Converging infrastructures

Converging Hands or Converging Minds?

Interlocutors sometimes repeat each other’s representational hand gestures. We investigated if this is a case of direct mimicry of form, or whether perceiving a gesture gives rise to a semantic representation, which subsequently informs gesture production. For this we used an interactive route description task, in which a confederate’s gestures indicated the route in either the vertical or the ...

NBIC, THE CONVERGING TECHNOLOGIES

A remark on the converging-input converging-state property

Suppose that an equilibrium is asymptotically stable when external inputs vanish. Then, every bounded trajectory which corresponds to a control which approaches zero and which lies in the domain of attraction of the unforced system, must also converge to the equilibrium. This “well-known” but hard-to-cite fact is proved and slightly generalized here.

Converging to Gosper’s Algorithm

Given two polynomials, we find a convergence property of the GCD of the rising factorial and the falling factorial. Based on this property, we present a unified approach to computing the universal denominators as given by Gosper’s algorithm and Abramov’s algorithm for finding rational solutions to linear difference equations with polynomial coefficients.

Converging Technologies, Shifting Boundaries

At the beginning of the 21 century, most people are no longer surprised by technological revolutions. The twentieth century brought us information technology and biotechnology: key technologies for pioneering innovations such as the computer, the Internet and genetically modified plants. In the transition to the twenty-first century, two other important developments: nanotechnology (the researc...