Symbolic Products Research Articles

A Maple V package for field theoretic Poisson brackets using object-oriented techniques

In the theory of bosonic fields the calculation of Poisson brackets poses interesting technical problems using a symbolic calculus product such as Maple V. This article demonstrates how object-oriented techniques can be introduced to solve this problem and to obtain a neat and clearly structured Maple V package.

Mobilités et identités urbaines

Even though in Bayonne one finds the fragmented social relationships but the importance of the city cannot however be denied. Because of its economic activity and moreover because of its continuous rivalry with Biarritz since the beginning of the century, the town has become a symbolic product with its own identities.

Joint memory

Joint memory is defined as the property of a social group in actualizing its own past transformations. It may result from the coupling of individual memories or be inscribed in the external environment. The concept of joint memory becomes heuristic when it subsumes an ensemble of social processes that are sufficiently integrated to be treated as an entity belonging to the real world. In social insects, colonies can perform action-perception loops which give rise to collective outcomes based on past experience; selective pressures could favour individual behavioural algorithms the combination of which provides a historical record organizing activities both in space and time. In contrast, social groups do not appear sufficiently autonomous in most vertebrates for joint memory be more than a way of seeing collective performances. However, in human beings, the development of external representations has made possible the growth of a socially distributed cognition; the accumulation of epigenetic events through cultural processes produces a set of material and symbolic products that feed back upon the conditions of evolution of the species.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO CHANGE THE WORLD?

At the centre of modern social thought there is a well-known theoretical puzzle. The social world is constructed by ongoing social activities, and if not continuously reproduced by our ongoing practices, it would immediately cease to exist. How come, then, that we nevertheless experience this universe of ongoing practices and practical results as some external opaque reality, even as such an unbending force? A typological distinction between several forms of social externality might help to resolve the puzzle: we are ruled, governed, controlled, constrained (as well as helped along) by the material results of past activities; by the symbolic products of our imaginations and activities; by rules and procedures; by other people with authority and power; and finally, by anonymous social mechanisms.

Symbolic analysis of large-scale microwave networks

A new and efficient method of symbolic analysis of the interconnection of microwave networks which are characterised by the wave-scatter matrices is presented. By taking advantage of unique topological properties of the networks, a rather simplified SFG (referred to as compact SFG (signal flow graph)) is introduced with which the effective symbolic products combination can be determined with great simplicity and clarity so that large-scale microwave networks can be treated. An augmented network principle is also derived so that all the elements of the wave-scatter matrix of the connected network can be obtained in one implementation.

Symbolic Analysis of Linear Non‐Reciprocal Circuits

AbstractA symbolic expression of a transfer function in a linear non‐reciprocal circuit is proved; the symbolic parameters may be proper immittances and controlled source parameters. the effectiveness of computation of symbol product coefficients is improved by using a generation‐and‐test algorithm of symbol combinations. A comparison between the most efficient symbolic analysis methods and the proposed method is performed. It is concluded that the proposed method is competitive with these methods.

The scientific appropriation of social research

The research program proposed by Robert Park in 1915, and largely carried out by himself, Ernest Burgess, and their students over the next twenty years, brought empirical sociological research into an academic setting on a scale not accomplished previously. This "appropriation" of social research was justified by the idea that knowledge produced by academic scientists was of a higher order than research findings of nonacademics.' University-based scientists alone were thought to be capable of a "pure sociological gaze" entailing the disavowal of immediate interventionist goals in their encounters with their objects of study. Historical studies have often adopted this justification for admitting new practices into the field as an explanation for scientific change.2 They forget that the criteria of scientificity they adopt are a product of the same historical development and were imposed by the very actors whose work they are now used to evaluate. Thus the symbolic struggle to impose a new definition of science, in which Park had to engage in order to gain legitimacy for practices previously regarded as unscientific, is left unanalyzed. The problem of "scientific advance" thereby becomes the purely logistic problem of organizing the institutional forms that more closely realize a static notion of science. As a consequence, the analysis of sociology as an institutional form is severed from the analysis of its symbolic products, and the relation between the two is either overlooked or treated as a wholly contingent one. Many studies of "institutionalization," or of "professionalization;' of social science are products of this approach in which the sociology of sociology subjects only the organizational or administrative aspects of science to its scrutiny, stopping at the actual content of sociological works, which is left to textual analysis by historians of ideas.

Symbols and Social Life: The Growth of Cultural Studies

The rapid growth of the Culture Section to become one of the largest divisions of the American Sociological Association in just three years has been widely noted, and yet the great interest in among sociologists is not yet fully represented in the pages of the leading American sociology journals. More than is the case for much work in the discipline, the evolving revitalization of the concept in sociology can be traced in focused collections of essays and in topical issues of specialty journals. See, for example, Peterson (1976, 1983); Wolff and Routh (1977); Coser (1978); Kamerman and Martorella (1983); Melischek, Rosengren, and Stappers (1984); Rees (1985); Calhoun (1989); Desan, Ferguson, and Griswold (1989); Foster and Blau (1989); and Pankratz and Morris (1990). What is more, much of the work that has given new impetus to studies in sociology has appeared in monographic studies of the sorts reviewed in the eight essays that make up this review symposium. While scholars today generally agree that comprises symbols in which alternative patterns of conduct are more or less clearly encoded, the revitalized interest in the concept has not produced a new orthodoxy in its use. In fact, virtually every denotation of the term culture ever employed in sociology can still be found. Nonetheless, the weight of usage has shifted significantly. The 1950s' functionalist view of as a coherent set of norms, values, and beliefs mirroring social structure, for example, is seldom found in contemporary sociological work beyond the four-color introductory textbooks. For recent reviews of studies in sociology see Wuthnow and Witten (1988); Blau (1988); and Peterson (1989). Oversimplifying the range of usages, one may say that is used in two quite different ways, one deriving from anthropology and the other deriving from the humanities via the sociology of knowledge tradition. The first sees as codes of conduct embedded in or constitutive of social life. In this sense scholars may speak, for example, of the of a nation, a class, a corporation, a gang, or a scientific research laboratory. Here is to social structure roughly what the genetic code is to a species of living organisms. Such cultural codes may be discovered in ethnographic observation, attitude surveys, patterns of cultural choice, or the content analysis of documents. The second general perspective sees in the symbolic products of group activity, be they those of artists, religionists, scientists, lawyers, taste makers, the folk, the mass media, and the like. In this perspective represents the symbols that people use to encode and convey various forms of information: knowledge, power, authority, affect, merit, beauty, and virtue. Such symbolic elements also serve individuals and groups to identify those of like kind and to mark distinctions from others. Scholars employing this usage of focus on how such symbolic codes are produced, what they teach, and how they are used in the competition between classes and collectivities ranging in size from nations to scientific research laboratories. Crosscutting the distinction just mentioned

On Two Products of Fractional Factorial Designs

Analysis of direct product (DP) of a number of fractional factorial designs (unblocked) has been presented in brief to show that the estimates of the parameters of the new design can be expressed as a suitable (asterisk) product of the estimates of the parameters of the component designs. It has also been proved that the analysis of symbolic product (SP) of the fractional designs (unblocked) can be translated into that of their direct product using pseuo­factors. Also using the above results the Rao's lower bound for the number of level combinations has been improved for a class of orthogonal arrays.

