Search

IN TASMANIAN WRITER RICHARD FLANAGAN'S Death of a River Guide (1996) there is fleeting mention of an Aboriginal woman named Lallah. Friend to the contemporary indigenous protagonist's ancestor, Black Pearl, [...]

Nicholas Shakespeare, In Tasmania. 374 pp. London: The Harvill Press, 2005. ISBN 0-0994-6608-2, 8.99 £ (paperback). British author Nicholas Shakespeare is well known as a writer of both fiction and [...]

Simulations of evolutionary dynamics often employ white noise as a model of stochastic environmental variation. Whilst white noise has the advantages of being simply generated and analytically tractable, empirical analyses demonstrate that most real environmental time series have power spectral densities consistent with pink or red noise, in which lower frequencies contribute proportionally greater amplitudes than higher frequencies. Simulated white noise environments may therefore fail to capture key components of real environmental time series, leading to erroneous results. To explore the effects of different noise colours on evolving populations, a simple evolutionary model of the interaction between life-history and the specialism-generalism axis was developed. Simulations were conducted using a range of noise colours as the environments to which agents adapted. Results demonstrate complex interactions between noise colour, reproductive rate, and the degree of evolved generalism; importantly, contradictory conclusions arise from simulations using white as opposed to red noise, suggesting that noise colour plays a fundamental role in generating adaptive responses. These results are discussed in the context of previous research on evolutionary responses to fluctuating environments, and it is suggested that Artificial Life as a field should embrace a wider spectrum of coloured noise models to ensure that results are truly representative of environmental and evolutionary dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 2019, a workshop on principled development of future agent-based simulations was held at Keele University. Participants spanned companies and academia, and a range of domains of interest, as well as participant career stages. This report summarizes the discussions and main outcomes from this workshop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figurations of the Canadian island of Newfoundland with those of the Australian island of Tasmania through close analysis of two significant contemporary novels, 'The Shipping News' by E. Annie Proulx and 'Death of a River Guide' by Richard Flanagan, are compared. Proulx's novel, in particular, exemplifies the pitfalls of the symmetry of redemption.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of multiple, distributed nodes each with limited resources. With their strict resource constraints and application-specific characteristics, WSNs contain many challenging tradeoffs. This paper proposes a bioinspired load balancing approach, based on pheromone signalling mechanisms, to solve the tradeoff between service availability and energy consumption. We explore the performance consequences of the pheromone-based load balancing approach using (1) a system-level simulator, (2) deployment of real sensor testbeds to provide a competitive analysis of these evaluation methodologies. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated with different scenario parameters and the required performance evaluation techniques are investigated on case studies based on sound sensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines two Romanticist paintings created for Indigenous audiences in the British colonies of Tasmania and Newfoundland. The paintings discussed are "Governor Arthur's Proclamation to the Tasmanian Peoples, 1830" by George Frankland and a lost, untitled painting by Amelia Curran. It is suggested that the paintings are examples of what the author calls alternative Romanticisms, which adapt global cultural forms for local purposes. Particular focus is given to the implications of the artists' acknowledgment of Indigenous presence in these colonies. Topics discussed include Aboriginal Australian peoples, the Beothuk people in Newfoundland, art as a means of communication, and symmetry.

We propose a framework for engineering emergent behaviour that allows system specification and design at the level of the emergence. We discuss how rule migration can be used to translate this high-level multi-layer design (mobile process model) into an equivalent simple cellular automaton model with only local rules, and emergent behaviour. In this paper, we use a case study in 2D to illustrate the process involved in deriving a migration rule for a simple random walk. We discuss how the mobile process architecture may be extended to model systems with multiple levels of emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A metamodel has been defined as: a model of a model; a definition of a language; a description of abstract syntax; and a description of a domain. Because of these varied definitions, it is difficult to explain why metamodels are constructed, what can be done with them, and how they are built. This tutorial introduces the key concepts, terminology and philosophy behind metamodelling, focusing on its use for language engineering , and expressed in a way that is intended to be accessible to researchers who may be more familiar with the use of traditional context-free grammar techniques. We highlight the main differences between metamodelling and grammar-based approaches, describe how to map metamodelling concepts and techniques to grammar concepts and techniques, and highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses of metamodelling via a set of small, but realistic examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]