Landscape Metaphor Research Articles

Debussy y Monet en el concierto "La danza de los colores". Intervención interdisciplinar de Música y Pintura. Grado en Bellas Artes TITLE: Debussy and Monet in the concert "The dance of the colours". Interdiciplinary music and painting intervention...

Romper la dinámica habitual del aula para mejorar el rendimiento de los estudiantes e incentivar su espíritu de aprendizaje y su creatividad nos lleva a aceptar retos para generar un aprendizaje significativo. En este artículo abordamos una experiencia multisensorial que se organizó junto al Conservatorio Profesional de Música de Teruel (España). Las artes visuales colaboraban como invitadas en el concierto homenaje al pianista y compositor Claude Debussy (en el centenario de su muerte) y para ello se diseñó una intervención mural. La asignatura de Color I, del área de pintura, trabajó el proyecto a partir del repertorio seleccionado, tomando como punto de partida la sinestesia, que nos servía de puente entre ambas formas de expresión y creación artística. De esta forma, música y pintura se conjugaban en una obra conjunta dentro de un proyecto colaborativo que se construía simultáneamente. En nuestra propuesta elegimos a Claude Monet, a sus pinturas de nenúfares, para recrear un estanque en cuatro paneles murales que serían pintados in situ por los estudiantes del primer curso. Al trabajar de forma conjunta se proyectó un trabajo colaborativo atendiendo a la percepción sensorial, a la destreza técnica, y como punto de unión entre ambas disciplinas, los colores y los sonidos que invitaban a sentir y percibir tonos, brillo y armonía en una actividad de innovación. La intervención mural y la transformación del espacio permitieron que las notas de color y el sonido danzasen dentro de una misma melodía, metáfora de un paisaje sensorial creado sobre el escenario.ABSTRACTBreaking the usual dynamics of the classroom to improve students´ performance and to encourage their learning spirit and creativity leads us to accept challenges to generate meaningful learning. In this article we approach a multisensory experience which was organized together with the Professional Conservatory of Music of Teruel (Spain). Visual Arts collaborate as guests in a concert-tribute to the pianist and composer Claude Debussy (on the centenary of his death) and, for this, a mural intervention was designed. The subject of Color I, from the Painting Area, developed a project from the selected repertoire, taking as a starting point synesthesia, which acted as a bridge between both forms of artistic expression and creation. In this way, music and painting were conjugated in a joint work within a collaborative project that was being constructed simultaneously. In our proposal, we chose Claude Monet and his water lily paintings, to recreate a pond in four mural panels that would be painted in situ by the first course’ students. Working together, we projected a collaborative work based in sensory perception, the technical skill, and as a point of union between both disciplines, the colors and sounds, which invited to feel and perceive tones, brightness and harmony in an activity of innovation. The mural intervention and the transformation of the space allowed the notes of color and sound to dance within the same melody, metaphor of a sensorial landscape created on the stage.

Feather evolution exemplifies sexually selected bridges across the adaptive landscape.

Over the last two decades, paleontologists have pieced together the early evolutionary history of feathers. Simple hair-like feathers served as insulating pelage, but the first feathers with complex branching structures and a plainer form evolved for the purpose of sexual display. The evolution of these complex display feathers was essential to the later evolution of flight. Feathers illustrate how sexual selection can generate complex novel phenotypes, which are then available for natural selection to modify and direct toward novel functions. In the longstanding metaphor of the adaptive landscape, sexual selection is a means by which lineages resting on one adaptive peak may gradually bridge a gap to another peak, without the landscape itself being first altered by environmental changes.

Adaptive Landscapes in the Age of Synthetic Biology.

For nearly a century adaptive landscapes have provided overviews of the evolutionary process and yet they remain metaphors. We redefine adaptive landscapes in terms of biological processes rather than descriptive phenomenology. We focus on the underlying mechanisms that generate emergent properties such as epistasis, dominance, trade-offs and adaptive peaks. We illustrate the utility of landscapes in predicting the course of adaptation and the distribution of fitness effects. We abandon aged arguments concerning landscape ruggedness in favor of empirically determining landscape architecture. In so doing, we transform the landscape metaphor into a scientific framework within which causal hypotheses can be tested.