Excerpts from the international conference on education and new information technologies

Long before our forefathers settled on this continent, the printing press became the key technology for learning. Today the key technology for the society is the microchip. The form in which we can see its potential most clearly is in the computer, the most symbolic product of the technology of the microchip and electronic micro-miniaturization. We are being propelled into the Third Wave because modern technology produces computers that are small and cheap enough to be part of almost every device we use, converting them into semi-intelligent devices with the ability to store, and be guided by, the information needed to operate them. It is very clear today, and will become even clearer in the years ahead, that each individual must necessarily understand something about the in order to comprehend the world. This understanding, often called computer literacy is something schools must obviously begin to provide. As in most things, one understands best by doing. Therefore, schools must not only teach about computers, they must teach with computers and allow the student to use them as personal learning tools like textbooks, notebooks, and libraries. Just as the immense communication and information processing abilities of computers transform most

Self-Consciousness and Clothing

A questionnaire study was undertaken to investigate if different aspects of self-consciousness related to clothing attitudes and strategic use of clothing. The major purpose was to determine if the trait of public self-consciousness, as delineated by Buss, would be systematically related to clothing measures. A secondary goal was to investigate sex differences, with the expectation that the linkage between clothing measures and self-consciousness would be stronger for women. Participating in the study were 104 subjects. Clothing measures showed a consistent and pervasive correlation with scores on public self-consciousness. Contrary to expectations, the magnitude of these relationships was greater for men than for women. The results are discussed in terms of the tactical use of such social and symbolic products as clothing for self-definition.

Sur le pouvoir symbolique

Né de l'effort pour présenter le bilan d'un ensemble de recherches sur le symbolisme dans une situation scolaire d'un type particulier, celle de la conférence dans une université étrangère (Chicago, avril 1973), ce texte ne doit pas être lu comme une histoire, même scolaire, des théories du symbolisme, ni surtout comme une sorte de reconstruction pseudo-hégélienne de la démarche qui aurait conduit, par dépassements successifs, vers la « théorie finale ».Si « l'immigration des idées », comme dit Marx, se fait rarement sans dommage, c'est qu'elle sépare les productions culturelles du système de repères théoriques par rapport auxquels elles se sont définies, consciemment ou inconsciemment, c'est-à-dire du champ de production balisé par des noms propres ou des concepts en -isme qu'elles contribuent toujours moins à définir qu'il ne les définit.

Un jeu chinois

A Chine se Game : Notes for a Social Critique of Judgment. The author reports on the results of a survey of the image that the French have of their political leaders. It was conducted in the form of a game known as the "Chinese portrait". He shows that those questioned employed classificatory schemes (high/low, right/left, white/black, strong/weak, rich/poor, etc.) which express in their own logic the objective structure of France's social classes. A "majority" assigned to the representatives of the left or of the working class the most pejorative characteristics the (Renault as opposed to the Rolls Royce, the pine-tree, black, the cap, and Mireille Mathieu, as opposed to the oak-tree, white, the top hat, and the Queen of England). But this was probably because the prevailing system of classification has been accepted by even those who wish to reject its bases and its symbolic products.

Group Influence and Brand Choice Congruence

Purchase decisions are made in and influenced by their social environment [1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8]. In our recent study [9], for example, it was found that group influence affects brand choice differently for different products and that brand choice congruence within groups varies significantly among test products. For products high in social involvement (e.g., cigarettes, beer), the power of group cohesiveness in predicting brand choice was greater than for products low in social involvement (e.g., deodorant). Thus, the study indicated that differences in the explanatory power of group cohesiveness are rooted symbolically in the nature of the product and the interpersonal situation in which it is used. These findings, with respect to the effect of symbolic product involvement in interpersonal interaction, suggest that investigations of group influence on brand choice should focus on both the symbolic nature of the product and group structure and decision processes. This exploratory study sought an explanation of group influence through a consideration of both. Correlates of group influence were examined in seven product contexts.

Concerning Piaget's View on Thinking and Symbol Formation

Piaget's symbolic function is examined in the light of some American interpretations and of recent theoretical developments. Piaget differentiates within cognition 2 aspects; operative, acting on and transforming a reality state, the basis of intelligent understanding; figurative, referring to the static configuration. Symbolic functioning includes both aspects; a symbol as signifier with a figurative content, different from and assimilated to operative intelligence which is the symbol's source and referent. While symbolic functioning is indissociable from human cognition, a particular symbolic product (e.g., image, language) can be considered a supportive but not a constitutive element of operativity.