The Naturalization of Timbre

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Hui
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Bird Song ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Human Species ◽  
First Case ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Animal Vocalizations

This chapter explores the use of timbre in scientific studies of animal vocalizations in the decades around the end of the twentieth century. In the first case, I examine the efforts of naturalists and ornithologists to represent timbre in their notation of bird song in the field. The second case study discusses current work in cognitive science to better understand the origins of human language and music through the study of songbirds. I argue that by assuming—implicitly, then explicitly—timbral perception in non-human species, the naturalists and scientists in both episodes are attempting to make timbre natural. These efforts to naturalize and universalize the perceptual importance of timbre as biologically meaningful says more about our ongoing inability to define timbre in some form other than by what it is not. Here too, timbre is not what birds hear, or at least not what they necessarily care about.

The design(ing) of language

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-85
Author(s):  
Grant Goodall
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Human Language ◽  
The Third ◽  
First Case ◽  
Design Property ◽  
The Creation ◽  
John Wilkins ◽  
Fundamental Design

Courses on invented languages can do much more than just introduce students to linguistics. Through three case studies, it is shown that as students learn how to design a language, they also learn about the design of human language in a way that is unlikely to occur in other courses. The first case study involves the creation of a lexicon, in relation to John Wilkins’ invented language of 1668 and to Saussurean arbitrariness, commonly regarded as a fundamental design property of human language. The second case study concerns phonemic inventories. By designing their own from scratch, students see the competing pressures that phonemic inventories must satisfy in all languages. The third case study concerns inflectional morphology and the pressures that determine the form of particular morphemes. All of these case studies are accessible to students and help them engage with important aspects of the design properties of human language.

Intrusive Evaluation of Ambient Displays

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 12-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaobin Shen
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
First Case ◽  
Ambient Displays ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Display Systems

Ambient display is a display, which sits on the peripheral of user’s attention. Currently, the research on ambient displays is still in initial stage, so few evaluation styles are available to evaluate ambient displays. Our previous research (Shen, Eades, Hong, & Moere, 2007) proposed two evaluation styles for ambient displays: Intrusive Evaluation and Non-Intrusive Evaluation. In this journal, we focus on the first style by applying two intrusive evaluation case studies. The first case study compares the performance of three different peripheral display systems on both large and small displays. Our results indicate there is a significant difference on a primary task performance and a peripheral comprehension task between large and small displays. Furthermore, we have found that distraction may be composed by display-distraction and self-interruption, and that animation may only influence the display-distraction. In addition, a measurement of efficiency derived from cognitive science is proposed. The second case study focuses on exploring the correct disruptive order of visual cues (animation, color, area and position). Our results show that the correct disruptive order of visual cues in ambient displays is: animation, color, area and position. Furthermore, we also revealed how display-distraction influences the comprehension of ambient display. In addition, this case study further amended the measurement of efficiency, which was proposed in previous case study, to improve its accuracy.

Intrusive Evaluation of Ambient Displays

2011 ◽  
pp. 240-258
Author(s):  
Xiaobin Shen
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Primary Task ◽  
First Case ◽  
Ambient Displays ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Display Systems

Ambient display is a display, which sits on the peripheral of user’s attention. Currently, the research on ambient displays is still in initial stage, so few evaluation styles are available to evaluate ambient displays. Our previous research (Shen, Eades, Hong, & Moere, 2007) proposed two evaluation styles for ambient displays: Intrusive Evaluation and Non-Intrusive Evaluation. In this journal, we focus on the first style by applying two intrusive evaluation case studies. The first case study compares the performance of three different peripheral display systems on both large and small displays. Our results indicate there is a significant difference on a primary task performance and a peripheral comprehension task between large and small displays. Furthermore, we have found that distraction may be composed by display-distraction and self-interruption, and that animation may only influence the display-distraction. In addition, a measurement of efficiency derived from cognitive science is proposed. The second case study focuses on exploring the correct disruptive order of visual cues (animation, color, area and position). Our results show that the correct disruptive order of visual cues in ambient displays is: animation, color, area and position. Furthermore, we also revealed how display-distraction influences the comprehension of ambient display. In addition, this case study further amended the measurement of efficiency, which was proposed in previous case study, to improve its accuracy.

A Machine for Feeling: Ping's Posthuman Affect

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Alys Moody
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Active Involvement ◽  
Affective Quality ◽  
Contemporary Perspective ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Natural Emotion ◽  
Archival Quality ◽  
Historical Moment

Beckett's famous claim that his writing seeks to ‘work on the nerves of the audience, not the intellect’ points to the centrality of affect in his work. But while his writing's affective quality is widely acknowledged by readers of his work, its refusal of intellect has made it difficult to take fully into account in scholarly work on Beckett. Taking Beckett's 1967 short prose text Ping as a case study, this essay is an attempt to take the affective qualities of Beckett's writing seriously and to consider the implications of his affectively dense writing for his texts’ relationship to history. I argue that Ping's affect emerges from the rhythms of its prose, producing a highly ‘speakable’ text in which affect precedes interpretation. In Ping, however, this affective rhythmic patterning is portrayed as mechanical, the product of the machinic ‘ping’ that punctuates the text and the text's own mechanical rhythms, demanding the active involvement of the reader. The essay concludes by arguing that Ping's mechanised affect is a specifically historical feeling. Arising from a specifically twentieth-century anxiety about technology's tendency to evacuate ‘natural’ emotion in favour of inhuman affect, it participates in a tradition of affectively resonant but curiously blank or indifferent performances of cyborg embodiment. Read in this historical light, Ping's implication of the reader in the production of its mechanised affect grants it, from our contemporary perspective, an archival quality. At the same time, it asks us to broaden the way in which we understand the Beckettian text's relationship to history, pointing to the existence of a more complex and recursive relationship between literature, its historical moment, and our contemporary moment of reading. Such a post-archival historicism sees texts as generated by but not bound to their historical moments of composition, and understands the moment of reception as an integral, if shifting, part of the text's history.

