De Marchi and Lorenzetti :253-261, 2016) have recently argued that in fields where the journal impact factor is not calculated, such as in the humanities, it is key to find other indicators that would allow the relevant community to assess the quality of scholarly journals and the research outputs that are published in them. The authors' suggestion is that information concerning the journal's rejection rate and the number of subscriptions sold is important and should be used for such assessment. The (...) question addressed by the authors is very important, yet their proposed solutions are problematic. Here I point to some of these problems and illustrate them by considering as a case in point the field of philosophy. Specifically, here I argue for four main claims. First, even assuming that IF provides a reliable indicator of the quality of journals for the assessment of research outputs, De Marchi and Lorenzetti have failed to validate their suggested indicators and proxies. Second, it has not been clarified why, in absence of IF, other journal-based metrics that are currently available should not be used. Third, the relationship between IF and rejection rate is more complex than the authors suggest. Fourth, accepting the number of sold subscriptions as a proxy would result in discrimination against open access journals. The upshot of my analysis is that the question of how to assess journals and research outputs in the humanities is still far from resolved. (shrink)

The thesis proposes a projective theory for contemporary urbanism that equates the active processes of the city and a new orientation for procedural urban design within a single line of thought that delineates the concept of a generic organization—one that derives from unitary operations acting in series, forming heterogeneous assemblages, but resisting the tendency to totalizing systematization. Such a description characterizes the urban condition as an open phenomenon, such as that described by theorists of assemblage urbanism. This thesis extends this (...) work from an analytical or empirical theory to an operative one that can be applied to design practice by combining it with an ontology of encapsulation and object-based agency. I will argue that computational processes are unique in the way that they enable urban design to operate in the same manner as the city with regard to enaction and representation while drawing attention to the rhetorical dimension of interactive systems like urbanism and procedural models. These parallels are further explored through a series of themes that bridge between urban studies and urban design and that connect to historical concerns in computation and urban design. The four themes—Interactive, Generative, Reflexive, Entropic—coalesce around a coherent, integrated theoretical schema. Within this framework, I also argue for an increasingly involved role for architecture as an active agent in the urban design process. Illustrations of how this might occur are presented alongside the arguments to underscore the fact that the material basis of the computational model is as significant a determinant of design practice as the material realities of the city are to the urban experience. Finally, these lessons are imported back into urbanism with architecture serving as an interface to the city. Procedural engagement allows architecture to participate in urbanism through an inextricably and mutually contingent interaction. In cases where this occurs, the city continuously prompts architecture to carry out new inquiries into the changing potential of the urban situation, without providing a terminal condition. Rather, by allowing the the outcome of the situation to remain undecided, both urbanism and computational modeling can be seen to offer the same productive irreality and alterity: an urban generic. (shrink)

Nine films to place thought. Thinking Places is a series of nine scientific films, made with the following principle: coupling, through the language of cinema, a speech given by a scientist that works on inhabited space and a place this scientist has chosen because this place changed him/her. Each film is based on four elementary rules: A. The person and the place must be shot simultaneously. B. The film includes one sequence shot only. C. The shooting is limited to one (...) take. D. The filmed place is what the filmed person is talking about. The Films 1. Béatrice Collignon/Ottawa 2. Jean-François Staszak/Boston 3. John Agnew/Belfast 4. Franco Farinelli/Florence 5. Paola Viganò/Kortrijk + Antwerp 6. Michel Lussault/Lyon 7. Augustin Berque/Imintanoute 8. Susanne Rau/Gran Canaria 9. Jacques Lévy/Seoul. (shrink)

The recurring challenge facing anyone who tries to localize realities in order to show their spatial relations on a map is the systematic impermanence of any objectivized space. Thus any space used as a base layer in thematic maps must be thought of as the result of an ongoing production. Places, like any mobile individuals, always move with respect to any given formalized space. In this process, maps have a localization purpose which should be understood as a “here”-enhancement, i.e. an (...) enhancement of the potential of our environment. I argue that the static, zenithal-view map, which used to be an important instrument of such enhancement, it is being growingly replaced by mobile devices able to articulate local information with spatial databases into a new hic et nunc. I suggest that that the very concept of the "geographical map" should evolve so as to refer precisely to this interactive system of spatial information. (shrink)

One way to evaluate and compare rival but potentially incompatible theories that account for the same set of observations is coherence. In this paper we take the quantitative notion of theory coherence as proposed by [Kwok, et.al. 98] and broaden its foundations. The generalisation will give a measure of the efficacy of a sub–theory as against single theory components. This also gives rise to notions of dependencies and couplings to account for how theory components interact with each other. Secondly we (...) wish to capture the fact that not all components within a theory are of equal importance. To do this we assign weights to theory components. This framework is applied to game theory and the performance of a coherentist player is investigated within the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. (shrink)

Business-IT alignment is complicated because of the need to align multiple business and IT points of view. A philosophical foundation can help generate methods that bring together these disparate viewpoints in a common model that all stakeholders can agree to. In this paper, we describe the philosophical foundations of the Systemic Enterprise Architecture Method and show how it can help business-IT alignment with the example of a concrete business process. These foundations are applicable to other methods as well.

The environmental modeller faces a dilemma. Science often demands that more and more process representations are incorporated into models. Testing the causal representations in environmental models then depends on specifying boundary conditions and model parameters adequately. This will always be difficult in applications to a real system because of the heterogeneities, non-stationarities, complexities and epistemic uncertainties inherent in environmental prediction. Thus, it can be difficult to define the information content of a data set used in model evaluation and any consequent (...) measures of belief or verisimilitude. A limit of acceptability approach to model evaluation is suggested as a way of testing models, implying that thought is required to define critical experiments that will allow models as hypotheses to be adequately differentiated. 2012 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS on behalf of Academie des sciences. (shrink)

Recent research has explored the principles of service system viability based on systems inquiry invoking perspectives from Systems Theory and Cybernetics in particular Stafford Beer’s viable systems model. However based on Banathy & Jenlink, Systems inquiry encompasses more than just Systems Theory and includes domains such as Systems Methodology and Systems Philosophy. Building on the extant literature, our work has the following particularities: 1) it is based on an explicit systems philosophy in which we explicitly define what we view as (...) viability and, 2) it involves a systems methodological approach to either analyze the viability of a service system or to design a viable service system. This is achieved by means of applying a systems modeling technique called SEAM. SEAM rests upon systemic principles and embodies conceptualizations from VSM. We apply SEAM to concretely model a utility company in Geneva, Switzerland in order to gain an understanding of how a service system maintains its identity and remains viable in its environment. (shrink)

Although we were required to lecture to large groups of over 170 students, the traditional lecture clashed with our commitment to teach in a way that was student-centred, relational and socially and politically transformative. In this context, and using an action research approach, we sought to turn our large-group lectures into a space that both met some of the historic aims of the lecture in passing on received knowledge, but also became a space for students to immediately engage in a (...) process of discussion and dialogue around the concepts and ideas raised. Although the literature suggested this was not possible in groups of over a hundred, we found that our students identified that the re-imagined lecture significantly aided their learning in a number of key respects. (shrink)

The developments in EMC modelling permit to estimate the disturbances in different kinds of circuits and installations, to define a protection philosophy and to evaluate its efficiency. Using some examples of modelling, the paper discusses whether these possibilities are useful for the standardization in progress in the European Community. It is shown that essential progress has been made in the last years in modelling field-to-transmission line coupling, crosstalk, antennas, and shielded enclosures and that these models can be applied to define (...) parameters and environments needed for standards. (shrink)

Artificial Life is an interdisciplinary effort to investigate the fundamental properties of living systems through the simulation and synthesis of life-like processes in artificial media. The field brings a powerful set of tools to the study of how high-level behavior can arise in systems governed by simple rules of interaction. This tenth volume marks two decades of research in this interdisciplinary scientific comunity, a period marked by vast advances in the life sciences. The field has contributed fundamentally to our understanding (...) of life itself through computer models, and has led to novel solutions to complex real-world problems -- from disease prevention to stock market prediction -- across high technology and human society. The proceedings of the biennial A-life conference -- which has grown over the years from a small workshop in Santa Fe to a major international meeting -- reflect the increasing importance of the work to all areas of contemporary science. (shrink)

A model of writing in cognitive development, Understanding the Representational Mind synthesizes the burgeoning literature on the child’s theory of mind to provide an integrated account of children’s understanding of representational and mental processes, which is crucial in their acquisition of our commonsense psychology. Perner describes experimental work on children’s acquisition of a theory of mind and representation, offers a theoretical account of this acquisition, and gives examples of how the increased sophistication in children’s theory of mind improves their understanding (...) of social interaction and how, in the case of autistic children, an impairment results in social ineptitude. He analyzes the concepts of representation and metarepresentation as they appear in current discussion in the philosophy of cognitive science and explains how the unfolding of mental representation enables infants to comprehend change over time, engage in pretence, and use representational systems like pictures and language. Perner goes on to show that around age four children become able to understand the representational nature of pictures and language and to distinguish appearance from reality. Introducing basic distinctions in philosophy of mind for characterizing the mental, Perner discusses differences in how commonsense and cognitive psychology view the mind. Tracing the onset of a commonsense psychology in the social and emotional awareness of early infancy, he reveals how the child begins to take a cognitive, representational view of the mind with repercussions for children’s episodic memory, self control, and their ability to engage in deception. Perner concludes by describing the observed developmental changes as a case of theory change And contrasts his thesis with competing proposals. Josef Perner is Lecturer in Experimental Psychology at Sussex University, Brighton, England. (shrink)