Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Identifying Patterns In Dna Change, Jason R. Gilder, Dan E. Krane, Travis E. Doom, Michael L. Raymer

Kno.e.sis Publications

Now that a draft sequence of the human genome is nearly complete, questions regarding both the information contained within our genetic blueprints as well as the manner in which that information content changes over time can be addressed in ways that had not previously been possible. By their very nature, some of the nucleotide sequences present within our genome allow detailed examination of the mode and pattern of evolution that has shaped our genetic instructions over time spans of tens of millions of years. Alu repeats are one example. Using these relatively short, ubiquitous DNA sequences we explore the problem …

Ontology Driven Information Systems In Action (Capturing And Applying Existing Knowledge To Semantic Applications), Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Beads In The Straits Settlements: Trade And Domestic Demand, 1827-1937, Hwei-Fe'n Cheah

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Beads have long been a part of the exchange of goods in Southeast. Indo-Pacific beads were traded in Southeast Asia and colored beads from China were exchanged for spices and forest products from the Indonesian archipelago. The Straits Settlements, comprising the ports of Singapore, Malacca, and Penang, was formed in 1826, to consolidate the trading position of the British in Southeast Asia. Singapore, in particular, developed into a major entrepot of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Research by the late Peter Francis, Jr., drew attention to its role as a channel for a part of the Southeast Asian bead …

Table Of Contents (V. 15, 2003)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Two Centuries Of Iroquois Beadwork, Dolores N. Elliott

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

To the 16th-century Iroquois living in what is now central New York state, European glass trade beads were something special; they were believed to have had magical and spiritual meaning. To this day, the Iroquois have a special relationship with glass beads. Iroquois artists began creating three-dimensional beaded items in the late 18th century. The first beaded pincushions and wall pockets were small, but they increased in size and quantity during the 19th century. Two centers of beadwork making arose: one around Niagara Falls in western New York and southern Ontario, and the other around Montreal in southern Quebec and …

Captions And Color Plates (V. 15, 2003)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Reviews And End Matter

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Beadwork: A World Guide, by Caroline Crabtree and Pam Stallebrass (2002), reviewed by Margret Carey

A Bead Timeline. Volume I: Prehistory to 1200 CE, by James W. Lankton (2003), reviewed by Marilee Wood

Amber in Archaeology, Curt W. Beck, Ilze B. Loze, and Joan M. Todd (eds.) (2003), reviewed by Karlis Karklins.

Beads: Journal Of The Society Of Bead Researchers - Volume 15 (Complete)

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

No abstract provided.

Bohemian Faceted-Spheroidal Mold-Pressed Glass Bead Attributes: Hypothesized Terminus Post Quem Dates For The 19th Century, Lester A. Ross

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Faceted-spheroidal mold-pressed beads have been manufactured in Bohemia since the 18th century. Evolution of manufacturing technology has resulted in the creation of bead attributes that can readily be observed on beads from archaeological contexts. Many North American archaeological sites contain examples of this bead type; but few reports have identified the attributes, much less recognized these beads as mold-pressed. Enough evidence now exists to suggest that some of these attributes have temporal significance for dating archaeological bead assemblages. Terminus post quem dates for faceted-spheroidal mold-pressed bead attributes are hypothesized, and a strategy for future research is suggested so that a …

Early Upper Paleolithic Ornaments From Üçaǧizli Cave, Turkey, Mary C. Stiner, Steven L. Kuhn

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Beads and similar ornaments appear early in the archaeological record associated with modern humans (Homo sapiens), first in Africa and somewhat later in Eurasia. They are thought to be among the first indicators of human use of symbols. This paper discusses criteria used to distinguish early mollusk-shell beads from other kinds of shells in archaeological deposits, focusing on evidence from the site of Üçaǧizli Cave in Turkey. Upper Paleolithic beadmakers at this and other sites clearly preferred certain forms of shell for ornamental purposes, although the reasons for that selectivity remain obscure.

Birds, Beasts, And Botanicals: Organic Beads And Pendants From The Amazon Basin, Deborah G. Harding

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

The people of the Amazon Basin have an incredible array of organic materials available to them, which they use to make beads and pendants. The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has extensive recent collections from the Amazon Basin, with hundreds of necklaces, belts, aprons, and ear and arm ornaments which contain beads made from organic materials. These collections are used to illustrate a variety of the beads and their materials.