Gewalt und Kommunikation

2011 ◽  
Vol 2011 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Jens Bonnemann
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Normal Case ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Philosophy Of Dialogue ◽  
The Individual

In ethics, when discussing problems of justice and a just social existence one question arises obviously: What is the normal case of the relation between I and you we start from? In moral philosophy, each position includes basic socio-anthropological convictions in that we understand the other, for example, primarily as competitor in the fight for essential resources or as a partner in communication. Thus, it is not the human being as isolated individual, or as specimen of the human species or socialised member of a historical society what needs to be understood. Instead, the individual in its relation to the other or others has been studied in phenomenology and the philosophy of dialogue of the twentieth century. In the following essay I focus on Martin Buber’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s theories of intersubjectivity which I use in order to explore the meaning of recognition and disrespect for an individual. They offer a valuable contribution to questions of practical philosophy and the socio-philosophical diagnosis of our time.

Scales and Units

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn M. de Luna
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Bantu Languages ◽  
The North ◽  
First Case ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
River Region ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Approaches

This chapter uses two case studies to explore how historians study language movement and change through comparative historical linguistics. The first case study stands as a short chapter in the larger history of the expansion of Bantu languages across eastern, central, and southern Africa. It focuses on the expansion of proto-Kafue, ca. 950–1250, from a linguistic homeland in the middle Kafue River region to lands beyond the Lukanga swamps to the north and the Zambezi River to the south. This expansion was made possible by a dramatic reconfiguration of ties of kinship. The second case study explores linguistic evidence for ridicule along the Lozi-Botatwe frontier in the mid- to late 19th century. Significantly, the units and scales of language movement and change in precolonial periods rendered visible through comparative historical linguistics bring to our attention alternative approaches to language change and movement in contemporary Africa.

Applications of random graphs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.C.C. Coolen ◽  
A. Annibale ◽  
E.S. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Random Graphs ◽  
Interaction Network ◽  
Power Grids ◽  
Protein Protein Interaction ◽  
Topological Features ◽  
First Case ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Protein Protein Interaction Network

This chapter reviews graph generation techniques in the context of applications. The first case study is power grids, where proposed strategies to prevent blackouts have been tested on tailored random graphs. The second case study is in social networks. Applications of random graphs to social networks are extremely wide ranging – the particular aspect looked at here is modelling the spread of disease on a social network – and how a particular construction based on projecting from a bipartite graph successfully captures some of the clustering observed in real social networks. The third case study is on null models of food webs, discussing the specific constraints relevant to this application, and the topological features which may contribute to the stability of an ecosystem. The final case study is taken from molecular biology, discussing the importance of unbiased graph sampling when considering if motifs are over-represented in a protein–protein interaction network.

Poe and His Global Advocates

2018 ◽  
pp. 596-617
Author(s):  
Emron Esplin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South America ◽  
Rio De La Plata ◽  
Río De La Plata ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
La Plata ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Global Reputation

This essay explores Edgar Allan Poe’s extraordinary relationships with various literary traditions across the globe, posits that Poe is the most influential US writer on the global literary scene, and argues that Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the work of Poe’s literary advocates—many of whom are literary stars in their own right—as it does on the brilliance of Poe’s original works. The article briefly examines Poe’s most famous French advocates (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry); glosses the work of his advocates throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and offers a concise case study of Poe’s influence on and advocacy from three twentieth-century writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America (Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar). The essay concludes by reading the relationships between Poe and his advocates through the ancient definition of astral or stellar influence.

Investigating the potential of redundant manipulators in narrow channels

2020 ◽  
pp. 095440622096451
Author(s):  
Ashish Singla ◽  
Jyotindra Narayan ◽  
Himanshu Arora
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Fuzzy Inference ◽  
Redundant Manipulators ◽  
Redundancy Resolution ◽  
Inference System ◽  
Narrow Channels ◽  
First Case ◽  
Task Priority ◽  
Patient Side

In this paper, an attempt has been made to investigate the potential of redundant manipulators, while tracking trajectories in narrow channels. The behavior of redundant manipulators is important in many challenging applications like under-water welding in narrow tanks, checking the blockage in sewerage pipes, performing a laparoscopy operation etc. To demonstrate this snake-like behavior, redundancy resolution scheme is utilized using two different approaches. The first approach is based on the concept of task priority, where a given task is split and prioritize into several subtasks like singularity avoidance, obstacle avoidance, torque minimization, and position preference over orientation etc. The second approach is based on Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), where the training is provided through given datasets and the results are back-propagated using augmentation of neural networks with fuzzy logics. Three case studies are considered in this work to demonstrate the redundancy resolution of serial manipulators. The first case study of 3-link manipulator is attempted with both the approaches, where the objective is to track the desired trajectory while avoiding multiple obstacles. The second case study of 7-link manipulator, tracking trajectory in a narrow channel, is investigated using the concept of task priority. The realistic application of minimum-invasive surgery (MIS) based trajectory tracking is considered as the third case study, which is attempted using ANFIS approach. The 5-link spatial redundant manipulator, also known as a patient-side manipulator being developed at CSIR-CSIO, Chandigarh is used to track the desired surgical cuts. Through the three case studies, it is well demonstrated that both the approaches are giving satisfactory results.

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