Since their discovery by Mandelbrot (The Fractal Geometry of Nature, Freeman, New York, 1977), fractals have experienced considerable success in quantifying the complex structure exhibited by many natural patterns and have captured the imaginations of scientists and artists alike. With ever-widening appeal, they have been referred to both as ‘‘fingerprints of nature’’ (Nature 399 (1999) 422) an...

In 1992 neurophysiologists [20] found a new type of cells in areas V1 and V2 of the monkey primary visual cortex, which they called grating cells. These cells respond vigorously to a grating pattern of appropriate orientation and periodicity. Three years later a computational model inspired by these findings was published [9]. The study of this paper is to create a grating cell operator that ha...

Received: March 18, 2015; Accepted: March 20, 2015; Published: March 22, 2015 If you read these pages, you certainly know the seminal book by Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982). In his Masterpiece, Benoit provides both a mathematical model and a description for many of the seemingly complex forms and patterns in nature, showing that fractal patterns are extremely famili...

BACKGROUND Management pain in hospitalized children is challenging for the health-care professionals. Nurses have the most interactions with children who need to assess and manage for their pain. Therefore, the aim was to describe nurses' experiences from pain management among hospitalized children from Iranian culture in this study. METHODS A phenomenological study was conducted in which 23 ...

This paper is the third and final one in a sequence of three. All three papers emphasize that a proposition can be justified by an infinite regress, on condition that epistemic justification is interpreted probabilistically. The first two papers showed this for one-dimensional chains and for one-dimensional loops of propositions, each proposition being justified probabilistically by its precurs...

Patterns in nature result from dynamic relationships of forces and constraints. What is analogous for patterns in art? Art is created by human hands motivated by inspiration and thought. It is the product of creativity and skill. Creativity is constrained by cognitive processes and skill by the limits of technology. Based upon the author’s studies of Oriental carpets, this paper suggests that p...

Introduction Measures of farm diversification Data and model specification Econometric results Discussion Summary and conclusions Acknowledgements References Appendix Abstract. Farm planning often focuses on optimal diversification with respect to risk, where the riskmanagement strategies combine production, marketing, financial and environmental aspects of the farmfirm. In this study an empiri...