scholarly journals Looking at Islamic Patterns II: Making Sense of Geometry

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Cromwell

Islamic geometric patterns are arrangements of interlocking stars and polygons. Why do they attract our attention? Following Silvia's model, interesting stimuli are hard to process yet comprehensible. To understand what it means to make sense of a geometric pattern we explore representations of space and geometric structure. Perceptual and linguistic evidence yields small sets of primitive objects and qualitative relations that suffice to build a synthetic geometry of perceptual space; constructing patterns requires the capability to divide lines and circles into equal parts, but does not rely on measuring lengths or angles explicitly.We compare eight representations of a star motif that demonstrate different approaches, different spatial frames of reference, and different levels of abstraction. A representation may be parametrised to represent a category, which allows us to verify that it captures salient features (the object should not be an anomaly in the category). We conclude that sequential constructive representations (algorithms) do not provide a good model for spatial structure, and that compression (encoding) and comprehension (making sense) are distinct.Chunking and schemas capture generic structure in unfamiliar contexts, in particular repetitive, composite, modular and hierarchical structure. The large corpus of Islamic patterns exhibits constant innovation over hundreds of years. We give examples to illustrate a clear trend towards increasingly complex structure, of both modular and hierarchical forms.

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malte Schilling ◽  
Nancy Chang ◽  
Katharina J. Rohlfing ◽  
Michael Spranger

Abstract Language comprehension of action verbs recruits embodied representations in the brain that are assumed to invoke a mental simulation (e.g., “grasping a peanut”). This extends to abstract concepts, as well (“grasping an idea”). We, therefore, argue that mental simulation works across levels of abstractness and involves higher-level schematic structures that subsume a generic structure of actions and events.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (15) ◽  
pp. 5136
Author(s):  
Bassem Ouni ◽  
Christophe Aussagues ◽  
Saadia Dhouib ◽  
Chokri Mraidha

Sensor-based digital systems for Instrumentation and Control (I&C) of nuclear reactors are quite complex in terms of architecture and functionalities. A high-level framework is highly required to pre-evaluate the system’s performance, check the consistency between different levels of abstraction and address the concerns of various stakeholders. In this work, we integrate the development process of I&C systems and the involvement of stakeholders within a model-driven methodology. The proposed approach introduces a new architectural framework that defines various concepts, allowing system implementations and encompassing different development phases, all actors, and system concerns. In addition, we define a new I&C Modeling Language (ICML) and a set of methodological rules needed to build different architectural framework views. To illustrate this methodology, we extend the specific use of an open-source system engineering tool, named Eclipse Papyrus, to carry out many automation and verification steps at different levels of abstraction. The architectural framework modeling capabilities will be validated using a realistic use case system for the protection of nuclear reactors. The proposed framework is able to reduce the overall system development cost by improving links between different specification tasks and providing a high abstraction level of system components.


2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Gehlen

Moral and Hypermoral, Arnold Gehlen´s final book-length publication, is an elaboration on basic theses which had initially been brought forward in Gehlen´s anthropological magnum opus "Der Mensch". In this respect, this draft of a "pluralistic ethics" is conceived as an elaboration on as well as a concretion of his doctrine of man. In this book, Gehlen set himself the task of combining anthropology, behavioral science, and sociology in a “genealogy of morality”, thus exposing four interdependent forms of ethics: from an ethos of "reciprocity" via “eudaimonism” and “humanitarianism” to an ethos of institutions, including the state. Gehlen made a decisive stand against the "abstract ethics of the Enlightenment": systematically, his book is primarily an anthropological justification of ethics, conceived as a "majority of moral authorities" and "social regulations." These are not subjected to an evolutionary interpretation, that is, as progress from an ethics of proximity to a world-encompassing morality. Moralities, whether based on instinct or arising from the needs of particular institutions, are always culturally shaped and set on different levels of abstraction. With its broad scope, the book belongs in the context of basic philosophical-sociological research known as philosophical anthropology.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanlong Sun ◽  
Hongbin Wang

According to the data-frame theory, sensemaking is a macrocognitive process in which people try to make sense of or explain their observations by processing a number of explanatory structures called frames until the observations and frames become congruent. During the sensemaking process, the parietal cortex has been implicated in various cognitive tasks for the functions related to spatial and temporal information processing, mathematical thinking, and spatial attention. In particular, the parietal cortex plays important roles by extracting multiple representations of magnitudes at the early stages of perceptual analysis. By a series of neural network simulations, we demonstrate that the dissociation of different types of spatial information can start early with a rather similar structure (i.e., sensitivity on a common metric), but accurate representations require specific goal-directed top-down controls due to the interference in selective attention. Our results suggest that the roles of the parietal cortex rely on the hierarchical organization of multiple spatial representations and their interactions. The dissociation and interference between different types of spatial information are essentially the result of the competition at different levels of abstraction.


2002 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne van Kleeck ◽  
Amy Beckley-McCall

Many studies have demonstrated that adults fine tune book-sharing discussions to the developmental levels of preschoolers, but little is known regarding how reading simultaneously to different-aged preschoolers is negotiated. We observed five mothers of different-aged preschoolers sharing books with each child individually and with both children together. Analyses focused on the linguistic complexity of the book, the amount of time spent sharing a book, and on several aspects of the mothers' book-sharing mediation. Results revealed developmental differences on several measures of how mothers mediated with younger as compared to older children individually. Book complexity, the time spent sharing books, and the percent of utterances at higher levels of abstraction were higher when reading to the older children; the number of mediation strategies per minute and the percent of mothers' behaviors that were used to get and maintain attention were higher when reading to the younger children. When reading to both children simultaneously, which aspects of the mediation fell at these different levels varied among the different mothers. This suggests that different mothers reach different solutions to the task of simultaneously reading to preschoolers of different ages. One mother approached the simultaneous book sharing much as she did sharing a book with her older child, one mother approached it as she did with her younger child, one mother simply read and did little mediation, and two mothers appeared to use a mixed strategy in the simultaneous reading condition.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 2089-2103 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Wutzler ◽  
M. Reichstein

Abstract. Interactions between different qualities of soil organic matter (SOM) affecting their turnover are rarely represented in models. In this study, we propose three mathematical strategies at different levels of abstraction to represent those interactions. By implementing these strategies into the Introductory Carbon Balance Model (ICBM) and applying them to several scenarios of litter input, we show that the different levels of abstraction are applicable at different timescales. We present a simple one-parameter equation of substrate limitation that can straightforwardly be implemented into other models of SOM dynamics at decadal timescale. The study demonstrates how substrate quality interactions can explain patterns of priming effects, accelerate turnover in FACE experiments, and the slowdown of decomposition in long-term bare fallow experiments as an effect of energy limitation of microbial biomass. The mechanisms of those interactions need to be further scrutinized empirically for a more complete understanding. Overall, substrate quality interactions contribute to both understanding and quantitatively modelling SOM dynamics.


10.29007/gpsh ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulbasit Ahmed ◽  
Alexei Lisitsa ◽  
Andrei Nemytykh

It has been known for a while that program transformation techniques, in particular, program specialization, can be used to prove the properties of programs automatically. For example, if a program actually implements (in a given context of use) a constant function, sufficiently powerful and semantics preserving program transformation may reduce the program to a syntactically trivial ``constant'' program, pruning unreachable branches and proving thereby the property. Viability of such an approach to verification has been demonstrated in previous works where it was applied to the verification of parameterized cache coherence protocols and Petri Nets models.In this paper we further extend the method and present a case study on its appication to the verification of a cryptographic protocol. The protocol is modeled by functional programs at different levels of abstraction and verification via program specialization is done by using Turchin's supercompilation method.


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