Counter Logic

The internet has public resources for improving community wealth. Tools for datamining and code metrics include cmetrics, FLOSSmole, FLOSSMetrics. and SLOCCount.Award for software testing and debugging: 1, 2, and 3. Utilities assist scenario forecasting. Kurzweil’s futurist performance was graded. AI is used for sports betting. Security adds computational forensics. SocialSci is a science research network. Engineering addresses world problems. Trees have been added to google earth engine. Digital evolution arrives at fireflies. News stream made from bitly links. CreateSpace self-publishes media. Irish expats have a social network. Comicspipeline.com shows arts in progress. Veterinarian designs prostheses. Phylo is a genomic game. Video discusses bioliberation. There were twenty-eight recent links.

Book Reviews:

Model-Driven Software Development: Integrating Quality Assurance, Rech and Bunse, 2008

An effect of a good model is to define the terminology and to automate analysis. The control and data flow are often similar to classical code-driven processes, but may be easier to handle since formats are less difference. The book has four sections for eighteen chapters from fifty authors. They discuss quality evaluation and improvement for specific domains. UML was an early instance; peer review was a quality method. New developments are shown for embedded systems, automotive, service engineering and infrared telescope. Some of these have used Matlab/Simulink/TargetLink. Metrics include matrices for maintainability, reusability, portability, efficiency and performance, for example. The book describes case studies. Models are inspected for completeness, consistency, traceability, and correctness. Empirical testing is still used to characterize system implementations.

Making Software, Oram and Wilson, 2010
This is a set of scholarly research papers which is interesting for, not only the results, but also the methods and the places under study. There are two parts on general principles and specific topics by forty-five authors. The table of contents shows the titles and subjects for thirty chapters, each of which also has a list of references. Part of the book’s implicit knowledge comes from how the authors answered their questions as well as how they present the evidence. The question becomes how to measure and improve these skills in other organizations and on a more continuous basis. The most common areas of interest are productivity metrics and measurement. These are shown for different software development process models and code bases. They also look at the limitations of education. There are some new concepts such as socio-technical congruence as a measure of coordination.

To Be Is To Question

IBM personalizes internet. Australia has a digital city. Adobe adds cloud filesharing. Verify gets user feedback on screens. Impure visualizes data. A biological brain navigates a vehicle. In electric cars, a Chevy gets an IP address, and an Urbee is made on printer. Also in 3D, Janus does interactive scanning and holograms do displays. Invisible material disappears. Chip PC is in the plug. Blekko searches selected sites. Gdb does profiling. Sensors warn of landslides. Technoscience combines science and engineering.

Book reviews:

What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly, 2010
The author seeks the essence of technology as a force the equal of nature. Technology has features such as evolution, complexity, specificity, diversity, and energy dependencies. He introduces the term technium as a form of civilization, an emergent system of accelerated life. Many advancements happen simultaneously in multiple places, e.g. the Axial Age. This is the result of new technologies increasing the odds of successors. There are four parts for fourteen chapters. It is written in an optimistic, mind-expanding style. He covers the ideas of many other authors such as Joel Garreau and W. Brian Arthur. There are twenty-books in the reading list including authors such as Ray Kurzweil and Steward Brand. Though not cited here, there have been efforts to formalize technology’s philosophical roots, theory, and predictions, reviewed earlier on this blog and google books.

Recent links (of about twenty-four):

video

YouTube – Tom Chatfield: 7 ways video games engage the brain
YouTube – Authors@Google: Alice Walker

Superintent

Seeming contradictions are grist for the engineering mill.  While hints of future issues raise the value of cooperation, vested domains attempt to defend their turf, especially the big budget items. Drama is usually followed by system reorganization, at lesser durations between phases. There are various models for the dynamics, including networking, and these are being shaken out by new entrants. Artifacts tell the story of their environment and culture.

Recent links (about 15): test: usability, cross-browser, debug: lldb, internet of things: Cape Cod, computation: astronomy,  education: computers and data mining, sustainability: contest, population and consumption, art: Sculptris, cognitive: Pinker on mass media.

