective and mutual liberation."2 However, despite their inteUectual kinship regarding their broad approach to race, Outlaw and SuUivan come to a significant and iUuminating disagreement over the issue of whiteness. In Du Boisian terms, they disagree about whether white people, qua white, have a racial gift worth conserving. Outlaw recognizes the illegitimacy of the hierarchical racial taxonomies established during the Enlightenment era but accepts race as a real and meaningful feature of our social landscape. Revealing a strong affinity for Du Bois' approach to race, Outlaw imagines his work as, an inquiry into raciality and ethnicity via a treacherous "third path" between racism and invidious ethnocentrism, on the one side, and anti-racism and antiinvidious ethnocentrism, on the other. What I propose can help us to recognize and nurture races and ethnies as we reconsider raciation and ethnicization as processes by which we humans produce TRANSACTIONS OFTHE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 41, No. 4 ©2005 Hi and reproduce ourselves as crucial aspects of our "social construction of ET1 realities."3 H tr* Q η He further argues for "the need to conserve 'race' and 'ethnie' (and 'ethnic- ¡» ity') as vital components of a philosophical anthropology."4 Outlaw there- 5j fore contends that the challenge facing liberatory race theorists is not the «' elimination of race, but instead, "the challenge is to find ways to conserve a Ç) sense of raciality that is both socially useful and consistent with democratic justice." Outlaw clearly wants to avoid invidious ethnocentrism, but what is more significant is that he also rejects the idea that we should purge racial ^j ideas and practices as a means to achieve democratic justice. He, like Du τ> Bois, is fully aware of the evils of racism, but is nonetheless committed to > the belief that human existence is inevitably colored by race as a salient fea- g ture of our social reality. Outlaw's commitment to the conservation of race ;> is so deep that he would preserve race-based communities of meaning, "even ^ if, in the very next instant, racism and perverted, invidious ethnocentrism in every form or > manifestation would disappearforever'. '6 ^ The key to this balancing act is to look at race and ethnicity through the r lens of "philosophical anthropology" instead of through the materialism of > biology. Outlaw argues that when we look at race this way we glean, an understanding and appreciation of senses of belonging and of shared destiny by which individuals are intimately connected to other individuals in ways that make for the constitution of particular kinds of social collectivities, what I term social-natural kinds. Races and ethnies are such "kinds."8 Outlaw thus uses an idea of race that is fully transactional, to use a term coined by Dewey and rewardingly reclaimed by Sullivan. Race is created in the confluence of culture and biology, to the extent that certain biologicaUy determined traits, primarily morphological features, are the tags that play important symbolic roles in terms of how social groups are formed. The goal, therefore, is not to eliminate race, because people long have and likely always will use appearance as one of the many determinants of how they form groups. The goal is, instead, to form groups in ways that encourage human flourishing "consistent... (shrink)

Philosophers differ widely in the extent to which they condone the exploration of the realms of possibilia. Some are very enamoured of thought experiments in which human intuition is trained upon the products of human imagination. Others are much more sceptical of the fruits of such purely cognitive explorations. That said, it is clear that human beings cannot dispense with modal speculation altogether. Rationality rests upon the ability to make decisions and that in turn rests upon the ability to learn (...) about what is possible and what is probable. Thus, on pain of irrationality, we must have some means of exploring other possible worlds. Thankfully, intuition is not the only aid we have at our disposal. Science also is in the business of finding regularities, which hold counterfactually. Scientific theory tells us about the likelihood of particular outcomes flowing from particular processes given particular background conditions. Thus, it also tells us about the contents of 1 of 21 other possible worlds. One consequence of the possibility of such inferences has been a theoretical interest, not just in the contents, but also in the geography of the domain of all possibly worlds. Metaphysicians, epistemologists and philosophers of language are very familiar with locutions such as “nearby possible worlds”. Similarly, evolutionary theory tells us that there is little chance of us discovering an organism that is mammal-like in most respects except in having six limbs. It’s not that we know such an organism to be impossible, but rather that we think it would be the product of an evolutionary history very different to the actual history of life on earth. Put another way, such organisms would be denizens of distant possible worlds. Clearly then, both biology and philosophy have ample motivation to be interested in the reasoning and evidence that supports such claims. Seemingly, in both disciplines there is a certain lure to this modal cartography, but ought we in fact to be convinced of its merits? Is it science or philosophy or not a good example of either? What sort of problems can it solve? What sort of problems will it create? How might we test its accuracy? In his excellent book Theoretical Morphology: The Concept and Its Applications, George McGhee provides an admirable introduction to the complex theoretical landscape surrounding the exploration of possible biological form. (shrink)

