Symbolic Patterns Research Articles

Zola. Vol. II: L'Homme de 'Germinal' (1871-1893) by Henri Mitterand (review)

996 Reviews Adieu and L'Auberge rouge 'le temoignage', in Melmoth reconcilie 'le don', and performatively in Le Chef-d'ceuvre inconnu. The approach is broadly deconstructionist, but the theoretical pedal is used deftly,and as a discreet accompaniment in the footnotes, rather than to play the big tune. Lots of Derrida, some de Man, but no Freud?for Lee's aim is to explore the literarity of Balzac's text, to take seriously, at face value, the letter of these works, carefully to weigh his words rather than be drawn into the powerful gravitational field ofthe monumental, indeed ossified, Balzac statue erected by the nouveaux romanciers and traditional criticism of the past. Many stimulating insights result: the readings are careful, coherent, only very occasionally questionable, taking full account of the complexities of Balzac's text: this really is close reading, and its perceptions, one feels, owe much more to Lee, and to his chosen topic of excess, than to his theoretical patrons. So the mirrorings and echoings of Un drame au bord de la mer take it,we may infer,into the corpus of Balzac's suggestive gender reversals, while Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu,Adieu, and L'Auberge rougeand Melmoth reconcilie are all examined via the occlusions, obfuscations, and blindnesses of characters, narrators, and texts. He is particularly good when reading against the grain, taking the opposite of the surface meaning or received opinion, or even of his own guiding theme: he gets much from looking at Porbus's restraint, forexample, or from the theme ofthe giftin the Melmoth story.In themselves, these are highly cogent and perceptive readings, but they constitute a fairlyclosed system, on which it is difficultto get a creative purchase, and from which it may be difficultfor anyone other than Lee to build out. Balzac's stories, at least those considered from this period, are indeed largely self-contained; but they were or became also part of a larger whole, of which Lee gives virtually no sense: there is scarcely any mention of Balzac's wider opus, the bibliography is solid but not exhaustive, and there is an index of key theoretical terms only. Interestingly, afterthe decades of postmodern deconstruction of Balzac, Lee tentatively gestures to? wards seeing in him a unity discovered in symbolic patterns and reversals, while none the less holding back from discerning one of any transcendent, still less numinous, kind, which might be, to use his phrase, 'trop rassurante'. But the cumulative effect of reading Balzac, even without deconstruction, is hardly reassuring, and Balzac's unity, like that of the world he purportedly represents, is very much an article of faith: it asks to be taken on trust.The narrowness of Lee's sample leads him to an unduly conventional and restrictive conception of the nouvelle as the only form of Balzac's shorter fiction,of its structures as the principal site of Balzac's unity,and to a rather positivistic view of it as a merely transient form in La Comedie humaine; but in analysing these five stories so sharply, and in showing within them the concealments and deceptions of realism, he has made a valuable contribution to Balzac studies. Pembroke College, Oxford Tim Farrant Zola. By Henri Mitterand. Vol. n: L'Homme de 'Germinal' {i8ji-i8gj). Paris: Fayard. 2001. 1192 pp.; 32 plates. ?42. ISBN 2-213-60831-8. Henri Mitterand has devoted his academic career to the study of Zola's life and work and is deservedly acknowledged as the doyen of Zola studies. His massive threevolume biography of Zola, timed to coincide with the centenary of Zola's death in September 2002, is the culmination of his research and more than confirms this reputation. This, the second volume of the biography, deals with the period, from 1871 to 1893, when Zola wrote and published all twenty Rougon-Macquart novels. As befits a biographical study, Mitterand is less concerned with a literary analysis of the novels than with their preparation and reception. (The selected bibliography points the reader to relevant works of literary criticism.) For each novel, Mitterand MLR, 98.4, 2003 997 looks in detail at Zola's copious preparatory notes, identifying the real-life people...