Book reviews:

How It Ends: From You To the Universe, Chris Impey, 2010

Science doesn’t end in this one, rather it evolves to handle complexity. It is assumed that a general theory of intelligence will be forthcoming. In the meantime, the author seeks to debunk myths, but observes that endings create meaning, and that stories, in addition to facts, are important. Practical limits are respected where known, but measurement of the end depends upon the tool; and adjusting the threshold changes results. The view is systemic. The set of twelve chapters begin from individual perspective and scale up. Each has an introduction that encapsulates the general idea in a scene or person. There are plenty of diagrams and photographs which illustrate the instances, terms, relationships or conclusion. Many of the human fears of impact result in fractional loss of numbers and regression of civilization, but not extinction. This book covers a lot of current thought, e.g. transhumanism, and names or quotes the signature personalities. Much of life is shown as part of a web. Bacteria can survive space and entry to the atmosphere. It is likely that there are other forms of life in the universe or the multiverse. An extensive glossary, notes and reading list are appended.
Incidentally, this does not cover Aubrey de Grey’s theory of regenerative medicine and longevity.

Holistic Engineering Education: Beyond Technology, editors Domenico Grasso and Melody Brown Burkins, 2010

Design is a common topic across nineteen papers by thirty authors in three countries (US, China, Peru) including thirteen states (mostly CA, MA and VA). This is due to the attribute of creativity as part of technology. (It may also overlap educational rivalries between scientific evolution and intelligent design.) The projected shortage of engineers has sharpened interest in improving education, from early through undergrad to faculty. There is an established history that can be improved upon as practice and standards become global. An emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration has several elements such as changes in segmentation from, for example, electrical/mechanical/industrial, proposed curriculums, ethical values, and study abroad. A set of recommended personal values includes analysis, translation and perception. Skills of interest include asking, labeling, modeling, decomposing, gathering, visualizing, and communicating. A case study is shown for the global positioning system highlighting systems design, and technical and business leadership. Holistic contexts include system, strategic, implementation and stakeholder. Cultural approaches reinforce unity of effort. Engineering is eligible to become a guild, like the learned professions for medical, legal, and accounting. Most chapters have conclusions and suggested readings. Sustainability issues are often reported in the news.
Experienced engineers probably have many stories about what could be changed in education and practice and professional societies attempt to be a conduit for this. Some of the skills are innate and show up in play or the use and innovation of tools and artifacts. Many fields are becoming more sophisticated in the use of instrumentation for measurement, visualization, computation and control. Most of these can be scaled to educational versions that include the newest areas of R&D. If not supplied institutionally, they probably will have some free or affordable public or web versions. Where there are few people to handle the tasks, expert automation would be required.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr, 2010

The question is whether people are losing their minds or society is constructing a new type of one. Tools have sticky cognitive effects on their users and the internet, while figuratively turning on the light for many, may also tend to make it harder to look as deeply as before. In order to write the book, the author attempted to disconnect and find seclusion for a while. He cites how changes of this magnitude have been perceived in the past, e.g. Socrates’ lament that writing destroyed the capacity for individual memory, or how the typewriter changed authors’ styles since they could not dwell on the feeling of writing in longhand. Information is meted out in lots of brief interlinked pieces. Email has become streams. Ads are pervasive. The ten chapters review the mind, book, maps, clocks, tech, computers, and AI, amid the dimension of networking. Rather than point to URLs, the story is told in flashbacks, e.g. how Weizenbaum’s ELIZA could earn the empathic confidence of people even though it was mindless. There are ten chapters and four digressions, the last of which looks at the irony of a book on the disappearance of long-term concentration. Notes and further reading are appended. Much of these are valid issues and worth further study. Whether the realtime flow and exponential increase in data to analyze can be paused often or enough is unknown. More direct types of mind links may not be too far off in the future.
For the attention-challenged, a way to get through this book might be to survey it quickly, then skim a few times to make raw impressions, not word for word, rather similar to becoming familiar with a song or painting, then read it backwards for the verbal reassurance. The reader can increase the pass-throughs to pick up more detail where necessary and as time allows, thereby rendering textual memory as well as consideration and opinion. It may turn out that reading is more of a creative process than previously thought, or that there are better tools for the task, as there are for other kinds of digital composition, e.g. like sculpting 3D art. It may then still be possible to frequently parse titles in dedicated slices while otherwise attending to the network. Eventually a learning process may be discovered, akin to development of Gladwell’s outlier mastery status, And, of course, each of the chapters can become a book or digital museum or web-service in the interim, so none of the 3R’s may remain sacrosanct for much longer. There may be a video about this floating around somewhere.