Formal spaces have become commonplace conceptual and computational tools in a large array of scientific disciplines, including both the natural and the social sciences. Morphological spaces are spaces describing and relating organismal phenotypes. They play a central role in morphometrics, the statistical description of biological forms, but also underlie the notion of adaptive landscapes that drives many theoretical considerations in evolutionary biology. We briefly review the topological and geometrical properties of the most common morphospaces in the biological literature. (...) In contemporary geometric morphometrics, the notion of a morphospace is based on the Euclidean tangent space to Kendall’s shape space, which is a Riemannian manifold. Many more classical morphospaces, such as Raup’s space of coiled shells, lack these metric properties, e.g., due to incommensurably scaled variables, so that these morphospaces typically are affine vector spaces. Other notions of a morphospace, like Thomas and Reif’s skeleton space, may not give rise to a quantitative measure of similarity at all. Such spaces can often be characterized in terms of topological or pretopological spaces. (shrink)

During the early Cambrian period metazoan life forms diverged at an accelerated rate to occupy multiple ecological niches on earth. A variety of explanations have been proposed to address this major evolutionary phenomenon termed the “Cambrian explosion.” While most hypotheses address environmental, developmental, and ecological factors that facilitated evolutionary innovations, the biological basis for accelerated emergence of species diversity in the Cambrian period remains largely conjectural. Herein, we posit that morphogenesis by self‐organization enables the uncoupling of genomic mutational landscape from (...) phenotypic diversification. Evidence is provided for a two‐tiered interpretation of genomic changes in metazoan animals wherein mutations not only impact upon function of individual cells, but also alter the self‐organization outcome during developmental morphogenesis. We provide evidence that the morphological impacts of mutations on self‐organization could remain repressed if associated with an unmet negative energetic cost. We posit that accelerated morphological diversification in transition to the Cambrian period has occurred by emergence of dormant (i.e., reserved) morphological novelties whose molecular underpinnings were seeded in the Precambrian period. (shrink)

Evolution is frequently concentrated in bursts of rapid morphological change and speciation followed by long‐term stasis. We propose that this pattern of punctuated equilibria results from an evolutionary tug‐of‐war between host genomes and transposable elements (TEs) mediated through the epigenome. According to this hypothesis, epigenetic regulatory mechanisms (RNA interference, DNA methylation and histone modifications) maintain stasis by suppressing TE mobilization. However, physiological stress, induced by climate change or invasion of new habitats, disrupts epigenetic regulation and unleashes TEs. With their (...) capacity to drive non‐adaptive host evolution, mobilized TEs can restructure the genome and displace populations from adaptive peaks, thus providing an escape from stasis and generating genetic innovations required for rapid diversification. This “epi‐transposon hypothesis” can not only explain macroevolutionary tempo and mode, but may also resolve other long‐standing controversies, such as Wright's shifting balance theory, Mayr's peripheral isolates model, and McClintock's view of genome restructuring as an adaptive response to challenge. (shrink)

The Arf family proteins are best known for their roles in the vesicle biogenesis. However, they also play fundamental roles in a wide range of cellular regulation besides vesicular trafficking, such as modulation of lipid metabolic enzymes, cytoskeleton remodeling, ciliogenesis, lysosomal, and mitochondrial morphology and functions. Growing studies continue to expand the downstream effector landscape of Arf proteins, especially for the less‐studied members, revealing new biological functions, such as amino acid sensing. Experiments with cutting‐edge technologies and in vivo functional studies (...) in the last decade help to provide a more comprehensive view of Arf family functions. In this review, we summarize the cellular functions that are regulated by at least two different Arf members with an emphasis on those beyond vesicle biogenesis. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the cultural code of Judaism in the visual semiosis of the Crimea. The object of the study is the traditional symbolism in the decor of the Jews of the Crimea: Ashkenazi Jews, Karaites and Krymchaks. The article uses the methods of cultural (semiotic, ontological and hermeneutic) analysis in the continuum of signs of the traditional Jewish semiosis, the idiographic method in the concept of the totality of signs, the method of analysis of previous studies, (...) the method of synthesis in substantiating the morphology of signs. The following aspects of the topic are considered in the study: five main codes of Jewish culture are identified, their morphology and interrelationships are substantiated, as well as key meanings and the main central code. The main conclusions of the study are: 1. The multiethnic landscape of Crimea is made up of the cultures of numerous ethnic groups. The main feature of the identification and self-identification of cultures is religion. The Jews of Crimea include Ashkenazi Jews, Karaites and Crimeans. A single source for cultural codes in the Jewish semiosis is the Torah (the Mosaic Pentateuch) for all three ethnic groups, and for two of them (Jews and Krymchaks), the interpretation of the Torah is also the Talmud. 2. Based on the studied material, five main codes of the Jewish visual semiosis of the Crimea are identified, each of which unites a certain group of symbols: skewomorphic, phytomorphic, zoomorphic, numeric. The unifying code and the primary source of all codes is the code Book (Torah). The interrelationships between the codes, the key meanings – symbols of Creation, Paradise, Torah persons and Messianic aspirations are revealed. The semantic center of all codes is the repository of the Torah – Aron Hakodesh, and the Torah itself. Thus, the ring pattern "from Torah to Torah" is revealed. 3. A special contribution to the research of the topic is the systematization of the cultural codes of the Jewish semiosis of the Crimea. The scientific novelty consists in the fact that for the first time a culturological analysis was carried out and the interrelationships of cultural codes in the visual semiosis of the Crimea were structured. (shrink)

The Doctrine of Signatures (DoS) figures prominently in both contemporary and historic herbal traditions across a diversity of cultures. DoS—conceptualized beyond its conventional interpretation as “like cures like”, which relies solely on plant morphology—can be viewed as a type of ecosemiotic communication system. This nuanced form of interspecies communication relies on the presence of “signatures”, or signs, corresponding to the therapeutic quality of different plants based on their morphology but also their aroma, taste, texture, and even their context in the (...) landscape. Despite its widespread contemporary dismissal by mainstream science as overly simplistic, childlike, primitive, and generally of limited value, we suggest that the recognition of “signatures” in plants may be considered as a form of communication between humans and plants. Drawing upon Indigenous thought, ecosemiotic theory, and lyric philosophy, we posit that understanding “signatures” metaphorically, as a reflection of the “shape of the world”, offers insights into the interconnectedness of all life forms—a profound affirmation of relational coherence between humans and the more-than-human. We advocate for another perspective on DoS: one which holds potential towards reorienting and restoring our relationships in the vibrant world of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Arguments of stability, intended in a wide sense, including the discussion of the conditions of the onset of instability and of stability changes, play a central role in the main theorizations of morphogenesis in 20th century theoretical biology. The aim of this essay is to shed light on concepts and images mobilized in the construction of arguments of stability in theorizing morphogenesis, since they are pivotal in establishing meaningful relationships between mathematical models and empirical morphologies.

Artículo publicado en 1925, en el cual el autor persigue definir el campo de la geografía en cuanto disciplina científica como un cuerpo organizado de conocimientos, cuya tarea es la de establecer un sistema crítico que abarque la fenomenología del paisaje, con el propósito de aprehender en todo su significado y color la variedad de la escena terrestre, buscando organizar los campos de la geografía como ciencia positiva.

The paper aims at an analysis of the concept of landscape, offering an ontological approach. Our claim is that such a perspective is hardly ever assumed in philosophical aesthetics, even if theories of landscape appreciation are in fact based on tacit ontological assumptions. We argue that having an explicit ontology of landscapes is important, for aesthetic theories of their appreciation are often attacked in terms of the problems caused by their tacit ontologies. Therefore, we sketch an “Experience Ontology” that (...) serves as an alternative to the ontologies implied in the two best known aesthetic approaches to landscapes. We contend that a landscape should not be conceived of as an object or view but as a way of experiencing one’s surroundings, and we argue that our theory is not only free from the shortcomings of the two dominant theories but that it also corresponds better to everyday intuitions. (shrink)

The paper applies phenomenological method to the analysis of perception of landscapes and other spatial formations. A spatial formation is seen as a region of space, or a territory, with its specific meaning that is experienced by the subject who views it. Husserl’s theory of meaning-formation is used to clarify how spatial formations obtain meanings that define them as landscape, home, or country. It is suggested that besides the subject’s position and the series of perceptions of objects, the decisive (...) element that determines the meaning of the specific spatial formation is what Husserl calls a “grasping sense” . It defines the gaze specific to a particular spatiality. When the “grasping sense” becomes intersubjectively valid and institutionalized, it obtains the status of a cultural form which functions as a meaning-bestowing automaton for interpreting the world for entire societies. Finally it is argued that the spatiality specific to human Umwelten serves the purpose of creating and maintaining meanings that would otherwise disappear in the flux of time.Keywords: perception of landscapes, spatial formations, phenomenological method, grasping sense, cultural form. (shrink)

