Prospective strategies underlie the control of interceptive actions.

The purpose of this study was to test whether a constant bearing angle strategy could account for the displacement regulations produced by a moving observer when attempting to intercept a ball following a curvilinear path. The participants were asked to walk through a virtual environment and to change, if (deemed) necessary, their walking speed so as to intercept a moving ball that followed either a rectilinear or a curvilinear path. The results showed that ball path curvature did indeed influence the participants' displacement kinematics in a way that was predicted by adherence to a constant bearing angle strategy mode of control. Velocity modifications were found to be proportional to the magnitude of target curvature with opposing curvatures giving rise to mirror displacement velocity changes. The role of prospective strategies in the control of interceptive action is discussed

The Voice as Transcursive Inscriber: The Relation of Body and Instrument Understood through the Workings of a Machine

This article examines the relationship of the body with a musical instrument; specifically it looks at the vital threshold conditions that occur during the interplay of voice and instrument. By examining the work ‘IKAS’ (1982) for solo saxophone by German composer Hans-Joachim Hespos, the unusual timbral relationships created between vocal and instrumental sounds are exposed. I argue that this particular work highlights the performer/instrument relation as one marked by Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the workings of a machine and a machine’s relation to a ‘flow’, in particular a machine’s function with view to the break in the flow. By turning towards Deleuze’s concept of the machine, this article offers a slightly different vocabulary for music analysis, one that more easily encompasses certain works of the twentieth century, specifically those that are more timbre- than pitch-based.

'From Neo-Latin to Vernacular: Marvell's Bilingualism and Renaissance Pedagogy'

This chapter contextualises Marvell's Latin poetry in relation to seventeenth-century pedagogical theory and practice, with particular focus on bilingual textbooks, double translation methodology, and etymological alertness. An analysis of several Marvellian case-studies serves to highlight the influence of pedagogical bilingualism upon his poetic creativity.

Effect of Selfish Node Behavior on Efficient Topology Design

The problem of topology control is to assign per-node transmission power such that the resulting topology is energy efficient and satisfies certain global properties such as connectivity. The conventional approach to achieve these objectives is based on the fundamental assumption that nodes are socially responsible. We examine the following question: if nodes behave in a selfish manner, how does it impact the overall connectivity and energy consumption in the resulting topologies? We pose the above problem as a noncooperative game and use game-theoretic analysis to address it. We study Nash equilibrium properties of the topology control game and evaluate the efficiency of the induced topology when nodes employ a greedy best response algorithm. We show that even when the nodes have complete information about the network, the steady-state topologies are suboptimal. We propose a modified algorithm based on a better response dynamic and show that this algorithm is guaranteed to converge to energy-efficient and connected topologies. Moreover, the node transmit power levels are more evenly distributed, and the network performance is comparable to that obtained from centralized algorithms.

The outflow ranking method for weighted directed graphs

A ranking method assigns to every weighted directed graph a (weak) ordering of the nodes. In this paper we axiomatize the ranking method that ranks the nodes according to their outflow using four independent axioms. Besides the well-known axioms of anonymity and positive responsiveness we introduce outflow monotonicity – meaning that in pairwise comparison between two nodes, a node is not doing worse in case its own outflow does not decrease and the other node’s outflow does not increase – and order preservation – meaning that adding two weighted digraphs such that the pairwise ranking between two nodes is the same in both weighted digraphs, then this is also their pairwise ranking in the ‘sum’ weighted digraph. The outflow ranking method generalizes the ranking by outdegree for directed graphs, and therefore also generalizes the ranking by Copeland score for tournaments.