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Genetics and Culture: Glossary |
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| Art |
1. Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature. 2.
3. High quality
of conception or execution, as found in works of beauty; aesthetic value.
7.
8.
9. Printing. Illustrative material. Source: http://www.dictionary.com |
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| Artist | art·ist
(ärtst) n. 1. One, such as a painter, sculptor, or writer, who is able by virtue of imagination and talent or skill to create works of aesthetic value, especially in the fine arts. 2. A person whose work shows exceptional creative ability or skill: You are an artist in the kitchen. 3. One, such as an actor or singer, who works in the performing arts. 4. One who is adept at an activity, especially one involving trickery or deceit: a con artist. [French artiste, from Old French, lettered person, from Medieval Latin artista, from Latin ars, art-, art. See ar- in Indo-European Roots.] |
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| Chimera |
Chimera [Chi·mae·ra
(k-mîr, k-)] n. chimera \Chime"ra\,
n.; pl. Chimeras. [L. chimaera a chimera (in sense 1), Gr. ? a she-goat,
a chimera, fr. ? he-goat; cf. Icel. qymbr a yearling ewe.] 1. (Myth.)
A monster represented as vomiting flames, and as having the head of a
lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon. ``Dire chimeras and
enchanted isles.'' --Milton. chimera |
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| Culture |
1.
2. Intellectual and artistic activity and the works produced by it. 3.
4. A high degree of taste and refinement formed by aesthetic and intellectual training. 5. Special training and development: voice culture for singers and actors. 6. The cultivation of soil; tillage. 7. The breeding of animals or growing of plants, especially to produce improved stock. 8. Biology.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Usage Note: The application of the term culture to the collective attitudes and behavior of corporations arose in business jargon during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Unlike many locutions that emerge in business jargon, it spread to popular use in newspapers and magazines. Few Usage Panelists object to it. Over 80 percent of Panelists accept the sentence The new management style is a reversal of GE's traditional corporate culture, in which virtually everything the company does is measured in some form and filed away somewhere. · Ever since C.P. Snow wrote of the gap between “the two cultures” (the humanities and science) in the 1950s, the notion that culture can refer to smaller segments of society has seemed implicit. Its usage in the corporate world may also have been facilitated by increased awareness of the importance of genuine cultural differences in a global economy, as between Americans and the Japanese, that have a broad effect on business practices. Source: The
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition culture n 1: a particular civilization at a particular stage 2: the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group 3: all the knowledge and values shared by a society [syn: acculturation] 4: (biology) the growing of microorganisms in a nutrient medium (such as gelatin or agar); "the culture of cells in a Petri dish" 5: the raising
of plants or animals: "the culture of oysters" |
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| Culture |
culture n 1: a particular civilization at a particular stage 2: the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group 3: all the knowledge and values shared by a society [syn: acculturation] 4: (biology) the growing of microorganisms in a nutrient medium (such as gelatin or agar); "the culture of cells in a Petri dish" 5: the raising
of plants or animals: "the culture of oysters" |
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| Development | Organismal, biological development: The process by which an egg grows in to an individual adult of a species. BY the mid-twentieth century, this process was still not completely known. The process of development itself is seen to have arisen as the result of natural selection acting over countless generations. The mechanisms by which genes lead to the formation of adults from egg/sperm is not resolved completely. [1] | |
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| Interactive |
[in·ter·ac·tive
(ntr-ktv) ] <programming> A term describing a program whose input and output are interleaved, like a conversation, allowing the user's input to depend on earlier output from the same run. The interaction with the user is usually conducted through either a text-based interface or a graphical user interface. Other kinds of interface, e.g. using speech recognition and/or speech synthesis, are also possible. This is in contrast to batch processing where all the input is prepared before the program runs and so cannot depend on the program's output.(http://www.dictionary.com) |
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| Media Art | Art form that makes use of electronic equipment, computing and new communication technologies. Technology and its various processes are used in unusual ways to produce works of art. Media artists work in experimental cinema, video, holography, computer graphics, copy art and wired art, among other forms. They create multimedia and interactive installations and they use computers, fax machines and satellites. This genre also includes avant-garde radio and television producers, as well as musicians whose compositions, recordings or concerts involve electronic or digital equipment. (New Media Dictionary: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/NMD/nmdhome.html ) | |
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| Meme |
meme
(mm) meme Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through, for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea. The term is used especially in the phrase "meme complex" denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organised belief system, such as a religion. However, "meme" is often misused to mean "meme complex". Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has become more important than biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons. -meme /meem/ n. [coined by analogy with `gene', by Richard Dawkins] An idea considered as a replicator, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase `meme complex' denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker subculture' meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, `meme' is often misused to mean `meme complex'. Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons. Source: Jargon File 4.2.0 Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2001 Denis Howe and http://www.dictionary.com |
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| Memetic algorithm |
A genetic algorithm or evolutionary algorithm which includes a non-genentic local search to improve genotypes. The term comes from the Richard Dawkin's term "meme".One big difference between memes and genes is that memes are processed and possibly improved by the people that hold them - something that cannot happen to genes. It is this advantage that the memetic algorithm has over simple genetic or evolutionary algorithms. These algorithms are useful in solving complex problems, such as the "Traveling Salesman Problem," which involves finding the shortest path through a large number of nodes, or in creating artificial life to test evolutionary theories. Memetic algorithms are one kind of metaheuristic. UNLP memetic algorithms home page (http://www.ing.unlp.edu.ar/cetad/mos/memetic_home.html). (07 July 1997) Source: http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=memetic%20algorithm |
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| Multimedia | An artist-created installation and communication in which more than one technology is used and where interactivity is not essential. There are two main trends. The first is hypermedia, which focuses on data banks and text-, image-, and sound-processing, as well as the integration of various media. It is used mainly in business, education and medicine. Hypermedia environments usually involve a computer with a large amount of RAM (random access memory). The system consists of a monitor to display text, graphics and video images; a mouse; a keyboard; and sometimes a touch screen. The system must be capable of playing and digitizing sounds. The computer is connected to a CD-i (interactive compact disc player), a videodisc player, a fax machine, a modem and sometimes a videoconferencing system. All these systems use a storage device, such as a CD-ROM. Although an increasing number of artists are using such hypermedia platforms, most artists interested in multimedia are involved in the second trend, creating environments that make use of many different technologies, without resorting to or accessing data banks. Artists working within this trend produce multi-sensory works by linking cameras, printers, sensors, projectors, computers and various types of devices. Interactivity in a multimedia environment is different from the interactive relationship created in a virtual-reality environment. In multimedia, interaction is physical: users are outside the unit and press a button or their body heat or movements trigger a reaction. With virtual reality, often there is immersion---the user's senses are completely immersed in stimuli created by the unit. The term was used by the American Stanley Gibb in 1973 to describe works that combine images, sounds, blocking, etc. In 1958, during the Brussels World Exhibition, a group of Czech artists presented Lanterna Magika. The production included "performers," music and the projection of slides and film images, thereby fulfilling the definition of multimedia. (New Media Dictionary: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/NMD/nmdhome.html ) | |
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| Natural Selection | Theory generated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the nineteenth century to account for the generation and variety of species of organisms. It has "three premises. (1) Individual members of a species vary to some extent from one to another...(2) Much of the variation between individuals is hereditary, passed from one generation to the next....this depends on the transmission of hereditary factors - genes...(3) Organisms have an excessive rate of reproduction, tending to produce more offspring than can possibly be sustained by their environment, with the inevitable result that many of them will die. If these three premises are true, the process of natural selection will occur in the following way. In every generation only a selection of individuals in a population will live to survive and reproduce. This selection will not be completely random but will favour individuals with certain characteristics...Now because individual variation is to some extent hereditary, individuals that finally make it to reproduce will pass some of their characteristics on to the next generation. This means that the characters that favoured an individual's chance of survival and reproduction will also be the ones that tend to be passed on. Repeating this process over many generations, with heritable variation arising and being selected every time, organisms will tend to evolve features that favour their survival and reproduction in the environment: in other words adaptations." Used primarily as a process of explaining evolution. [1] | |
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| Xenotransplation | The transfer of cells and organs from one species into another.E.g. from animals to humans. For more information on the history of xenotransplantation: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_425000/425120.stm or see web archive | |
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