The control of various introduced species brings to the fore questions around how species are categorised as ‘native’ or ‘invasive’, belonging or not belonging. In far north Queensland, Australia, the Cape York region is a complex mixture of land tenures, including pastoral leases, National Parks and Aboriginal land, and overlapping management agreements. Weed control comprises much of the work that land managers in Cape York do. However, different land managers target different introduced species for control, and the ways in which (...) certain species are understood as more or less problematic indicate how land managers understand and seek to order landscapes. Through investigating the various positions that introduced species occupy, I will explore how Cape York emerges as a ‘hybrid landscape’ that is produced in contested, overlapping and ambiguous ways, and is rife with ‘feral dynamics’. (shrink)

Allen Carlson's aesthetics of nature contends that a deepening in the scientific knowledge of natural objects and environments is required to achieve an appropriate aesthetic appreciation of them. This ‘scientific cognitivism’ is often presented as supporting the emergence and development of environmental awareness as well as a theory consistent with the requirements of environmentalism that have been set out by Carlson himself. But Carlson's view about the aesthetic appreciation of contemporary agricultural landscapes gives more relevance to their functional fitness (...) for human purposes than to scientific cognitivism. It will be shown here how this different treatment weakens the link between Carlson's work and his requirements of environmentalism. (shrink)

In a series of formal studies and less formal applications, Hong and Page offer a ‘diversity trumps ability’ result on the basis of a computational experiment accompanied by a mathematical theorem as explanatory background (Hong & Page 2004, 2009; Page 2007, 2011). “[W]e find that a random collection of agents drawn from a large set of limited-ability agents typically outperforms a collection of the very best agents from that same set” (2004, p. 16386). The result has been extremely influential as (...) an epistemic justification for diversity policy initiatives. Here we show that the ‘diversity trumps ability’ result is tied to the particular random landscape used in Hong and Page’s simulation. We argue against interpreting results on that random landscape in terms of ‘ability’ or ‘expertise.’ These concepts are better modeled on smother and more realistic landscapes, but keeping other parameters the same those are landscapes on which it is groups of the best performing that do better. Smoother landscapes seem to vindicate both the concept and the value of expertise. Change in other parameters, however, also vindicates diversity. With an increase in the pool of available heuristics, diverse groups again do better. Group dynamics makes a difference as well; simultaneous ‘tournament’ deliberation in a group in place of the ‘relay’ deliberation in Hong and Page’s original model further emphasizes an advantage for diversity. ‘Tournament’ 2 dynamics particularly shows the advantage of mixed groups that include both experts and non-experts. As a whole, our modeling results suggest that relative to problem characteristics and conceptual resources, the wisdom of crowds and the wisdom of the few each have a place. We regard ours as a step toward attempting to calibrate their relative virtues in different modelled contexts of intellectual exploration. (shrink)

Analyzing geometric properties of high-dimensional loss functions, such as local curvature and the existence of other optima around a certain point in loss space, can help provide a better understanding of the interplay between neural network structure, implementation attributes, and learning performance. In this work, we combine concepts from high-dimensional probability and differential geometry to study how curvature properties in lower-dimensional loss representations depend on those in the original loss space. We show that saddle points in the original space are (...) rarely correctly identified as such in expected lower-dimensional representations if random projections are used. The principal curvature in the expected lower-dimensional representation is proportional to the mean curvature in the original loss space. Hence, the mean curvature in the original loss space determines if saddle points appear, on average, as either minima, maxima, or almost flat regions. We use the connection between expected curvature in random projections and mean curvature in the original space (i.e., the normalized Hessian trace) to compute Hutchinson-type trace estimates without calculating Hessian-vector products as in the original Hutchinson method. Because random projections are not suitable to correctly identify saddle information, we propose to study projections along dominant Hessian directions that are associated with the largest and smallest principal curvatures. We connect our findings to the ongoing debate on loss landscape flatness and generalizability. Finally, for different common image classifiers and a function approximator, we show and compare random and Hessian projections of loss landscapes with up to about 7×10^6 parameters. (shrink)

