The fraught tension between science and religion has loomed large in scholarship about the nineteenth century in Spain, especially given the prominence of the Catholic Church and the discoveries made by Wallace and Darwin. The struggle for epistemological superiority between these two discourses (science and religion) has served to overshadow certain corners of the cultural landscape that, though prominent sites of intellectual exploration in their day, have received comparatively less scholarly attention until recently. Fringe Discourses brings together a group of essays that seeks to restore a sense of the epistemological richness of nineteenth-century Spain. By exploring the relationship between epistemology, modernity, and subjectivity, these essays recover significant efforts by Spanish authors and intellectuals to explain human nature and their world, which seemed to be changing so radically before their eyes. In doing so the essays also reveal just how elastic the relationship was between science and pseudoscience, genius and quackery. Offering a veritable Wunderkammer, the authors collected here train their sights both on curious fields of study (from pogonolgy, the science of beards, to Spiritualism) and curiouser people (from a government spy on undercover assignment in Morocco dressed as a Moorish prince to a hypnotic huckster who dupes the queen regent). With other authors focusing on science fiction dystopias, mystical journeys, and anatomical symbology, Fringe Discourses reveals the Spanish nineteenth century for the intellectual Wild West it was.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Presenting interdisciplinary research at the forefront of present advances in information technologies and their foundations, Scientific Applications of Language Methods is a multi-author volume containing pieces of work (either original research or surveys) exemplifying the application of formal language tools in several fields, including logic and discrete mathematics, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, natural computing and bioinformatics.

This book provides a sound mathematical and technical perspective in functional and structural retina models, presents evaluation metrics to assess those models, and provides insights about the models hardware implementation. It begins by introducing the retina anatomy and its workings in a detailed way suitable for an engineering audience, while providing the mathematical analysis of the retina neural response. Moreover, it explores and establishes a framework for the comparison of retina models by organizing a set of metrics for testing and evaluating the different models. The book follows a signal processing perspective, where all models and metrics are discretized in order to be implemented and tested in a digital system, such as a computer or a specialized dedicated hardware device.

The conventional wisdom was that biology influenced mathematics and computer science. But a new approach has taken hold: that of transferring methods and tools from computer science to biology. The reverse trend is evident in Grammars and Automata for String Processing: From Mathematics and Computer Science to Biology and Back. The contributors address the structural (syntactical) view of the domain. Mathematical linguistics and computer science can offer various tools for modeling complex macromolecules and for analyzing and simulating biological issues. This collection is valuable for students and researchers in biology, computer science, and applied mathematics.

This book contributes to better understand how lifestyle modulations can effectively halt the emergence and progression of human diseases. The book will allow the reader to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms by which the environment interferes with the bio-molecular regulatory processes underlying the emergence and progression of complex diseases, such as cancer. Focusing on key and early cellular bio-molecular events giving rise to the emergence of degenerative chronic disease, it builds on previous experience on the development of multi-cellular organisms, to propose a mathematical and computer based framework that allows the reader to analyze the complex interplay between bio-molecular processes and the (micro)-environment from an integrative, mechanistic, quantitative and dynamical perspective. Taking the wealth of empirical evidence that exists it will show how to build and analyze models of core regulatory networks involved in the emergence and progression of chronic degenerative diseases, using a bottom-up approach.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Natural Computing, TPNC 2017, held in Dublin, Ireland, in December 2018. The 35 full papers presented in this book, together with one invited talk, were carefully reviewed and selected from 69 submissions. The papers are organized around the following topical sections: applications of natural computing as algorithms, bioinformatics, control, cryptography, design, economics. The more theoretical contributions handle with artificial chemistry, artificial immune systems, artificial life, cellular automata, cognitive computing, cognitive engineering, cognitive robotics, collective behaviour, complex systems, computational intelligence, computational social science, computing with words, developmental systems, DNA computing, DNA nanotechnology, evolutionary algorithms, evolutionary computing, evolutionary game theory, fractal geometry, fuzzy control, fuzzy logic, fuzzy sets, fuzzy systems, genetic algorithms, genetic programming, granular computing, heuristics, intelligent agents, intelligent systems, machine intelligence, molecular programming, neural computing, neural networks, quantum communication, quantum computing, rough sets, self-assembly.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing, SLSP 2018, held in Mons, Belgium, in October 2018. The 15 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: speech synthesis and spoken language generation; speech recognition and post-processing; natural language processing and understanding; and text processing and analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th Colombian Conference on Computing, CCC 2018, held in Cartagena, Colombia, in September 2018. The 46 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 194 submissions. The papers deal with the following topics: information and knowledge management, software engineering and IT architectures, educational informatics, intelligent systems and robotics, human-computer interaction, distributed systems and large-scale architectures, image processing, computer vision and multimedia, security of the information, formal methods, computational logic, and theory of computation.

This book contributes to better understand how lifestyle modulations can effectively halt the emergence and progression of human diseases. The book will allow the reader to gain a better understanding of the mechanisms by which the environment interferes with the bio-molecular regulatory processes underlying the emergence and progression of complex diseases, such as cancer. Focusing on key and early cellular bio-molecular events giving rise to the emergence of degenerative chronic disease, it builds on previous experience on the development of multi-cellular organisms, to propose a mathematical and computer based framework that allows the reader to analyze the complex interplay between bio-molecular processes and the (micro)-environment from an integrative, mechanistic, quantitative and dynamical perspective. Taking the wealth of empirical evidence that exists it will show how to build and analyze models of core regulatory networks involved in the emergence and progression of chronic degenerative diseases, using a bottom-up approach.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th InternationalConference on Algorithms for Computational Biology, AlCoB 2018, held in Hong Kong, China, in June 2018. The 11 full papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 20 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Phylogenetics, Sequence Rearrangement and Analysis, Systems Biology and Other Biological Processes.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference,on Theory and Practice of Natural Computing, TPNC 2017, held in Prague, Czech Republic, December 2017. The 22 full papers presented in this book, together with one invited talk, werecarefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. The papers are organized around the following topical sections: applications of natural computing; evolutionary computation; fuzzy logic; Molecular computation; neural networks; quantum computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Statistical Language and Speech Processing, SLSP 2017, held in Le Mans, France, in October 2017. The 21 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. The papers cover topics such as anaphora and conference resolution; authorship identification, plagiarism and spam filtering; computer-aided translation; corpora and language resources; data mining and semanticweb; information extraction; information retrieval; knowledge representation and ontologies; lexicons and dictionaries; machine translation; multimodal technologies; natural language understanding; neural representation of speech and language; opinion mining and sentiment analysis; parsing; part-of-speech tagging; question and answering systems; semantic role labeling; speaker identification and verification; speech and language generation; speech recognition; speech synthesis; speech transcription; speech correction; spoken dialogue systems; term extraction; text categorization; test summarization; user modeling. They are organized in the following sections: language and information extraction; post-processing and applications of automatic transcriptions; speech paralinguistics and synthesis; speech recognition: modeling and resources.

A strong visual identity is hard to miss, instantly catching the eye. In children's spaces, it is best tailored with their unique outlook in mind as children perceive the world around them differently from the rest of us, responding to specific sets of details. Design and Visual Identity for Children's Spaces shares a variety of contemporary creative designs for children's spaces all over the world; they combine children-friendly visual elements with smart space design to tailor comfortable and conducive environments where they can learn, have fun, flourish, and be themselves. Over 35 projects that focus on educational institutions, enrichment centres, recreational clubs, play zones, concept stores, and children's hospitals, among others, share concepts that transform spaces to make them more relatable for children through thoughtfully considered visual identity and interior layouts that resonate specifically with them. Designers dig deep, even consult with children, to create designs that call out to them in fun, inspiring spaces that unleash imaginations, while they foster a sense of connection and belonging. Discover the rationales and inspirations behind these concepts, which also unify aspects of the business with a cohesive brand identity to promote the desired brand impressions and top-of-the-mind consumer recall. Through the projects in these pages, the reader is offered a host of thoughtful and creative solutions in designing children's spaces, making this book a handy tool for anyone in the business of managing children's spaces, or keen on designing children's spaces.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference, TPNC 2014, held in Granada, Spain, in December 2014. The 22 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on nature-inspired models of computation; synthesizing nature by means of computation; nature-inspired materials; and information processing in nature.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference, AlCoB 2014, held in July 2014 in Tarragona, Spain.

The 20 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 39 submissions. The scope of AlCoB includes topics of either theoretical or applied interest, namely: exact sequence analysis, approximate sequence analysis, pairwise sequence alignment, multiple sequence alignment, sequence assembly, genome rearrangement, regulatory motif finding, phylogeny reconstruction, phylogeny comparison, structure prediction, proteomics: molecular pathways, interaction networks, transcriptomics: splicing variants, isoform inference and quantification, differential analysis, next-generation sequencing: population genomics, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, microbiome analysis, systems biology.

Nature is characterized by a number of physical laws and fundamental dimensionless couplings. These determine the properties of our physical universe, from the size of atoms, cells and mountains to the ultimate fate of the universe as a whole. Yet it is rather remarkable how little we know about them. The constancy of physical laws is one of the cornerstones of the scientific research method, but for fundamental couplings this is an assumption with no other justification than a historical assumption. There is no 'theory of constants' describing their role in the underlying theories and how they relate to one another or how many of them are truly fundamental. Studying the behaviour of these quantities throughout the history of the universe is an effective way to probe fundamental physics. This explains why the ESA and ESO include varying fundamental constants among their key science drivers for the next generation of facilities. This symposium discussed the state-of-the-art in the field, as well as the key developments anticipated for the coming years.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2013, held in Bilbao, Spain in April 2013.
The 45 revised full papers presented together with 5 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 initial submissions. The volume features contributions from both classical theory fields and application areas (bioinformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial intelligence, etc.). Among the topics covered are algebraic language theory; algorithms for semi-structured data mining; algorithms on automata and words; automata and logic; automata for system analysis and program verification; automata, concurrency and Petri nets; automatic structures; cellular automata; combinatorics on words; computability; computational complexity; computational linguistics; data and image compression; decidability questions on words and languages; descriptional complexity; DNA and other models of bio-inspired computing; document engineering; foundations of finite state technology; foundations of XML; fuzzy and rough languages; grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, multidimensional, unification, categorial, etc.); grammars and automata architectures; grammatical inference and algorithmic learning; graphs and graph transformation; language varieties and semigroups; language-based cryptography; language-theoretic foundations of artificial intelligence and artificial life; parallel and regulated rewriting; parsing; pattern recognition; patterns and codes; power series; quantum, chemical and optical computing; semantics; string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and bioinformatics; string processing algorithms; symbolic dynamics; symbolic neural networks; term rewriting; transducers; trees, tree languages and tree automata; weighted automata.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference, TPNC 2012, held in Tarragona, Spain, in October 2012. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 6 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on nature-inspired models of computation; synthesizing nature by means of computation; nature-inspired materials; and information processing in nature.

Formal Languages and Applications provides a comprehensive study-aid and self-tutorial for graduates students and researchers. The main results and techniques are presented in an readily accessible manner and accompanied by many references and directions for further research. This carefully edited monograph is intended to be the gateway to formal language theory and its applications, so it is very useful as a review and reference source of information in formal language theory.

Nature is characterized by a number of physical laws and fundamental dimensionless couplings. These determine the properties of our physical universe, from the size of atoms, cells and mountains to the ultimate fate of the universe as a whole. Yet it is rather remarkable how little we know about them. The constancy of physical laws is one of the cornerstones of the scientific research method, but for fundamental couplings this is an assumption with no other justification than a historical assumption. There is no 'theory of constants' describing their role in the underlying theories and how they relate to one another or how many of them are truly fundamental. Studying the behaviour of these quantities throughout the history of the universe is an effective way to probe fundamental physics. This explains why the ESA and ESO include varying fundamental constants among their key science drivers for the next generation of facilities. This symposium discussed the state-of-the-art in the field, as well as the key developments anticipated for the coming years.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2011, held in Tarragona, Spain in May 2011. The 36 revised full papers presented together with four invited articles were carefully selected from 91 submissions. Among the topics covered are algebraic language theory, automata and logic, systems analysis, systems verifications, computational complexity, decidability, unification, graph transformations, language-based cryptography, and applications in data mining, computational learning, and pattern recognition.

In the last years, it was observed an increasing interest of computer scientists in the structure of biological molecules and the way how they can be manipulated in vitro in order to define theoretical models of computation based on genetic engineering tools. Along the same lines, a parallel interest is growing regarding the process of evolution of living organisms. Much of the current data for genomes are expressed in the form of maps which are now becoming available and permit the study of the evolution of organisms at the scale of genome for the first time. On the other hand, there is an active trend nowadays throughout the field of computational biology toward abstracted, hierarchical views of biological sequences, which is very much in the spirit of computational linguistics. In the last decades, results and methods in the field of formal language theory that might be applied to the description of biological sequences were pointed out.

The workshop on The Cosmology of Extra Dimensions and Varying Fundamental Constants, which was part of JENAM 2002, was held at the Physics Department of the University of Porto (FCUP) from the 3rd to the 5th of September 2002. It was regularly attended by about 110 participants, of which 65 were officially registered in the VFC workshop, while the others came from the rest of the JENAM workshops. There were also a few science correspondents from the national and international press. During the 3 days of the scientific programme, 8 Invited Reviews and 30 Oral Communications were presented. The speakers came from 11 different European countries, and also from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Japan and the U.S.A. There were also speakers from six Portuguese research institutions, and nine of the speak ers were Ph.D. students. The contributions are presented in these proceedings in chronological order. The workshop brought together string theorists, particle physicists, theoretical and observational cosmologists, relativists and observational astrophysicists. It was generally agreed that this inter-disciplinarity was the greatest strength of the work shop, since it provided people coming into this very recent topic from the various different backgrounds with an opportunity to understand each other's language and thereby gain a more solid understanding of the overall picture."

The theory of formal languages is widely accepted as the backbone of t- oretical computer science. It mainly originated from mathematics (com- natorics, algebra, mathematical logic) and generative linguistics. Later, new specializations emerged from areas ofeither computer science(concurrent and distributed systems, computer graphics, arti?cial life), biology (plant devel- ment, molecular genetics), linguistics (parsing, text searching), or mathem- ics (cryptography). All human problem solving capabilities can be considered, in a certain sense, as a manipulation of symbols and structures composed by symbols, which is actually the stem of formal language theory. Language - in its two basic forms, natural and arti?cial - is a particular case of a symbol system. This wide range of motivations and inspirations explains the diverse - plicability of formal language theory ? and all these together explain the very large number of monographs and collective volumes dealing with formal language theory. In 2004 Springer-Verlag published the volume Formal Languages and - plications, edited by C. Martin-Vide, V. Mitrana and G. P?un in the series Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing 148, which was aimed at serving as an overall course-aid and self-study material especially for PhD students in formal language theory and applications. Actually, the volume emerged in such a context: it contains the core information from many of the lectures - livered to the students of the International PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications organized since 2002 by the Research Group on Mathem- ical Linguistics from Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain."