Fractals have experienced considerable success in quantifying the complex structure exhibited by many natural patterns and have captured the imagination of scientists and artists alike [Mandelbrot]. With ever widening appeal, they have been referred to both as "fingerprints of nature" [Taylor et al 1999] and "the new aesthetics" [Richards]. Recently, we showed that the drip patterns of the Amer...

An intelligent agent uses known facts including statistical knowledge to assign degrees of belief to assertions it is un certain about We investigate three principled techniques for doing this All three are applications of the principle of indi erence because they assign equal degree of belief to all basic situations consistent with the knowledge base They di er because there are competing intu...

Most approaches to generative phonology grant a privileged status to “natural” phonological rules, those that have a clear phonetic motivation. In Optimality Theory, for example, children are typically assumed to begin language learning with markedness constraints ranked above faithfulness constraints (see Smolensky 1996). The implication — often not made explicit — is that phonetically arbitra...

The paper is concerned with supporting natural patterns of scientific collaboration in Access Grid environments. We reveal that no current approach to Access Grid allows dynamic session invocation within on-going Access Grid sessions nor workflow driven session triggering among users involved in that workflow. A model for a lightweight signaling architecture integrated within Access Grid is pro...

In this paper, crystallographic aspects of ancient, medieval and modern Turkish ornaments are dealt with. Crystallographic patterns (CPs) are considerably different from other patterns. The following are characteristic of CPs: the edge of ornament elements draws the edge of the figure; maximal compactness of the ornament elements; lack of background or transformation of background to ornament e...

Under the current scenario of rapid human population increase, achieving efficient and productive agricultural land use while conserving biodiversity is a global challenge. There is an ongoing debate whether land for nature and for production should be segregated (land sparing) or integrated on the same land (land sharing, wildlife-friendly farming). While recent studies argue for agricultural ...

Generalist predators such as spiders and ground beetles provide important ecosystem services by suppressing density of pest insects in agroecosystems, which offers a sustainable solution to trade-off between agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. There is increasing recognition that landscape factors beyond field-plot scale are important determinants for community structure of g...

Argumentation schemes have been developed in argumentation theory as stereotypical patterns of inference, abstract structures representing the material (semantic) relation and logical relation between the premises and a conclusion in an argument with a corresponding set of critical questions indicating their defeasibility conditions (Walton et al. 2008). They can be regarded as the modern inter...

How to feed the world without loosing what is left of biodiversity? Two answers for this question are found in the literature. On the one hand, the “Land Sparing” paradigm suggests that increasing yield by means of intensive agricultural systems would fulfill the needs of human population and save natural landscapes. On the other hand, “Biodiversity Friendly Farming” argues that agricultural in...

A mutualism is an interaction where the involved species benefit from each other. We study a two-dimensional hexagonal three-state cellular automaton model of a two-species mutualistic system. The simple model is characterized by four parameters of propagation and survival dependencies between the species. We map the parametric set onto the basic types of space-time structures emerged in the mu...