Self Organizing Men

The roles of paradox and incoherence in the construction and maintenance of the masculine self remains unexplored in both gender and men's studies. Self-Organizing Men - through poetry, visual images, prose and humor - seeks to understand how paradox and the failure to cohere to a unitary self creates opportunities for sustained connections to sexual love, the penis, childhood, and vulnerability as well as disrupts traditional transsexual narratives of masculinity and the gendered body. Contributors include: Eli Clare, Scott Turner Schofield, Tim'm T. West, Dr. Bobby Noble, Nick Kiddle, Eli VandenBerg, Jordy Jones, Doran George, Aren Z. Aizura, and Gaylourdes. Editor Jay Sennett is a published author and filmmaker.

This book focuses on the influence of socio-economic and land-use policies on the commuting problems and quality of life of the poor in Singapore and Hong Kong. It considers the influence of self-organisation: how the mobility of an individual is constituted by structures such as transport systems or socio-economic structural factors, as well as influenced by individual decisions. Where most transport studies focus on the influence of factors such as income inequality, the gender gap, and the built environment, this book fills a gap in paying particular attention to the influence of individual decisions on commuting. Given the prevalence of the former in research, government decision-makers are often constrained by these approaches and fail to understand the commuting problems of the poor. This book argues that the self-organisation approach provides some ideas that are outside the common conceptual framework in conventional transport planning and looks to improve mobility of lower-income commuters. Relevant to social science researchers working in areas such as urban planning and transport, mobility deprivation, and poverty, this book breaks new ground in quality of life studies in the Singapore and Hong Kong contexts.

This unique book offers a comprehensive and integrated introduction to the five fundamental elements of life and society: energy, information, feedback, adaptation, and self-organization. It is divided into two parts. Part I is concerned with energy (definition, history, energy types, energy sources, environmental impact); thermodynamics (laws, entropy definitions, energy, branches of thermodynamics, entropy interpretations, arrow of time); information (communication and transmission, modulation–demodulation, coding–decoding, information theory, information technology, information science, information systems); feedback control (history, classical methodologies, modern methodologies); adaptation (definition, mechanisms, measurement, complex adaptive systems, complexity, emergence); and self-organization (definitions/opinions, self-organized criticality, cybernetics, self-organization in complex adaptive systems, examples in nature). In turn, Part II studies the roles, impacts, and applications of the five above-mentioned elements in life and society, namely energy (biochemical energy pathways, energy flows through food chains, evolution of energy resources, energy and economy); information (information in biology, biocomputation, information technology in office automation, power generation/distribution, manufacturing, business, transportation), feedback (temperature, water, sugar and hydrogen ion regulation, autocatalysis, biological modeling, control of hard/technological and soft/managerial systems), adaptation and self-organization (ecosystems, climate change, stock market, knowledge management, man-made self-organized controllers, traffic lights control).

Is the study of living systems a useful metaphor for political science? In this book, Dr. Dobuzinskis argues for further exploration of biopolitical models to explain the complexity of political theory and social change. His discussion emphasizes the new cybernetics, which considers not only self-regulating but also self-organizing or self-producing systems. Self-organizing systems operate in an autonomous sphere comparable to the autonomy of the political community and the political actors who compose this community. The autonomy of these systems is maintained through dynamic equilibration processes that entail not only the preservation of a given structure but also, at crucial times, the creative rearrangement of the existing structure and its transformation into a new pattern of relations. From this perspective, a political crisis is both a threat to the political system and the occasion of its renewal; stability may also mean decay. Emphasizing the links that have developed historically between the natural and social sciences, this book is a reflection on the merits of and difficulties involved in representing the evolutionary process at the political level as the problematic reproduction of national communities and states.

Self-organizing maps (SOMs) were developed by Teuvo Kohonen in the early eighties. Since then more than 10,000 works have been based on SOMs. SOMs are unsupervised neural networks useful for clustering and visualization purposes. Many SOM applications have been developed in engineering and science, and other fields. This book contains refereed papers presented at the 9th Workshop on Self-Organizing Maps (WSOM 2012) held at the Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, on December 12-14, 2012. The workshop brought together researchers and practitioners in the field of self-organizing systems. Among the book chapters there are excellent examples of the use of SOMs in agriculture, computer science, data visualization, health systems, economics, engineering, social sciences, text and image analysis, and time series analysis. Other chapters present the latest theoretical work on SOMs as well as Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) methods.

JOHANN GOTSCHL Over the last decades, social philosophers, economists. sociologists, utility and game theorists, biologists, mathematicians, moral philosophers and philosophers have created totally new concepts and methods of understanding the function and role of humans in their modern societies. The years between 1953 and 1990 brought drastic changes in the scientific foundations and dynamic of today's society. A burst of entirely new, revolutionary ideas, similar to those which heralded the beginning of the twentieth century in physics, dominates the picture. This book also discusses the ongoing refutation of old concepts in the social sciences. Some of them are: the traditional concepts ofrationality, for example, based on maximization of interests, the linearity of axiomatic methods, methodological individualism, and the concept of a static society. Today the revolutionary change from a static view of our society to an evolutionary one reverberates through all social sciences and will dominate the twenty-first century. In an uncertain and risky world where cooperation and teamwork is getting more and more important, one cannot any longer call the maximization of one's own expectations of utility or interests "rational" .

Kohonen Self Organizing Maps (SOM) has found application in practical all fields, especially those which tend to handle high dimensional data. SOM can be used for the clustering of genes in the medical field, the study of multi-media and web based contents and in the transportation industry, just to name a few. Apart from the aforementioned areas this book also covers the study of complex data found in meteorological and remotely sensed images acquired using satellite sensing. Data management and envelopment analysis has also been covered. The application of SOM in mechanical and manufacturing engineering forms another important area of this book. The final section of this book, addresses the design and application of novel variants of SOM algorithms.

There is no common understanding of the concept of the human mind, its changes in different historical epochs, forecasts for development, or its influence on the phenomena of art and culture. The connection between the evolution of the mind, anatomical changes, and social organization are not clear. Through the theory of self-organization of complex systems, the essence of cultural changes in different historical periods and solutions to practical questions in the theory of art and design are better understood. Self-Organization of the Human Mind and the Transition From Paleolithic to Behavioral Modernity is a critical scholarly resource that examines the development of human consciousness as a realization of the laws of self-organization or complex systems. The theory of self-organization of complex systems uses the mathematical apparatus of the wave model of S-space. The book also conducts a comparison of theoretical assumptions with specific cultural phenomena that are manifestations of the evolution of the mind. Featuring a range of topics such as behavior, rationality, and culture, this book is essential for archaeologists, academicians, anthropologists, researchers, sociologists, professionals, and students.