Generalized Metrics And Uniquely Determined Logic Programs, Pascal Hitzler, Anthony K. Seda

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

The introduction of negation into logic programming brings the benefit of enhanced syntax and expressibility, but creates some semantical problems. Specifically, certain operators which are monotonic in the absence of negation become non-monotonic when it is introduced, with the result that standard approaches to denotational semantics then become inapplicable. In this paper, we show how generalized metric spaces can be used to obtain fixed-point semantics for several classes of programs relative to the supported model semantics, and investigate relationships between the underlying spaces we employ. Our methods allow the analysis of classes of programs which include the acyclic, locally hierarchical, …

Semantic N-Gram Language Modeling With The Latent Maximum Entropy Principle, Shaojun Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Fuchun Peng, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

We describe a unified probabilistic framework for statistical language modeling-the latent maximum entropy principle-which can effectively incorporate various aspects of natural language, such as local word interaction, syntactic structure and semantic document information. Unlike previous work on maximum entropy methods for language modeling, which only allow explicit features to be modeled, our framework also allows relationships over hidden features to be captured, resulting in a more expressive language model. We describe efficient algorithms for marginalization, inference and normalization in our extended models. We then present experimental results for our approach on the Wall Street Journal corpus.

Kuhn's Paradigm As A Parable For The Cold War: Incommensurability And Its Discontents From Fuller's Tale Of Harvard To Fleck's Unsung Lvov, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

In a journal issue dedicated to a discussion of Steve Fuller's Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, I argue that Kuhn’s limited acknowledgment of Fleck’s influence on his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was due to a foundational incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework for philosophical studies of science and Fleck’s historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to scientific progress. The incommensurability in question constituted an insurmountable tension between the kind of language and thinking manifest in Fleck’s study and the conceptual language evident in Kuhn and characteristic of one might still call the received view’ in philosophy of science. …

Reflections About The Faxon Company: Beyond Vision, The Reality Of Shatterproof Windows And The Demise Of The Faxon Company, Connie Foster

DLTS Faculty Publications

Connie Foster, editor of Serials Review, opens this issue with reflections about the Faxon Company. She is joined by several contributors who had close ties with the subscription agency, either as former employees or clients. In an effort to document some of the milestones of the Faxon Company and results of an upheaval in the business community with the bankruptcy of divine/RoweCom/Faxon Library Services, the contributors also willingly share some experiences with and insights about a former serials subscription agency giant with services that spanned three centuries.

Web Service: Been There, Done That?, Steffen Staab, Will Van Der Aalst, V. Richard Benjamins, Amit P. Sheth, John A. Miller, Chistoph Bussler, Alexander Maedche, Dieter Fensel, Dennis Gannon

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web services can be defined as loosely coupled, reusable software components that semantically encapsulate discrete functionality and are distributed and programmatically accessible over standard Internet protocols. Web services have received a lot of hype, the reasons for which are not easily determined. Some of their benefits might even seem to waste away, once we touch on the nitty-gritty details, because Web services per se do not offer a solution to underlying problems. The contributions included in this section delve into some of these issues, including: pitfalls of workflow issues; structuring procedural knowledge into problem-solving methods; discussing how a low initial …

Reducing Automobile Emissions In Southern California: The Dance Of Public Policies And Technological Fixes, Rudi Volti

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

For many years I have taught at a small liberal arts college in Southern California. When first-year students arrived at the college in the early 1970s, they settled into the usual things that occupy freshmen. A few weeks would go by, and then they would make a remarkable discovery: tall mountains would appear to the north as autumn weather dissipated the heavy blanket of smog that had obscured them. Today, the air is not perfectly clear in September, but students are aware of the mountains from the day they move into the dormitories. The region's partial victory over smog illustrates …

Semantic Web Processes, Jorge Cardoso, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Growth Strategies And Intellectual Capital Formation In New And Emerging Heis, Ellen Hazelkorn

Books/Book chapters

Higher educational institutions are being asked to contribute more effectively and efficiently to economic growth, innovation and intellectual capital. As they do so, the academy has also come under pressure. The content of academic work, the role of faculty, and the balance between teaching, research and service, have, arguably, been restructured, reconfigured and redefined. For academics within traditional universities, pressures for accountability and social relevance have challenged what many valued as ‘their autonomy’. But, for staff within new and emerging HEIs, those formed or reconstituted circa. 1970, there have been different pressures. Many were hired originally as teachers and now …

Formal Concept Analysis And Resolution On Algebraic Domains - Preliminary Report, Matthias Wendt, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We relate two formerly independent areas: Formal concept analysis and logic of domains. We will establish a correspondence between contextual attribute logic on formal contexts resp. concept lattices and a clausal logic on coherent algebraic cpos. We show how to identify the notion of formal concept in the domain theoretic setting. In particular, we show that a special instance of the resolution rule from the domain logic coincides with the concept closure operator from formal concept analysis. The results shed light on the use of contexts and domains for knowledge representation and reasoning purposes.