Symbolic adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference for data mining of heterogenous data

The application of neuro-fuzzy systems to domains involving prediction and classification of symbolic data requires a reconsideration and a careful definition of the concept of distance between patterns. Traditional distances are inadequate to provide information about the proximity between the symbolic patterns. This work proposes a new architecture of neurofuzzy systems, the Symbolic Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (SANFIS) that utilizes effectively a statistically extracted distance measure. The learning approach is a hybrid one and consists of a sequence of steps some of which are essential and some are used in order to optimize further the performance. Initially, a Statistical Distance Metric space is computed from the information provided with the training set. The premise parameters are subsequently evaluated with a three-phase Instance Based Learning (IBL) scheme that estimates the input membership function centers and spreads and constructs the corresponding fuzzy rules. The first phase of this scheme explores heuristic approaches that can uncover information for the relative importance and the reliability of the examples. The second phase exploits this information and extracts an adequate subset of the training patterns for the construction of the fuzzy rules. The concept of fuzzy adaptive subsethood is used at the third phase, for the reduction of the number of the fuzzy sets used as input membership functions. The consequent parameters are estimated with an efficient linear least squares formulation. The obtained performances from the SANFIS trained with the hybrid learning methods are significantly better than the traditional nearest neighbour Instance Based Learning schemes and compares well with advanced neural designs. At the same time SANFIS provides an enhanced explanation ability with the construction of a few interpretable rules.

Anomaly Detection in Complex Systems

This paper presents a novel concept of anomaly detection in complex systems using tools of Symbolic Dynamics and Pattern Discovery. Anomaly is defined as a deviation from the nominal behaviour and can be associated with parametric changes that may gradually evolve. The proposed methodology is based on two-time-scale analysis of observed asymptotic behaviour of the dynamical system. This concept of small change detection in dynamical systems is elucidated through an example of the forced Duffing equation with a slowly varying dissipation parameter.

A robust timing and frequency synchronization for OFDM systems

A robust symbol-timing and carrier-frequency synchronization scheme applicable to orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexing systems is presented. The proposed method is based on a training symbol specifically designed to have a steep rolloff timing metric. The proposed timing metric also provides a robust sync detection capability. Both time domain training and frequency domain (FD) training are investigated. For FD training, maintaining a low peak-to-average power ratio of the training symbol was taken into consideration. The channel estimation scheme based on the designed training symbol was also incorporated in the system in order to give both fine-timing and frequency-offset estimates. For fine frequency estimation, two approaches are presented. The first one is based on the suppression of the interference introduced in the frequency estimation process by the training symbol pattern in the context of multipath dispersive channels. The second one is based on the maximum likelihood principle and does not suffer from any interference. A new performance measure is introduced for timing estimation, which is based on the plot of signal to timing-error-induced average interference power ratio against the timing estimate shift. A simple approach for finding the optimal setting of the timing estimator is presented. Finally, the sync detection, timing estimation, frequency estimation, and bit-error-rate performance of the proposed method are presented in a multipath Rayleigh fading channel.

Shelley's Poetics, Wave Dynamics, and the Telling Rhythm of Complementarity

With discovery of superstring theory, musical metaphors take on startling reality, for theory suggests that microscopic landscape is suffused with tiny strings whose pattern orchestrate evolution of cosmos. The winds of change, according superstring theory, gust through aeolian universe. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and Quest for Ultimate Theory (1999) 19. It is well known that brain has periodic of activity.. entire [neural network] can operate only by large amount of cooperative, back-and-forth matching of activity at all levels ... neurons in central nervous system have rich diversity of electrical properties based on ionic conductances that endow with oscillatory Francisco Varela, et.al., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science & Human Experience (1993)75 Drawn from quantum cosmology and cognitive neuroscience, epigraphs capture my recollection of critical coincidence in which my thinking about Percy Shelley's theoretical poetics began. too, theorized that cosmological structure expressed itself in vibrational and that mental events manifest autorhythmic oscillatory properties. In fact, he positioned their rhythmic interactions at foundation of his poetics, which proposed a certain order or rhythm at core of all imaginative expressivity (i.e. wide range of 'texts' falling within definitions of poetry in Defense). (1) Early in A Defense of Poetry, states that rhythmic principle within human beings corresponds to impressions which excite them (481). Mind and matter, as aspects of cosmos apparent in laws, express their shared dynamics in physical sensation[s] of rhythm and therein embody, in well chosen words of Amittai Aviram, an insistent manifestation of (Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry [1994]200. The world expresses itself in waves of information, yet these outer waves encounter and interact with inner waves generated in brain, placing consciousness itself at/as event horizon of Being. To employ phrase current with these interactive waves form patterns of interference, and under optimal conditions, both material vehicles of rhythmic manifestation/expression (biosphere and brain) achieve what contemporary physics and neuroscience term cohesion. For images of light and water provide symbolic tracks in wavelike properties of discussed in his poetics and embody properties thematically evoked in his best poetry. New readings of Shelley's figures and theories of light: confirm De Man's belief in Shelley Disfigured, that these tropes establish extraordinarily systematic foundation for occasionally chaotic poetic events (The Rhetoric of Romanticism [1984] 110). Critical analysis has also moved beyond this restricted rhetorical sphere of semiotic play toward more materialized and theorized views (Arkady Plotinsky, All Shapes of Light: The Quantum Mechanical Shelley, Shelley: Poet and Legislator ..., eds. Bennett and Curran [1996] 263). For example, given Shelley's probing nature, recovery of such symbolic pattern in physics and mind science of his day creates widened cultural context within which his imagistic tendencies. Light and water, two principles expressed through wave dynamics, embody wavelike aspects of mind and matter evoked in his poetry. Zajonc's term in Catching Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (1993) also fit Shelley: the lights of nature and of mind entwine ... call forth vision, and these harmonic interactions frame emergent feature calls perfect symmetry between inner and outer phenomena (2). Shelley's ability synthesize scientific and poetic insights grows from his comprehensive and synthetical view of celestial and cerebral mechanics (David Clark,ed. …

