Planners Coming to the Table

Coming in to the Foodshed

Bioregionalists have championed the utility ofthe concept ofthe watershed as an organizingframeworkfor thought and action directed to understanding and implementing appropriate and respectful human interaction with particular pieces of land. In a creative analogue to the watershed, permaculturist Arthur Cetz has recently introduced the term "foodshed" to facilitate critical thought about where ...

Aristotle on the Cause of Being and of Coming to Be

This paper considers Aristotle’s distinction between the cause of being and the cause of coming to be. It is intended to show that Aristotle is able to unify both kinds of causes on the basis of the idea that a thing’s substance is its end. He is not confused about the cause of being and of coming to be, as it might seem in several passages. The paper’s focus is on Metaphysics Zeta 17. In contr...

Symbolic Significance of Yeats's "The Second Coming"

Coming to our senses.

Sensory organs are specialized to receive different kinds of input from the outside world. However, common features of their development suggest that they could have a shared evolutionary origin. In a recent paper, Niwa et al. show that three Drosophila adult sensory organs all rely on the spatial signals Decapentaplegic and Wingless to specify their position, and the temporal signal ecdysone t...

Providing Haptic ’Hints’ to Automatic Motion Planners

In this paper, we investigate various paradigms for enabling a human operator and an automatic motion planner to cooperatively solve a motion planning query. Our work is motivated by our experience that automatic motion planners sometimes fail due to the difficulty of discovering ‘critical’ configurations of the robot that are often naturally apparent to a human observer. In particular, we stud...