John Kulvicki explores the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful, taking inspiration from the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts. They express a variety of thoughts, and they are also representations. Kulvicki shows how the meanings of pictures let us put them to a wide range of communicative uses.
John Kulvicki offers an account of the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful which is inspired by the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts, along with language, gesture, facial expressions, and props. They express wide ranges of thoughts, make assertions, offer warnings, instructions, and commands. Pictures are also representations. They have meanings, which help explain the range of communicative uses to which they can be put. Modelling the meanings of pictures is accounting for the ways in which pictures manage to be meaningful, with an eye toward how those meanings let us use them as we do. By framing pictures with the philosophy of language, we acquire new perspectives on the many things we can do with them. Sometimes, pictures are used as descriptions—he looks like this!—while sometimes they are used more like singular terms—find him!, while showing a mug shot. Most picture-making cultures also have iconographies, but this is usually put to one side in discussions of pictures, if it is mentioned at all. Likewise, some uses of pictures, especially in advertising, are metaphorical, and very little has been said about metaphor in pictures. Pictures are also related in important ways to other kinds of representations like maps, and this book provides a new way of understanding what makes them alike and different. By showing that pictures are very different from languages, this book also shows that the tools developed with language in mind are not actually specific to linguistic phenomena.
"The book provides an up-to-date and authoritative treatment of pattern recognition and computer vision, with chapters written by leaders in the field. On the basic methods in pattern recognition and computer vision, topics range from statistical pattern recognition to array grammars to projective geometry to skeletonization, and shape and texture measures."--BOOK JACKET.
The 11th Edition of Helping Children Learn Mathematics is designed to help those who are or will be teachers of mathematics in elementary schools help children develop understanding and proficiency with mathematics so they can solve problems. This text is built around three main themes: helping children make sense of mathematics, incorporating practical experiences, and using research to guide teaching. It also integrates connections and implications from the Common Core Standards: Mathematics (CCSS-M).
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence, MDAI 2005, held in Tsukuba, Japan in July 2005. The 40 revised full papers presented together with an introduction by the editors and 4 invited lectures were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 118 submissions. The papers are devoted to theory and tools for modeling decisions, as well as applications that encompass decision making processes and information fusion techniques. Special focus is given to applications related with risk, security and safety.
Pathways to the Origin and Evolition of Meanings in the Universe The book explains why meaning is a part of the universe populated by life, and how organisms generate meanings and then use them for creative transformation of the environment and themselves. This book focuses on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of biology, semiotics, philosophy, ethology, information theory, and the theory of evolution. Such a broad approach provides a rich context for the study of organisms and other semiotic agents in their environments. This methodology can be applied to robotics and artificial intelligence for developing robust, adaptable learning devices. In this book, leading interdisciplinary scholars reveal their vision on how to integrate natural sciences with semiotics, a theory of meaning-making and signification. Developments in biology indicate that the capacity to create and understand signs is not limited to humans or vertebrate animals, but exists in all living organisms - the fact that inspired the integration of biology and semiotics into biosemiotics. The authors discuss the nature of semiotic agents (organisms and other autonomous goal-directed units), meaning, signs, information, memory, evolution, and consciousness. Also discussed are issues including the origin of life, potential meaning and its actualization, top-down causality in physics and biology, capacity of organisms to encode their functions, the strategy of organisms to combine homeostasis with direct adaptation to new life-cycle phases or new environments, multi-level memory systems, increase of freedom via enabling constraints, creative modeling in evolution and learning, communication in animals and humans, the origin and function of language, and the distribution and transfer of life in space. This is the first book on biosemiotics in its global conceptual and spatial scope. Biosemiotics is presented using the language of natural sciences, which supports the scientific grounding of semiotic terms. Finally, the cosmic dimension of life and meaning-making leads to a reconsideration of ethical principles and ecological mentality here on earth and in space exploration. Audience Theoretical biologists, ethologists, astrobiologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, philosophers, phenomenologists, semioticians, biosemioticians, molecular biologists, linguists, system scientists and engineers.
"This book is aimed at researchers and practitioners involved in designing and managing complex multimedia information systems"--Provided by publisher.
C. J. Date is one of the founding fathers of the relational database field. Many of today’s seasoned database professionals "grew up" on Date’s writings. Those same professionals, along with other serious database students and practitioners, form the core audience for Date’s ongoing writing efforts. Date on Database: Writings 2000-2006 is a compilation of Date’s most significant articles and papers over the past seven years. It gives readers a one-stop place in which to find Date’s latest thinking on relational technology. Many papers are not easily found outside this book.