Bridging the Disciplines: Interdisciplinary Discourse and Faculty Scholarship

The Luce Seminar is... almost like a hub, the spokes coming out, so many different things going on, and each one touches an important aspect of what Emory is about. I saw it as a benchmark in my development.... I don't approach any topic without... wanting to know what other disciplines have said about it. I am a better teacher, a better professor... a better citizen of the because of the seminar. Although some scholars and academic leaders pay lip service to the need to create a vibrant intellectual community, others view the ingredients of such a community as key to sustaining high quality faculty work. Their idea of lively and genuine scholarly exchange is far from ivy-clad nostalgia. In their view, a strong community not only supports interaction across disciplines, but also helps connect the larger purposes of scholarly inquiry. Because current demands to connect teaching and research across fields of inquiry are influencing all types of institutions, this need has extended from the more elite research institutions to the full range of higher education. However, trends suggest that successful connections may be hard to achieve. The industrialization that followed World War II created an unprecedented demand for new knowledge. In turn, economic and technological expansion fueled the development of professional expertise in the disciplines that continues unabated (Bender, 1998; Geiger, 1993). Some scholars suggest the need to rein in the dominance of disciplinary specialty. Concerned that overemphasizing disciplinary expertise may reduce the richness of local interaction and dilute the herence of academic culture, they seek to develop mechanisms for ntellectual exchange aimed at integrating across fields (Austin, 1990; Boyer, 1990, 1997; Clark, 1983; Damrosch, 1995; Dill, 1991; Kerr, 1982; Tierney & Rhoads, 1994). Even thoug h interaction across disciplines seems to improve the ability of scholars to address societal problems, the caliber of solutions they pose, and the quality of academic life in general (Benson, Harkavy, & Puckett, 1996; Boyer, 1990, 1997; Hollingsworth, 1996; Rice, 1996), disciplinary pecialty erodes the vitality of local connections. Assuming that local connections across disciplines contribute to the quality of scholarly work, leaders at one research university initiated an eight-year experimental program of in-depth discourse among faculty from a wide variety of fields. Such programs appear to help scholars overcome barriers that can impede meaningful interaction (Klein, 1996). In a previous qualitative analysis, we examined some ways the program supported exchange and community (Frost & Jean, 1999). In this qualitative analysis based on the perceptions of the participants, we seek to gauge the potential breadth and depth of the program's effects on the ways faculty members think, work, and interact. To provide foundation for our findings, we explore some aspects of academic culture and disciplinary specialty that influence such programs, regardless of location or type. Academic Culture, Disciplinary Specialty, and Faculty Programs Since Clark described the cultures of the academy in 1983, scholars have explored the forces that influence the attitudes and practices of faculty (Austin, 1990; Cameron & Ettington, 1988; Dill, 1991; Peterson & Spencer, 1990; Tierney & Rhoads, 1994). These forces include patterns of attitudes, meanings, symbols, and behaviors that coalesce around disciplines, institutions, and the profession. The culture of the discipline, for example, consists of a knowledge tradition that includes categories of thought, a common vocabulary, and related codes of conduct. The culture of the institution surrounds individual universities, generating loyalty through symbols of unity while permitting various subcultures to flourish. …

