Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker

This paper re‐examines the concept of “meme” in the context of digital culture. Defined as cultural units that spread from person to person, memes were debated long before the digital era. Yet the Internet turned the spread of memes into a highly visible practice, and the term has become an integral part of the netizen vernacular. After evaluating the promises and pitfalls of memes for understanding digital culture, I address the problem of defining memes by charting a communication‐oriented typology of 3 memetic dimensions: content, form, and stance. To illustrate the utility of the typology, I apply it to analyze the video meme “Leave Britney Alone.” Finally, I chart possible paths for further meme‐oriented analysis of digital content.     

联合装备体系对抗仿真可组合问题的概念框架

组合仿真已成为复杂系统联合建模仿真领域的研究热点之一.以装备体系对抗仿真为背景分析了其对可组合性的需求,在此基础上对可组合问题研究中的可组合性、互操作性以及重用性这三种相关概念进行对比分析;以组合仿真开发过程引出可组合问题的基本研究问题;以组合模式刻画了仿真组分的组装机制,最后以层次化可组合问题的参考模型对可组合程度以及组合相容性、组合可替换性等概念进行了界定,从而构成可组合问题的概念框架.     

分布式数字资产交易平台的问题与评估

近年来,分布式数字资产交易平台(decentralized digital asset exchanges,DDAE)受到了广泛的关注.基于金融市场基础设施(principles for financial market infrastructures,PFMI)原理,提出了评估数字资产交易平台的5项基本原则.并基于这...     

Positive Illusions and New Venture Creation: Conceptual Issues and An Empirical Illustration

This paper discusses the nature and role of positive illusions in the exploitation of new ideas and innovation leading to the development of new enterprises and industries. Positive illusions imply misperceptions of oneself and the environment that can lead to faulty investments and bankruptcies. However, without the optimistic misperceptions of one's own abilities and opportunities that positive illusions imply, little or nothing would happen. Thus, illusions that lead to initiative and commitment are crucial to create and exploit new innovations, even though venturing into new business areas always involves risk and potential failure. We discuss how entrepreneurs, public authorities, and the media might influence such illusions to stimulate innovative initiatives, as well as how entrepreneurs can adjust their misperceptions to avoid negative consequences without killing initiative. The paper is primarily conceptual and draws on insights from literatures such as cognitive psychology, strategy, management, and entrepreneurship. In our discussion we also utilise examples from blue mussel farming, which represents a potentially important innovation within the Norwegian aquaculture industry.     

Realist Activity Theory for Digital Library Evaluation: Conceptual Framework and Case Study

A critical yet largely unexamined facet of digital library design anduse is how library content is assembled and vetted, which in turn hasprofound implications for ongoing digital library usefulness and usability.This article presents a social realist evaluation framework for anactivity theoretic case study of the Flora of North America digitallibrary. Social realist evaluation is a relatively new evaluationparadigm, positing that outcomes follow from mechanisms acting incontingently configured contexts. Because this study focuses on thedigital library content vetting process, a significant part of thepresent analysis concerns the publication subsystem of the Flora ofNorth America digital library – Collaborative Publishing Services –and how problems related to its design and use facilitates our abilityto explain the Flora of North America not only as a functioning digitallibrary project, but as a contradiction-driven organizational form inexpansive development. Activity theory is a philosophical and cross-disciplinaryframework for studying different forms of human practices in a multi-level,stratified manner, developmentally in time and through space. This intensivecase study of the Flora of North America digital library illustrates thatwhile social realism, itself content-neutral mechanics of explanation,provides a real foundation for activity theoretic analyses of workand technology, activity theory supplies a conceptually and substantivelyrich vocabulary for explanatory reasoning about technologically mediatedsocial practices, such as digital library assemblage and use.     

Language Learning from Texts: Mindchanges, Limited Memory, and Monotonicity

The paper explores language learning in the limit under various constraints on the number of mindchanges, memory, and monotonicity. We define language learning with limited (long term) memory and prove that learning with limited memory is exactly the same as learning via set driven machines (when the order of the input string is not taken into account). Further we show that every language learnable via a set driven machine is learnable via a conservative machine (making only justifiable mindchanges). We get a variety of separation results for learning with bounded number of mindchanges or limited memory under restrictions on monotonicity. A surprising result is that there are families of languages that can be monotonically learned with at most one mindchange, but can neither be weak-monotonically nor conservatively learned. Many separation results have a variant: If a criterion can be separated from , then often it is possible to find a family of languages such that is and learnable, but while it is possible to restrict the number of mindchanges or long term memory on criterion , this is impossible for .