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Developing Insights into the Design of the Simplest Self-Replicator and Its Abstract Complexity, Part 2
No full textThis is the second in a three-part series investigating the internals of the simplest possible self-replicator (SSR). It builds on the construction of a hypothetical self- replicator devised in Part 1 and considers various significant aspects about the design and construction of an artificial, concrete SSR: the material basis of its construction, the e↵ects of the variable geometry of the SSR during its growth through the cloning and division phases, and the three closure rules that must be satisfied by the SSR— energy closure, material closure, and information closure.
The highest technical challenges that need to be faced by the design and construction of the artificial SSR are considered. The emerging complexity of the artificial SSR is depicted using a metaphorical comparison of the SSR with a city fully populated by automated machinery that systematically constructs a new city that is identical to the old city without external help but only using the construction materials that enter through the city gateways. The current level of technology is evaluated to determine if it is sucient for the successful completion of the design and construction of an artificial autonomous SSR project using either a nano-biochemical basis or or a macro-material basis.
Part 1 of this series analyzed the basic necessary design elements of the sim- plest self-replicator (SSR), including necessary components, functions, processes, and information. Having established the minimum requirements for the design, this part will discuss the physical implementation of the SSR
Developing Insights into the Design of the Simplest Self-Replicator and Its Abstract Complexity, Part 1
No full textThis is the first in a three-part series investigating the internals of the simplest possible self-replicator (SSR). The SSR is defined as having an enclosure with input and output gateways and having the ability to create an exact replica of itself by ingesting and processing materials from its environment. This first part takes an analytical approach and identifies, one by one, the internal functions that must operate inside the SSR to be a fully autonomous replicator
Developing Insights into the Design of the Simplest Self-Replicator and Its Abstract Complexity, Part 3
No full textThis is the last in a three-part series investigating the internals of the simplest possible self-replicator (SSR). Part 1 and Part 2 investigated the necessary design and possible physical implementation of such a self-replicator. This last installment compares potential man-made self-replication to the existing natural self-replicators on Earth, present in the structured hierarchy of ecosystems throughout the world. The insights offered by this series are used to reflect upon possible scenarios for the origin of life and their implications
Methodological Naturalism and Its Creation Story
No full textThe objective of this paper is to survey how science, when aligned to materialist philosophy through methodological naturalism, answers questions about the origins of some of the entities that present the highest interest to science. It will discuss the elements of the materialist origins narrative and how successful these elements are in providing support for the exceptional claim of materialism: that everything (meaning among other things, life, living organisms of all sorts, brains, our solar system, our Earth, minds and consciousness) "``can be explained as manifestation or result of matter." The paper analyzes the nature and the internal complexity of living organisms through the use of the concept of machines
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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