Experiential approaches to sustainability education: towards learning landscapes

Purpose This paper aims to critically reflect the current specialist discourse on experiential approaches to higher education for sustainable development (HESD). Limitations to the current discourse are identified, and as a result, an alternative approach to the study of experiential education (EE) within HESD is suggested. Design/methodology/approach Three research questions are addressed by analysing the literature on EE and experiential learning (EL) within HESD in specialist academic journals. Findings There is a consensus among authors regarding the appropriateness of experiential approaches to HESD. However, limitations to the current discourse suggest the need for an alternative approach to studying EE within HESD. Therefore, this paper proposes the application of the learning landscape metaphor to take a more student-centred and holistic perspective. Originality/value The learning landscape metaphor has previously not been applied to EE within HESD. This alternative conceptualisation foregrounds student perspectives to experiential initiatives within HESD. The holistic approach aims to understand the myriad influences on students learning, while allowing examination of how experiential approaches relate to other educational approaches within HESD.

Predictability of imitative learning trajectories

The fitness landscape metaphor plays a central role in the modeling of optimizing principles in many research fields, ranging from evolutionary biology, where it was first introduced, to management research. Here we consider the ensemble of trajectories of an imitative learning search, in which agents exchange information on their fitness and imitate the fittest agent in the population, with the aim of reaching the global maximum of the fitness landscape. We assess the degree to which the start and end points determine the learning trajectories using two measures, namely the predictability, which yields the probability that two randomly chosen trajectories are the same, and the mean path divergence, which gauges the dissimilarity between two learning trajectories. We find that the predictability is greater in rugged landscapes than in smooth ones. The mean path divergence, however, is strongly affected by the search parameters—population size and imitation propensity—that obliterate the influence of the underlying landscape. The learning trajectories become more deterministic, in the sense that there are fewer distinct trajectories and those trajectories are more similar to each other, with increasing population size and imitation propensity. In addition, we find that the roughness of the learning trajectories, which measures the deviation from additivity of the fitness function, is always greater than the roughness estimated over the entire fitness landscape.

Haematopoietic stem cells: entropic landscapes of differentiation.

The metaphor of a potential epigenetic differentiation landscape broadly suggests that during differentiation a stem cell approaches a stable equilibrium state from a higher free energy towards a stable equilibrium state which represents the final cell type. It has been conjectured that there is an analogy to the concept of entropy in statistical mechanics. In this context, in the undifferentiated state, the entropy would be large since fewer constraints exist on the gene expression programmes of the cell. As differentiation progresses, gene expression programmes become more and more constrained and thus the entropy would be expected to decrease. In order to assess these predictions, we compute the Shannon entropy for time-resolved single-cell gene expression data in two different experimental set-ups of haematopoietic differentiation. We find that the behaviour of this entropy measure is in contrast to these predictions. In particular, we find that the Shannon entropy is not a decreasing function of developmental pseudo-time but instead it increases towards the time point of commitment before decreasing again. This behaviour is consistent with an increase in gene expression disorder observed in populations sampled at the time point of commitment. Single cells in these populations exhibit different combinations of regulator activity that suggest the presence of multiple configurations of a potential differentiation network as a result of multiple entry points into the committed state.

Disseminating Secret-Story-Knowledge through the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices

ABSTRACTThis article is inspired simultaneously by the metaphor of professional knowledge landscapes and our experiences of the transformative potential of self-study methodology. We argue for the unique potential of self-study research, as a means not only for teacher educators to develop their pedagogy, but also to leave the mark of their experiences on the inhospitable terrain of teacher education reform. Central to our argument is our conceptual re-visioning of the professional knowledge landscape such that teacher educators’ knowledge of practice, typically contained in their “secret stories” of practice, comes to occupy a more public and prominent position on the landscape through self-study research. Locating our work within the Australian teacher education context, we highlight the ways in which current policy initiatives are redefining the work of teacher educators, and increasing the marginalization of teacher educators’ own perspectives and voices in the (re)production of knowledge about teaching. We offer a challenge to teacher educators to publicly participate in articulating and sharing their professional knowledge of practice through self-study.

Ecology dictates evolution? About the importance of genetic and ecological constraints in adaptation(a)(a)Contribution to the Focus Issue Evolutionary Modeling and Experimental Evolution edited by José Cuesta, Joachim Krug and Susanna Manrubia.

The topography of the adaptive landscape is a major determinant of the course of evolution. In this review we use the adaptive landscape metaphor to highlight the effect of ecology on evolution. We describe how ecological interactions modulate the shape of the adaptive landscape, and how this affects adaptive constraints. We focus on microbial communities as model systems.

The Coordinated Activity Theory of the Firm

This paper proceeds from the assumption that economies are characterized by a high degree of interactive nonconvexity in most activities and at most scales. The consequence is nonconvex production and preference sets and the corresponding inefficiency of myopic algorithms. One application of this perspective is the theory of the firm. Conventional theories explain the existence, boundaries and internal organization of firms on the basis of contracting costs that impede the otherwise optimizing properties of market decentralization. I propose instead an approach in which the motive for organizing production within rather than between institutions is to internalize nonconvexities, thereby obtaining the benefit of explicitly coordinated plans. A useful device for representing this problem is the profit landscape, understood to be nonconvex in the sense that fitness landscapes are in evolutionary theory. Firms face three types of challenges, optimizing with respect to a particular profit hill (the problem analyzed in standard microeconomics), selecting a desirable hill, and achieving flexibility to transition between hills in the face of environmental change. These entail tradeoffs, which are reflected in the diversity of personnel, organizational, and innovation strategies observed in actual enterprises. While the use of the landscape metaphor in coordinated activity theory resembles a similar deployment in evolutionary economics, the two approaches differ in the questions they ask and the units of observation and analysis they employ. The applicability of the coordinated activity model is underscored by its congruence with the bulk of management literature, which can be understood more readily in terms of hill-selection than, or in addition to, the hill-climbing paradigm of conventional economics. In this sense, the existing management literature already provides a body of empirical and applied support for coordinated activity theory, although not generally for the socially-founded objectives of economics.

Mohammad in Archipelago: Spatializing Spirituality in Majelis Shalawat Syubbanul Muslimin in Kalikajar Probolinggo

Using Mohammad in Archipelago as a metaphor of the postmodern religious landscape, this article argues that Mohammad, a prophet of Muslim born in Mecca Saudi Arabia, has undoubtedly become a consumer item in shalawat council (Majelis Shalawat) practiced in many areas of Indonesia, including Probolinggo. This new religious phenomenon has been reproduced in line with the emergence of blurred negotiation between the profane and the sacred, and by the fact that religion is always posed in social life and in business life, shalawat practice also depends itself on the meaning and process making, or the certain socio-cultural context. This study sets the Majelis Shalawat Syubbanul Muslimin, located at Probolinggo, in relation with the ways they reproduced its penetration of religion vis-a-vis market economy. It also portrays how Syubbanul Muslimin produced a spatial order of certain followers since they have successfully practiced modes and techniques of production, consumption, and structuration of their own spiritual market. Additionally, it also contributes to the construction of charisma they have shaped by using the economic-political discourse of media.

Science map metaphors: a comparison of network versus hexmap-based visualizations.

Most maps of science use a network layout; few use a landscape metaphor. Human users are trained in reading geospatial maps, yet most have a hard time reading even simple networks. Prior work using general networks has shown that map-based visualizations increase recall accuracy of data. This paper reports the result of a comparison of two comparable renderings of the UCSD map of science that are: the original network layout and a novel hexmap that uses a landscape metaphor to layout the 554 subdisciplines grouped into 13 color-coded disciplines of science. Overlaid are HITS metrics that show the impact and transformativeness of different scientific subdisciplines. Both maps support the same interactivity, including search, filter, zoom, panning, and details on demand. Users performed memorization, search, and retrieval tasks using both maps. Results did not show any significant differences in how the two maps were remembered or used by participants. We conclude with a discussion of results and planned future work.

Adaptive fitness landscape for replicator systems: to maximize or not to maximize

Sewall Wright’s adaptive landscape metaphor penetrates a significant part of evolutionary thinking. Supplemented with Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection and Kimura’s maximum principle, it provides a unifying and intuitive representation of the evolutionary process under the influence of natural selection as the hill climbing on the surface of mean population fitness. On the other hand, it is also well known that for many more or less realistic mathematical models this picture is a severe misrepresentation of what actually occurs. Therefore, we are faced with two questions. First, it is important to identify the cases in which adaptive landscape metaphor actually holds exactly in the models, that is, to identify the conditions under which system’s dynamics coincides with the process of searching for a (local) fitness maximum. Second, even if the mean fitness is not maximized in the process of evolution, it is still important to understand the structure of the mean fitness manifold and see the implications of this structure on the system’s dynamics. Using as a basic model the classical replicator equation, in this note we attempt to answer these two questions and illustrate our results with simple well studied systems.

How to Escape Local Optima in Black Box Optimisation: When Non-elitism Outperforms Elitism

Escaping local optima is one of the major obstacles to function optimisation. Using the metaphor of a fitness landscape, local optima correspond to hills separated by fitness valleys that have to be overcome. We define a class of fitness valleys of tunable difficulty by considering their length, representing the Hamming path between the two optima and their depth, the drop in fitness. For this function class we present a runtime comparison between stochastic search algorithms using different search strategies. The (1+1) EA is a simple and well-studied evolutionary algorithm that has to jump across the valley to a point of higher fitness because it does not accept worsening moves (elitism). In contrast, the Metropolis algorithm and the Strong Selection Weak Mutation (SSWM) algorithm, a famous process in population genetics, are both able to cross the fitness valley by accepting worsening moves. We show that the runtime of the (1+1) EA depends critically on the length of the valley while the runtimes of the non-elitist algorithms depend crucially on the depth of the valley. Moreover, we show that both SSWM and Metropolis can also efficiently optimise a rugged function consisting of consecutive valleys.

Managing the future of the past: images of Exmoor landscape heritage

Tarr Steps is a footbridge across a river but it also bridges two temporal landscapes: the present and the ‘deep past’. Although the origins of the site are uncertain, the bridge is often represented as objectively authentic and ‘ancient’. The historicity of this claim is challenged by secondary production of the site. We unpack the discursive construction of the bridge and argue that Tarr Steps’ connection to the deep past is a cultural imaginary based on a selective interpretation of its morphology. This imaginary connection authenticates representation of the site as resembling the origin of a sequence of cultural evolution in Britain. We explore implications of this in relation to three metaphors of landscape used in the cultural heritage management tool called Historic Landscape Characterisation. In so doing, we raise questions about the future of the past, specifically in terms of the conceptualisation of temporality, authenticity and the politics of representation.

On the origin of innovations\u2014the opportunity vacuum as a conceptual model for the explanation of innovation

The aim of this paper is to transfer the innovation system (IS) approach to the microeconomic level, creating a conceptual framework which helps individual actors to explain, identify, and predict the origin of innovations. Based on the ongoing discussion about the applicability of boundedly rational search and, in particular, the metaphor of an opportunity landscape, the author has developed a conceptual framework for the origin of economic innovations, structured along three dimensions. First, the adjacent possible defines a narrow space of potential first-order combinations of exiting knowledge, which is the trajectory for the new developments in technology and science. Second, the adjacent feasible defines an area of expected cost reduction which enables the exploitation of the new technologies within a threshold. Finally, the adjacent acceptable represents a small area on the current edges of socially accepted behavior, which currently only innovators embrace, but soon will reach the early majority of adopters. It is, however, the moment when all three dimensions achieve an intersecting area, when the opportunity vacuum (OV) is created. The OV is a space, which strongly attracts innovation and often creates multiple inventions at the same time emerging independently. While this model is aimed at explaining the origin of economic innovations in retrospective, it can also be applied as a framing method to anticipate future economic novelty.

Vocal development in a Waddington landscape.

Vocal development is the adaptive coordination of the vocal apparatus, muscles, the nervous system, and social interaction. Here, we use a quantitative framework based on optimal control theory and Waddington's landscape metaphor to provide an integrated view of this process. With a biomechanical model of the marmoset monkey vocal apparatus and behavioral developmental data, we show that only the combination of the developing vocal tract, vocal apparatus muscles and nervous system can fully account for the patterns of vocal development. Together, these elements influence the shape of the monkeys' vocal developmental landscape, tilting, rotating or shifting it in different ways. We can thus use this framework to make quantitative predictions regarding how interfering factors or experimental perturbations can change the landscape within a species, or to explain comparative differences in vocal development across species.