Understandings of the relationship between space, culture and belief are formative in the experience of seeking healing. This paper examines the relationship between place, healing and spirituality in the context of interdisciplinary perspectives (particularly those of the medical humanities) on healing and well-being. The paper examines places of spiritual significance and their relationship to healing in the ‘uncertain’ quest for alleviation or cure, exploring these thematics in the context of the work on the geographies of ‘therapeutic landscapes.’ Through a (...) discussion of fieldwork at two sites in Perthshire, Scotland, a framework is proposed for the investigation of therapeutic sites of spiritual significance, detailing features such as connection, renewal, reproduction, participation, alleviation and expectation. A deeper examination of sites of healing with spiritual significance, it is proposed, has the potential to develop greater understandings of the ways in which people experience illness and well-being. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A review of Songs of Nature, a study by John Sallis of the landscapes of the modern Chinese artist Cao Jun, with philosophical emphases on the notion of landscape, this analysis widens out to a relevance to all creative work. It homes in on the comparative or intercultural overlap between Western and Eastern traditions. as well as that between painting and music and the other senses. The focus is on the elemental. Art is at base a return to (...) nature with earth and sky as the horizons of what it means to be human. (shrink)

The title of Sketches of Landscapes is drawn from the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, in which Wittgenstein characterizes his remarks as “a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.” The invocation of Wittgenstein is meant to suggest the character of the distinctive methodology Stroll intends to apply to a number of the central issues in metaphysics and epistemology, a methodology he calls “philosophy by example.” He describes it (...) as a piecemeal approach emphasizing “specific cases, episodes, scenarios, and contexts”, and it seems to consist largely in opposing overarching philosophical theories and generalizations with concrete examples and instances of common usage that are at odds with them. Despite Stroll’s often-repeated claims of novelty, the methodology of Sketches of Landscapes does not differ significantly from the standard practice of criticizing philosophers’ distinctions, positions, and arguments by adducing counterexamples to the former and identifying fallacies in the latter. The book is best seen not as a unified illustration of a distinctive philosophical method, but as seven self-contained essays on a number of familiar issues. The first chapter discusses skepticism, while the next two criticize Putnam’s views on meaning and reference. The fourth chapter sketches a novel linguistic theory and brings it to bear on Plato’s theory of forms. The final three chapters discuss reference and fiction, holism, and direct and indirect realism about perception. I shall comment on Stroll’s discussions of the first three of these topics. (shrink)

This paper reports on-going work in the eSCAPE Project (Esprit Long Term Research Project 25377) directed to the research and development of electronic landscapes for public use. Our concern here is to elucidate a sociologically informed approach towards the design of electronic landscapes or virtual worlds. We suggest — and demonstrate through ethnographic studies of virtual technologies at a multimedia art museum and information technology trade show — that members sense of space is produced through social practices tied (...) to the accomplishment of activities occurring within the locations their actions are situated. Space, in other words, is socially constructed and shaped through members’ practices for accomplishing situated activities. We explicate, by practical examples, an approach to discovering social practices in and through which a sense of space is constructed and outline how such understandings may be used to formulate requirements for the design of electronic landscapes. In explicating our ethnographically informed approach, we outline how future technologies may bedeveloped through the situated evaluation of experimental prototypes in public use. (shrink)

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead (...) of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the early hominid ‘‘lithic niche’’ by examining the social implications of stone artifact making. I reject the idea that making tools for use is an adequate explanation of the elaborate artifact forms of the Lower Palaeolithic, or a sufficient cause for long-term trends in hominid technology. I then advance an alternative mechanism founded on the claim that competency in making stone artifacts requires extended learning, and that excellence in artifact making is attained only by highly skilled individuals (...) who have been taught and practiced for extensive periods. Consequently both competency and expertise in knapping comes at a high learning cost for both the individual learner and the social group to which they belong. Those high intrinsic costs of learning created contexts in which groups selected cost-reducing forms of social learning and teaching, and in which specialization could develop. Artifacts and their manufacturing processes probably acquired functions as social signals—as honest signals of valuable capacities. The magnification of these signals, through competition between knappers and through inspiring later craftspeople, may account for a substantial amount of the accumulated elaboration visible in the archaeological record. Consequently lithic artifacts operated as material symbols from an early time in hominid evolution. (shrink)

The integration of embodied and computational approaches to cognition requires that non-neural body parts be described as parts of a computing system, which realizes cognitive processing. In this paper, based on research about morphological computations and the ecology of vision, I argue that nonneural body parts could be described as parts of a computational system, but they do not realize computation autonomously, only in connection with some kind of—even in the simplest form—central control system. Finally, I integrate the proposal (...) defended in the paper with the contemporary mechanistic approach to wide computation. (shrink)