Collective Actions is one of the most significant artistic practices to emerge from Moscow Conceptualism. The group's enigmatic idea of 'Empty action' is the focal point for Marina Gerber's exploration of this practice in relation to labour in the late Soviet Union. Based on interviews with members of the group (Monastyrski, Panitkov, Alexeev, Makarevich, Elagina, Romashko, Hänsgen and Kiesewalter) she exposes the relation between their jobs, their individual art practices and their contribution to the collective in the context of post-Stalinist debates on labour and free time. Departing from the mundane fact that Collective Actions' practice took place in free time from work for the Soviet State, Gerber identifies Empty action as a form of 'art after work'.

The present volume has its origin in a meeting of philosophers, linguists and cognitive scientists that was held at Umea University, Sweden, September 24-26, 1993. The meeting was organized by the Department of Philosophy in cooperation with the Department of Linguistics, and it was called UmLLI-93, the Umea Colloquium on Dynamic Approaches in Logic, Language and Information. The papers published here are considerably expanded and revised versions of talks presented by invited speakers at this colloquium. The papers included here fall into three broad categories. In the first part of the book, Action, we have collected papers that concern the formal theory of action, the logic of nonns, and the theory of rational decision. The papers in the second part, Belief Change, concern the theory of belief dynamics in the tradition of Alchourr6n, Gardenfors and Makinson. The third part, Cognition, concerns abstract questions about knowledge and truth as well'as more concrete questions about the usefuleness and tractability of various graphic representations of infonnation. An additional and important topic of the colloquium concerned logical approaches to natural language. For the sake of the thematic unity of this book, and its appearance in the series Trends in logic, the colloquium papers related to language are not included here, but some of these contributions will appear in the philosophical journal Theoria.

Action theory is the object of growing attention in a variety of scientific disciplines and this is the first volume to offer a synthetic view of the range of approaches possible in the topic. The volume focuses on the nexus of formal action theory with a startlingly diverse set of subjects, which range from logic, linguistics, artificial intelligence and automata theory to jurisprudence, deontology and economics. It covers semantic, mathematical and logical aspects of action, showing how the problem of action breaks the boundaries of traditional branches of logic located in syntactics and semantics and now lies on lies on the borderline between logical pragmatics and praxeology. The chapters here focus on specialized tasks in formal action theory, beginning with a thorough description and formalization of the language of action and moving through material on the differing models of action theory to focus on probabilistic models, the relations of formal action theory to deontic logic and its key applications in algorithmic and programming theory. The coverage thus fills a notable lacuna in the literary corpus and offers solid formal underpinning in cognitive science by approaching the problem of cognition as a composite action of mind.

Introductory Guide to WebSphere Business Integration from IBM Using WebSphere Business Integration (WBI) technology, you can build an enterprise-wide Business Integration (BI) infrastructure that makes it easier to connect any business resources and functions, so you can adapt more quickly to the demands of customers and partners. Now there’s an introductory guide to creating standards-based process and data integration solutions with WBI. WebSphere Business Integration Primer thoroughly explains Service Component Architecture (SCA), basic business processes, and complex long-running business flows, and guides you to choose the right process integration architecture for your requirements. Next, it introduces the key components of a WBI solution and shows how to make them work together rapidly and efficiently. This book will help developers, technical professionals, or managers understand today’s key BI issues and technologies, and streamline business processes by combining BI with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Coverage includes Linking BI, business process management (BPM), and SOA BI scenarios, architecture, patterns, and the IBM Business Object Framework Business orchestration utilizing WS-BPEL and other industry standards BI development with WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) and the SCA programming model WebSphere Process Server (WPS): a runtime for service-oriented applications Defining business maps, rules, business state machines, and human tasks Managing BI services: security, auditing, and more Integrating third-party and legacy systems with WebSphere adapters Utilizing WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Business Monitor Using WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB) to integrate services

A logic-based approach to the design of computing systems would, undoubtedly, offer many advantages over the imperative paradigm most commonly applied so far for programming and hardware design and, consequently, logic, again and again, has been heralded as the basis for the next generation of computer systems. While logic and formal methods are indeed gaining ground in many areas of computer science and artificial intelligence the expected revolution has not yet happened. In this book the author offers a convincing solution to the ramification problem and qualification problem associated with the frame problem and thus contributes to a satisfactory solution of the core problem and related challenges. Thielscher bases his approach on the fluent calculus, a first-order Prolog-like formalism allowing for the description of actions and change.

This text presents documents drawn from the artistic archives of Eastern and Central Europe during the second half of the 20th century.

"With an abridged translation of the Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism."