Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

A bug in the system: speculations on cybernetics, superorganisms, and simulated serendipity

Publication Date
2016-January-01
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What is a cybernetic organism in the age of digital imagining? Where can we find a historical nexus between the methods used to models systems and the increasing velocity of digital images? How do bodies fracture and congeal when integrated...

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Lighthouse principle for diffusion in social networks

Publication Date
2018-January-01
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The article investigates an influence relation between two sets of agents in a social network. It proposes a logical system that captures propositional properties of this relation valid in all threshold models of social networks with the same structure. The...

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Shakes, Quakes and Kokoro no care

Publication Date
2013-January-01
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The 3.11 events in 2011 are historically the most destructive series of natural disasters to have ever hit the island nation of Japan. But while the international media has commended the bravery of survivors and applauded Japanese efforts to provide...

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Testing biological hypotheses with embodied robots: adaptations, accidents, and by-products in the evolution of vertebrates

Publication Date
2014-November-12
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Evolutionary robotics allows biologists to test hypotheses about extinct animals. In our case, we modeled some of the first vertebrates, jawless fishes, in order to study the evolution of the trait after which vertebrates are named: vertebrae. …

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