De fillettes en amazones : maturation et transformation des générations Shibuya

The Shibuya girls known as kogyaru or ko-gals are a known phenomenon on Tokyo's cultural map for over 10 years now. During the years, they have created a unique youth sub-culture, whole feminine, which has filtered into various layers of culture, influencing values, beliefs and mainly gender status. The kogyaru are very young, mostly high-school girls, but they already follow an ideology of freedom for women and changes in the traditional values of society. One of the dominant features of the kogyaru sub-culture is the practice of enjo-kosai, a form of prostitution, as part of the ideology of the group. Ènjo-kosai has become a central feature of the kogyaru, being their flag of freedom of women over men by using the body as a symbol of power. This article is based on a research conducted in Shibuya during the years 2000-2002. The research was based on observations and interviews and it tried to follow and explain how enjo-kosai became a major symbolic pattern of the kogyaru and the reasons for practicing it.

Approximate symbolic pattern matching for protein sequence data

In protein sequences, often two sequences that share similar substrings have similar functional properties. Learning of the characteristics and properties of an unknown protein is much easier if its likely functional properties can be predicted by finding the substrings already known from other protein sequences. The sequence pattern search algorithm proposed in this paper searches for similar matches between a pattern and a sequence by using fuzzy logic and calculates the degree of similarity from a sequence inference step. Proteins from 11 domain families are used for simulation and the result shows that the proposed algorithm is capable of identifying sequences that have a similar pattern compared to their family protein motifs.

The Field behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities

The author develops “netnography” as an online marketing research technique for providing consumer insight. Netnography is ethnography adapted to the study of online communities. As a method, netnography is faster, simpler, and less expensive than traditional ethnography and more naturalistic and unobtrusive than focus groups or interviews. It provides information on the symbolism, meanings, and consumption patterns of online consumer groups. The author provides guidelines that acknowledge the online environment, respect the inherent flexibility and openness of ethnography, and provide rigor and ethics in the conduct of marketing research. As an illustrative example, the author provides a netnography of an online coffee newsgroup and discusses its marketing implications.

Feminist Criticisms and Reinterpretations of Hegel

In 1970, the Italian feminist Carla Lonzi published her now-classic polemic urging women to “spit on Hegel”. Disregarding her advice, many subsequent feminist theorists and philosophers have engaged substantially with Hegel's thought, and a wide variety of feminist readings of Hegel have sprung up. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of these different feminist criticisms and interpretations of Hegel. In introducing these various interpretations, I will show how they reflect a range of divergent feminist approaches to the history of philosophy as a whole. My aim is not only to describe but also to evaluate these approaches, with respect to their capacity to generate insightful and productive readings of Hegel's philosophy. I shall argue that what I will call the “essentialist” feminist approach to Hegel is the most fruitful, doing most to illuminate the contours of his thought and to open up new and creative ways of reading his works.To anticipate, in surveying the various feminist interpretations of Hegel, I will classify them as reflecting four different types of feminist approach to the history of philosophy. The first, “extensionist” approach draws upon the history of philosophy for conceptual resources to understand and explain women's social situation. The second approach is more critical, tracing the pervasiveness of “masculinist” assumptions and biases in the history of philosophy. To call views “masculinist” is to say that they uphold systematic and hierarchical contrasts between masculinity and femininity, contrasts which need not be explicit but may be sustained through contrasts between other ostensibly neutral concepts which actually have tacit gender connotations. This critical approach generates an overwhelmingly negative picture of the philosophical tradition. The third, “essentialist” approach complicates this picture, recovering and highlighting the strands within historical texts which revalorise concepts or items that are given feminine connotations. These often overlooked strands oppose the dominant masculinist tendencies in texts by assigning equal importance and value to “symbolically feminine” concepts. However, proponents of the fourth, “deconstructive” approach object that essentialist readings of philosophical texts accept and reinforce patterns of gender symbolism which feminists ought to challenge. Deconstructive feminists seek to expose and exacerbate the instability within these patterns of gender symbolism by tracing how philosophical texts continuously undermine the gender contrasts present within them.

The Symbiotics of Semiotics and Visual Communication

This article reviews visual semiotics, aphilosophical approach that seeks to interpret messages in terms of their signs and patterns of symbolism. Semiotic analysis is particularly relevantfor messages that rely on visual communication cues. The theory is that Peircian semiotics, rather than Saussurian semiology, can provide a central organizing perspective for analyzing how the “standsfor” function in sign systems produces meaning in nonverbal communication situations.

Generalized Radial Basis Function Networks Trained with Instance Based Learning for Data Mining of Symbolic Data

The application of the Radial Basis Function neural networks in domains involving prediction and classification of symbolic data requires a reconsideration and a careful definition of the concept of distance between patterns. This distance in addition to providing information about the proximity of patterns should also obey some mathematical criteria in order to be applicable. Traditional distances are inadequate to access the differences between symbolic patterns. This work proposes the utilization of a statistically extracted distance measure for Generalized Radial Basis Function (GRBF) networks. The main properties of these networks are retained in the new metric space. Especially, their regularization potential can be realized with this type of distance. However, the examples of the training set for applications involving symbolic patterns are not all of the same importance and reliability. Therefore, the construction of effective decision boundaries should consider the numerous exceptions to the general motifs of classification that are frequently encountered in data mining applications. The paper supports that heuristic Instance Based Learning (IBL) training approaches can uncover information within the uneven structure of the training set. This information is exploited for the estimation of an adequate subset of the training patterns serving as RBF centers and for the estimation of effective parameter settings for those centers. The IBL learning steps are applicable to both the traditional and the statistical distance metric spaces and improve significantly the performance in both cases. The obtained results with this two-level learning method are significantly better than the traditional nearest neighbour schemes in many data mining problems.

ミシン縫製作業行動における技能差異ポイントの比較解析

One of the most serious problems in current labor-intensive industries, such as clothing manufacture, is difficulty in maintaining special hand skills, especially because of aging of highly skilled workers. A systematic way to hand down special skills is therefore becoming urgently necessary. For the purpose of supporting transmission of such special skills, we propose an efficient method of clarifying the important points of highly skilled behavior.As target tasks for analysis, we selected four typical difficult operations in clothing manufacture with sewing machines. The results can be flexibly applied to any kind of sewing-machine operations. Through observation of these operations, we pointed out several factors in the differences between highly skilled operators and unskilled operators. For example, highly skilled operators always keep their elbows lower and their wrists higher, whereas unskilled operators use the opposite posture during the task.To clarify the hypothetical skill factors, quantitative measurement was performed, and an analysis method was developed to quantify the differences in behavior between highly skilled operators and unskilled operators. Task behaviors were measured with several sensing devices, such as a motion capturing device, data gloves, and a sewing-machine motor rotation counter. The proposed analysis method was applied to the experimental data, and adequacy of hypothetical skill factors was confirmed. The elbows of skilled workers are kept more than 40 mm lower than those of other workers.Qualitative analysis was also performed. Differences in motion sequence patterns were analyzed as follows: First, arithmetically characteristic points were automatically extracted from each set of time-series data for measured behavior. These characteristic points were associated with predefined symbols and the symbols were used to establish a sequence pattern. The sequence pattern of symbols obtained was identified with a task model, which is a previously defined series of motions. Thus, portions of the whole measured behavior were associated with parts of the predefined task in partial motion level. Finally, the sequence patterns of symbols obtained from highly skilled operators and unskilled operators were compared, and the differences were extracted. Corresponding parts of sequences for each motion were also compared and their differences in partial motion level were extracted.

Modified interaction of blood pressure and heart rate in idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy

Neurovegetative and haemodynamic changes impact on the regulation pattern of blood pressure and heart rate in patients with heart failure. We studied these patterns and their interactions in patients with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (IDC) and in healthy subjects (REF). We continually measured the heart rate and blood pressure (Portapres device) in twenty-five supine IDC patients (age: 51 +/- 13 y; left ventricular end-diastolic diameter 67 +/- 11 mm; ejection fraction 30 +/- 11%) and in twenty-seven REF (age: 50 +/- 11 y) Recording time was 30 minutes. The heart rate (HR) of each beat and the systolic blood pressure (SYS) of the subsequent beat were measured. Code numbers (symbols) were assigned to the beat-to-beat changes in HR and SYS (increase: 1; decrease: 0). The frequencies of the symbols sequences of three successive beats were counted. In this way we obtained a matrix consisting of eight (two to the power of three) HR and SYS combinations: 000, 100, 010, 001, 111, 110, 011 and 101. We then counted the frequencies of the different combinations of the symbol sequences in HR and SYS (2(3) x 2(3) = 64 combinations). The relative frequencies of symbol patterns appearing in HR, SYS and in the combined analysis of HR and SYS, were compared for IDC and REF using the T-test for independent samples. Significant differences were seen between IDC and REF. The HR patterns 101 and 010 were more frequent in IDC than in REF patients (11.1 +/- 4.7 vs. 7.7 +/- 2.9%, p = 0.003, and 16.1 +/- 6.3 vs. 11.7 +/- 4.9%, p = 0.008). This finding was even more marked in the analysis of the SYS patterns 101 and 010 (11.0 +/- 7.4 vs. 8.2 +/- 2.9%, p < 0.001, and 11.6 +/- 7.4 vs. 5.4 +/- 2.7%, p < 0.001). Non-alternating patterns were more frequent in REF (e.g. 000HR & 111SYS: 4.6 +/- 3.3 vs. 2.9 +/- 2.4%, p = 0.03). We demonstrated significant interaction of the regulation patterns of blood pressure and heart rate, as also their interactions in IDC. Opposed changes in HR and SYS mediated by the baroreflex, became superimposed by alternans phenomena in IDC. The pattern analysis of changes in HR and SYS detects these disturbances of neurovegetative short-term control.

How Students Understand Physics Equations

What does it mean to understand a physics equation? The use of formal expressions in physics is not just a matter of the rigorous and routinized application of principles, followed by the formal manipulation of expressions to obtain an answer. Rather, successful students learn to understand what equations say in a fundamental sense; they have a feel for expressions, and this guides their work. More specifically, students learn to understand physics equations in terms of a vocabulary of elements that I call symbolic forms. Each symbolic form associates a simple conceptual schema with a pattern of symbols in an equation. This hypothesis has implications for how we should understand what must be taught and learned in physics classrooms. From the point of view of improving instruction, it is absolutely critical to acknowledge that physics expertise involves this more flexible and generative understanding of equations, and our instruction should be geared toward helping students to acquire this understanding. The work described here is based on an analysis of a corpus of videotapes in which university students solve physics problems.

The Divisions of Yeats Studies

The Divisions of Yeats Studies Daniel T. O’Hara (bio) Pierce, David. W.B. Yeats: Critical Assessments. 4 Vols. Helm Information, 2000. xxx + 678 pp.; viii + 587 pp.; viii + 554 pp.; viii + 856 pp. With Index to Writers and Assessments. $495.00. The Helm Information Critical Assessments of Writers in English, under the general editorship of Graham Clarke, is an invaluable aid to scholarship. For writers such as Henry James and George Eliot, the Bronte Sisters and D.H. Lawrence (just four of the eighteen sets already published, with nine more announced as forthcoming), this series generously makes available truly representative samples of contemporaneous reviews of a writer’s major works, as well as a wide range of general assessments and critical views up to the present moment. Today’s [End Page 511] scholars can discover in these finely edited, exquisitely handsome volumes, not only the histories of critical debates for their chosen writers, but they can also recognize the recurrent features of the writers’ oeuvres that have characteristically defined the object of study. I myself—selection entry number “305” in Volume 4—have found that what I think of as the divisions of Yeats studies have appeared and re-appeared insistently from the earliest reviews and commentaries right up to the latest studies. Such remarkable continuity makes one think that, despite their differences, all the generations of critics are addressing the same realities. The primary division concerns the scholarly conflict about the state of the corpus. Next, there is the division in the field occasioned by the critical discussions about the status of Yeats’s occult system of belief. These divisions between matters of textual analysis (and construal) and critical judgments on the nature and value of Yeats’s religious worldview lead rather naturally to yet another divisive issue, the more speculative or theoretical question of Yeats’s identity—as a person, as a writer, and as a citizen influential in the formation of modern Ireland. Yeats, as we know, was a constant reviser of his texts throughout his career. When he collected work in book-form not only did he usually revise the individual texts therein many times over, but also he would create ever-new arrangements for them that would vary from the first sometimes to all later editions. The first appearance of a poem, and the volume in which it was initially collected, would equally become material for subsequent acts of imaginative creation of increasingly powerful and also chronologically distorting symbolic and mythic patterns. For textual scholars and literary biographers or historians, the question of the “best” version of a poem or a volume is not necessarily answered by determining, when possible, Yeats’s so-called “final intention.” The question is, quite simply: “best” for what and whose purposes? Richard J. Finnegan (see entry 334) and Warwick Gould (see entry 342) are the most recent scholars to debate the comparative merits of symbolic pattern and simple chronology as the principle of judgment for arranging Yeats’s corpus. What complicates their debate, however, is that before his death in January 1939, Yeats expressed a double intention for his collected works. On the one hand, the so-called edition deluxe or “Dublin” edition from Scribner’s, which was never published as such, was to be chronological with respect to the sequence of his published volumes, even as the internal pattern of the volumes was largely to be maintained. Narrative and dramatic poems were to be interspersed among the lyric volumes throughout the projected “Collected Poems” in this edition. On the other hand, the familiar Collected Poems from Macmillan (reprinted many times since 1933, with the addition of the final poems in 1954), divides the lyric from the dramatic and narrative poetry, consigning the latter to the back of the book. Gould argues for the former, chronological arrangement, Finneran for the latter. Finneran, as the general editor of the new Collected Works of W.B. Yeats from Scribner’s, has won the debate, for now, and has published, not without some controversy over his re-arrangements of the final poems, what is billed as the definitive editon of The Poems, with many uncollected poems supplementing, also at the back...

Accelerated Genetic Programming of Polynomials

An accelerated polynomial construction technique for genetic programming is proposed. This is a horizontal technique for gradual expansion of a partial polynomial during traversal of its tree-structured representation. The coefficients of the partial polynomial and the coefficient of the new term are calculated by a rapid recurrent least squares (RLS) fitting method. When used for genetic programming (GP) of polynomials this technique enables us not only to achieve fast estimation of the coefficients, but also leads to power series models that differ from those of traditional Koza-style GP and from those of the previous GP with polynomials STROGANOFF. We demonstrate that the accelerated GP is sucessful in that it evolves solutions with greater generalization capacity than STROGANOFF and traditional GP on symbolic regression, pattern recognition, and financial time-series prediction tasks.

DETECTING CARDIORESPIRATORY COORDINATION BY RESPIRATORY PATTERN ANALYSIS OF HEART PERIOD DYNAMICS — THE MUSICAL RHYTHM APPROACH

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that cardiorespiratory coordination can be unveiled by analyzing solely the heart period data from electrocardiogram (ECG). The analysis was done (1) on the basis of symbolic musical pattern analysis to detect intermittent cardiorespiratory phase coordination and (2) on the quantitative evaluation of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) to examine long-term frequency coordination between heartbeat and respiration. The methods were applied to 196 ECGs of 98 healthy subjects. The results showed that at night (1) intermittent phase coordination occurred reproducibly in individual subjects, and (2) long-term frequency ratios statistically approached 4:1 over all subjects to within an accuracy of 0.02, although individual values ranged from 2.5–6.0 with a high intraindividual reproducibility (r=0.94, day A versus day B). Moreover, intermittent phase coordination ratios and long-term frequency ratios corresponded to each other with a remarkably high correlation (r=0.95). In the light of clinical applications, the coordination analysis presented here has an enormous advantage over those techniques depending on respiratory flow measurements, because the pattern technique requires only ECG recordings, and it is thus applicable over a longer period of time under daily life conditions.

Fuzzy handwriting description language:: FOHDEL

In this paper we present a new fuzzy language – FOHDEL – for the syntactic description of handwritten symbols. The presented language incorporates the fuzzy logic techniques to describe the syntactic relations of the semantic features extracted from a symbol pattern. A FOHDEL rule-base represents the compact feature information extracted from a small number of character prototypes and covers various handwriting styles. After presenting the theoretical basis of the fuzzy formalism, the structure of the proposed language is illustrated with some examples. An automatic FOHDEL rule generation strategy is briefly discussed.

Inscribing the Winch: Mechanisms by Which Students Develop Knowledge Structures for Representing the Physical World With Algebra

I propose and test an account of mechanisms by which students develop knowledge structures for modeling the physical world with algebra. The account begins to bridge the gap between current mathematics curricula, in which modeling activities play an important role, and theoretical accounts of how students learn to model, which lag behind. After describing the larger study, in which I observed 12 pairs of 8th-grade students introduce and refine algebraic representations of a physical device called a winch, I then focus on 1 pair that generated an unconventional yet sound equation. Because the prevailing genetic accounts of knowledge structures in mathematics education, cognitive science, and information-processing psychology do not explain key characteristics of the data, I begin to construct a new developmental account that does. To do so, I use forms, a class of schemata that combine patterns of algebra symbols with patterns of experience in the physical world, and 2 mechanisms, notation variation and mapping variation. I then use forms and the 2 mechanisms to analyze how the selected pair of students introduced and refined initial, faulty algebraic representations of the winch into an unconventional yet sound equation.