Metaphors of Globalization

The organization and function of human society in the global economy is, in the current discourse, part of epistemology, developed on the broader link of social sciences with scientific creativity and artistic imagination. The “chaotic” synergy of globalization has developed on a conceptual network where the logic of conceptual metaphor and cognitive scenario are integrative and circular. It is this assertion we start from in the research on the interdisciplinary character of the metaphor of globalization, with special attention paid to the metaphors of the organic, of space, of movement (the spiral formula, the loop, centre-periphery, the metaphor of the nebula, man as a sum, etc.). The research method (contrastive, functional, analytical) has in view the interdisciplinary and dynamic character of metaphors that highlight the conceptual system beyond the research. The conclusion of the study is that the role of interdisciplinary metaphors is to fuse with the text and arguments of an entire conceptual system it generates.

Using dual-network-analyser for communities detecting in dual networks

Background Representations of the relationships among data using networks are widely used in several research fields such as computational biology, medical informatics and social network mining. Recently, complex networks have been introduced to better capture the insights of the modelled scenarios. Among others, dual networks (DNs) consist of mapping information as pairs of networks containing the same set of nodes but with different edges: one, called physical network, has unweighted edges, while the other, called conceptual network, has weighted edges. Results We focus on DNs and we propose a tool to find common subgraphs (aka communities) in DNs with particular properties. The tool, called Dual-Network-Analyser, is based on the identification of communities that induce optimal modular subgraphs in the conceptual network and connected subgraphs in the physical one. It includes the Louvain algorithm applied to the considered case. The Dual-Network-Analyser can be used to study DNs, to find common modular communities. We report results on using the tool to identify communities on synthetic DNs as well as real cases in social networks and biological data. Conclusion The proposed method has been tested by using synthetic and biological networks. Results demonstrate that it is well able to detect meaningful information from DNs.

A novel algorithm for finding top-k weighted overlapping densest connected subgraphs in dual networks

The use of networks for modelling and analysing relations among data is currently growing. Recently, the use of a single networks for capturing all the aspects of some complex scenarios has shown some limitations. Consequently, it has been proposed to use Dual Networks (DN), a pair of related networks, to analyse complex systems. The two graphs in a DN have the same set of vertices and different edge sets. Common subgraphs among these networks may convey some insights about the modelled scenarios. For instance, the detection of the Top-k Densest Connected subgraphs, i.e. a set k subgraphs having the largest density in the conceptual network which are also connected in the physical network, may reveal set of highly related nodes. After proposing a formalisation of the approach, we propose a heuristic to find a solution, since the problem is computationally hard. A set of experiments on synthetic and real networks is also presented to support our approach.

Towards a cultural model of qi in TCM

This paper aims to construct a cultural model of qi in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) by probing into its conceptual metaphors based on a contextualized semantic analysis of qi in Huang Di’s Inner Classic (HDIC). It is found that there are eight conceptual metaphors of qi, each involving experiential correlation between source and target concept. To be specific, cause for effect builds up a major metonymic basis for the metaphorical mappings from the source concept of qi (i.e., substance) to the target concepts, including physiological function, breathing, climate, pathogenic factor, disease/syndrome, odor, property of drugs and time. It is worth special noting that time is understood in terms of the motion of qi in TCM. The conceptual metaphor time is qi is Chinese culture-specific. On the whole, conceptual metaphors of qi form a conceptual network and further constitute a cultural model: qi as the substance origin of human life is believed in TCM to function by ceaseless motion, giving rise to wellness or illness. This cultural model reflects a pair of inseparable concepts in ancient Chinese philosophy, viz. substance and (its) function, with the former being primary, essential and original, while the latter, secondary, concomitant and derivational.

Co-similar malware infection patterns as a predictor of future risk

The internet is flooded with malicious content that can come in various forms and lead to information theft and monetary losses. From the ISP to the browser itself, many security systems act to defend the user from such content. However, most systems have at least one of three major limitations: 1) they are not personalized and do not account for the differences between users, 2) their defense mechanism is reactive and unable to predict upcoming attacks, and 3) they extensively track and use the user’s activity, thereby invading her privacy in the process. We developed a methodological framework to predict future exposure to malicious content. Our framework accounts for three factors–the user’s previous exposure history, her co-similarity to other users based on their previous exposures in a conceptual network, and how the network evolves. Utilizing over 20,000 users’ browsing data, our approach succeeds in achieving accurate results on the infection-prone portion of the population, surpassing common methods, and doing so with as little as 1/1000 of the personal information it requires.

Produção de Conhecimento em Abordagem Centrada na Pessoa: Um Percurso Teórico-Metodológico Gadameriano

This article aims to present the theoretical-methodological route, built by the first author in his Master's Dissertation under the guidance of the second, based on Hans-Georg Gadamer hermeneutic-philosophical philosophy. Its relevance is justified because it is a structured alternative for conducting bibliographic research within the scope of the Person Centered Approach (PCA). For this, we initially want to justify an epistemological choice of gadamerian hermeneutics in its relation to the research objective. Then, we present the conceptual network formed by the articulation of prejudice, language, tradition, update and fusion of horizons that supports this perspective, in a ways that allows, later, to systematize the phases of information investigation, comprehensive analysis and hermeneutic synthesis to the development of research on the proposed problem. The article ends with the observation of the potentiality and proficiency related to the approximation, and consequent articulation, between PCA and the Gadamerian philosophical perspective, with reflections on the implications regarding the use of a hermeneutic-philosophical method in the production of knowledge in the approach. Palavras-chave : Person-Centered Approach; Philosophical Hermeneutic; Carl Rogers; Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Corpus-Based Syntactic-Semantic Graph Analysis

This research exemplifies the corpus-based graph approach to the syntactic-semantic analysis of a concept feeling using the Construction Grammar Conceptual network methodology. by constructing a lexical network from grammatically tagged collocations of the english and the Croatian web corpora, the structure of the semantic domains is revealed as a set of sub-graphs derived from the source lexeme’s friend-of-a-friend graph. the subgraph structures, calculated with the community detection algorithm, are interpreted as the semantic domains associated with the source lexeme’s conceptual matrix. lexical structures are analyzed using a centrality algorithm that determines the overall rank of the salience and semantic relatedness to the source concept feeling. this empirical approach can be used for developing nlP methods and tasks, such as computing semantic similarity, sense disambiguation, sense structuring, as well as for comparative corpus and cross-cultural studies. ConGraCnet has a web application on the page <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://emocnet.uniri.hr/congracnet">http://emocnet.uniri.hr/congracnet</a>.