Silent Landscapes: A comparative approach to José Leonilson and Louise Bourgeois

paper compares the works of two visual artists whose œuvres operate in in-between spaces between the visual and the verbal as much as between the self and the Other. Comparing the works of Jose Leonilson (Brazil, 1957- 93) and Louise Bourgeois (France/USA, 1911-2010) reveals creative and constitutive activity in a space that can best be described via the metaphor of a seaside landscape in which the line we try to draw to divide salt water from sand never stands. In what manners, however, could the poetic space these artists create be significant for a broader spectrum than literary interests? In our understanding, Leonilson’s and Bourgeois’s poetics operate through a silent hearing of the Other, whether that be loved ones, stone, or cloth. This conceptual notion, required for creative action, thus establishes a particular notion of balance between them and the Other. It is this precise aspect that also operates the mobility of the notion of love through their œuvres, and through the selection of personal emotional narratives as the thriving force for creation.

Segregation Landscape: A New View on the Schelling Segregation Space

Thomas C. Schelling showed that global aggregation may occur, even if it does not correspond to agent preferences; thus, to some extent his model supported the view that segregation is unavoidable, whatever the tolerance is. The segregation landscape approach proposed in this paper is seriously weakening this hypothesis; here, we radically change the perspective and propose using the landscape metaphor to represent emergent segregated communities. A segregation landscape is a mapping from situated individuals into an extra dimension which represents the degree of segregation of everyone. This paper uncovers how to interpret hills and valleys, and whether these interpretations are congruent with the intuitive notion of frontier. Such a representation allows to describe both the static properties of a segregation space as well their impact on how does information propagate between segregated communities. In order to assess the explanatory power of the landscape metaphor, we devise agent-based simulations. First, we establish the link between the micro-level quanti ed by individual tolerance and the macro-structure represented by the landscape; then we show how geographic properties impact the dynamical behavior on such a population landscape.

From pregnancy out of place to pregnancy in place: Across, within and between landscapes of meaning

Through his metaphor of landscapes of meaning, Reed provides a way of looking at meaning in terms of how it explains action, with the assumption that action occurs within landscapes of meaning. However, my ethnographic evidence suggests that Reed’s metaphor needs to enlarge its scope. In doing this I use my research on immigrant girls in Sweden. The aim is to demonstrate that people can and do live across, within and between landscapes of meaning. This interstitiality can both produce extreme hardship and possibilities of freedom and agency. I share the story of one person, Nazira, who is negotiating with different social and cultural worlds. This allows her to criticize different cultural contexts and to work towards emergent cultural forms. I conclude by arguing that my ethnographical accounts could be used in support and as a critique of the theoretical understanding of landscapes of meaning within Reed’s interpretivist sociology.

Construction of the landscape for multi-stable systems: Potential landscape, quasi-potential, A-type integral and beyond.

Motivated by the famous Waddington's epigenetic landscape metaphor in developmental biology, biophysicists and applied mathematicians made different proposals to construct the landscape for multi-stable complex systems. We aim to summarize and elucidate the relationships among these theories from a mathematical point of view. We systematically investigate and compare three different but closely related realizations in the recent literature: the Wang's potential landscape theory from steady state distribution of stochastic differential equations (SDEs), the Freidlin-Wentzell quasi-potential from the large deviation theory, and the construction through SDE decomposition and A-type integral. We revisit that the quasi-potential is the zero noise limit of the potential landscape, and the potential function in the third proposal coincides with the quasi-potential. We compare the difference between local and global quasi-potential through the viewpoint of exchange of limit order for time and noise amplitude. We argue that local quasi-potentials are responsible for getting transition rates between neighboring stable states, while the global quasi-potential mainly characterizes the residence time of the states as the system reaches stationarity. The difference between these two is prominent when the transitivity property is broken. The most probable transition path by minimizing the Onsager-Machlup or Freidlin-Wentzell action functional is also discussed. As a consequence of the established connections among different proposals, we arrive at the novel result which guarantees the existence of SDE decomposition while denies its uniqueness in general cases. It is, therefore, clarified that the A-type integral is more appropriate to be applied to the decomposed SDEs rather than its primitive form as believed by previous researchers. Our results contribute to a deeper understanding of landscape theories for biological systems.