Learning Continuous Latent Variable Models With Bregman Divergences, Shaojun Wang, Dale Schuurmans

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present a class of unsupervised statistical learning algorithms that are formulated in terms of minimizing Bregman divergences— a family of generalized entropy measures defined by convex functions. We obtain novel training algorithms that extract hidden latent structure by minimizing a Bregman divergence on training data, subject to a set of non-linear constraints which consider hidden variables. An alternating minimization procedure with nested iterative scaling is proposed to find feasible solutions for the resulting constrained optimization problem. The convergence of this algorithm along with its information geometric properties are characterized.

Still Patently Unconstitutional: A Reply To Professor Nard, Margo A. Bagley

Faculty Articles

In Defense of Geographic Disparity is Professor Craig Nard's response to my article Patently Unconstitutional: The Geographical Limitation on Prior Art in a Small World (Patently Unconstitutional). According to Professor Nard, my article advocates "the elimination of [the] geographic disparity" of 35 U.S.C § 102 in order to "protect developing nations and indigenous peoples from Western countries' patent law regimes." Professor Nard is correct in his assertion that I seek the elimination of the geographical disparity in U.S. patent law; however, he misses the mark as to my reasons. My opposition to the geographical limitation does not derive from …

Introducing The Global Diffusion Of The Internet Series, Peter Wolcott, Seymour E. Goodman

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

Many genes can play a role in multiple biological processes or molecular functions. Identifying multifunctional genes at the genome-wide level and studying their properties can shed light upon the complexity of molecular events that underpin cellular functioning, thereby leading to a better understanding of the functional landscape of the cell. However, to date, genome-wide analysis of multifunctional genes (and the proteins they encode) has been limited. Here we introduce a computational approach that uses known functional annotations to extract genes playing a role in at least two distinct biological processes. We leverage functional genomics data sets for three organisms—H. sapiens, …

Global Diffusion Of The Internet - I: India: Is The Elephant Learning To Dance?, Peter Wolcott, Seymour E. Goodman

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

With his proclamation in 1998 that "IT is India's tomorrow", Prime Minister Vajpayee captured a vision of a 21st century India substantially different from that of the previous century, with its high levels of poverty, bloated bureaucracies, and protectionist policies. He envisioned the new India as a major IT power, fully integrated with the global economy, bringing about substantial domestic and international benefit. The Internet is a key to this vision, both as an enabler of technology-based change, and as an indicator of the vision's fulfillment.

Using an analytic framework developed by the authors and others, this study documents the …

Icts As An Aid To Inclusivity?: Barriers To Benefits For Adult Learners In The Ennis Information Age Town, Anna Greenhalgh

Masters

The subject of this thesis is the potential role of ICTs as a means of addressing social exclusion. ICTs have been recognised for their double-edged promise: while they may open opportunities in work, education and social practices, their benefits may be inaccessible to disadvantaged members of society. This subject is explored by means of a case study of adult learners who have been exposed to a ‘social experiment’ involving technological endowment of an Irish community: the Ennis Information Age Town project. This large-scale private sector initiative, which ran between 1997 and 2002, has the potential to inform future ICT projects …

Mitigating The Negative Effects Of Stress In Space Flight: A Transactional Approach, Haydee Maria Cuevas

Publications

The primary goal of this theoretical paper is to highlight how a transactional approach to investigating stressor effects during space flight can lead to a greater understanding of the complex processes by which humans adapt psychologically and physically to the adverse conditions encountered in this extreme environment.Transactional approaches conceptualize stress as occurring in the nature of the "transaction" (Le., interaction) between the individual and the stimulus environment, emphasizing the role of cognitive appraisal (Le., perceived ability to cope with the situation). Interventions that positively influence this cognitive appraisal process may, therefore, lessen the experience of stress and optimize human performance …