Reverse Engineering: An Industrial Perspective, Raja and Fernandes, 2008

This textbook details how reverse engineering is used for copy, design abstraction and reengineering. This is based on high-resolution digitization and 3D CAD. Results have included reduced inspection time and improved workflow. Quality assurance benefits were standardization and interchangeable parts and reduced manufacturing cost. There are actual examples from automotive, aerospace, and medical device industries, and tables refer to more. Eleven papers discuss definitions, methodologies, system selection and rapid prototyping. The authors diagram a generic process and show how it is customized in each case. The product development cycles includes test. Taxonomies are given for measuring and positioning systems. Legal concerns arise from fair use and patents, and may be handled by a recommended sui generis system. Organizational considerations are listed including a champion, management support, resource coordination, competition, and user participation, e.g. “tribal knowledge” in an aerospace firm. This does get technical and there are some equations. Terms include computer-aided reverse engineering (CARE), coordinate measuring machine (CMM), nonuniform rational B-splines (NURBS), NC machine, multijet modeling (MJM), and computer-aided inspection (CAI).
Merging data and semantic web approaches is outside the scope of this book.

Netropic

Where there’s a bit, there’s a bot may become an aphorism of digital consciousness, at least until something is picked as the universal standard. There may be some new principles of order, somewhere between anthropic and entropy, introduced by the impending Singularity. Approximations of these turn up in the literature of fiction as well as technology. This may also be an engineering topic for successive approximation by neural nets or intermediate computational agents which can parse relevant external worlds.

Recent links (about 22):semantic-web: RDB2RDF, computer: future of BIOS, flexible OLEDs, internet: trends, documentation: office live docs, location: Flook browser, Bing map SDK, social-networks: Facebook video, networks: IBM Mote Runner SDK, search: ReputationDefender, alerts:  SproutRobot, business: IBM ecurrency tokens.

 

Book reviews:

Philosophy and Engineering: An Emerging Agenda, by Ibo van de Poel and David Goldberg, 2009

This book details a variety of claims which, together, do not appear consistent, but may provide methods for further study. Engineering applies science and produces technology. The effects on society can be ethically evaluated through cooperation of philosophers. The recognized set of philosophical problems is still being determined including epistemological, methodological, metaphysical and ontological. It may also address other existing philosophical problems. The book has contributions by thirty-two authors in three parts for twenty-eight papers.
Engineering as a discipline is historically distinct from architecture.A well-defined philosophy does not exist, though efforts date from the start of the 21st century having arisen independently in the East and West, and following, yet distinct from, the philosophies of science and technology. A pluralistic approach can be linguistic, phenomenological, post-modern, analytic, pragmatic, and Thomist. It is within the field of philosophy of technology. Science and engineering are often treated as simplified notions based on politics of funding rather than examination of what people actually do in particular. Generalization differs in engineering from natural sciences, including artifact type, function and structure, which combine causes and concepts. The models used to represent reality are idealized, tested, and compared to eachother. Sociotechnical system boundaries include the behaviors and relations of elements impacted by it. Integrity is uniquely complex for engineers, the profession and its education. The engineering priority of technical ingenuity over helping people needs to be rebalanced to avoid becoming lost in the labyrinth of technology. Engineering ethics needs a global foundation based on principles of public safety, human rights, environmental and animal preservation, engineering competence, scientifically founded judgment, openness and honesty. Research in engineering ethics has spread to Asia and Europe from North American origins. The scale extends through individual, group, company, profession and planet. Imagination of the engineering world is a way to deal with conditions of epistemic opacity. Responsibility for artifacts eventually transfer from engineer to user through knowledge of their workings. Ethics concerns the amount of harm from artifacts produced by solutions to engineering problems Ethicists have observed an actual design project where participants were characterized as actors in a network, and intermediate results were presented which affected the outcome of the project. This is helpful in mapping risks, responsibilities and ethical issues. Future comparisons may be made between engineering and medical science. Role-playing games can be used to teach ethics if they are felt and articulated, have a lengthy process, use case studies, and realistically up-to-date. The Norms Evolving in Response to Dilemmas (NERD) platform was used for experimentation in the ethics of technology as a form of stress testing. There is a crisis of a creative era which.is resulting in the philosophical interest similar to what Kuhn showed had occurred in science, and which leads to dialectics, data mining, and reliance upon either brute or social facts or institutional artifacts, it may be short-lived. Wittgenstein had engineering training and his philosophy was based on the realworld of things rather than ideology. Design methodologies include top-down, layered, platform-based or network-based and are related to human organizational structures and national cultural emphases. Computer science builds abstractions from bits, engineering configures solutions, and stigmergic design in nature is bottom up. The settings of engineering are ad hoc realworld or systematic hyperrealworld. Technology is ubiquitous; engineering is either denial or determinacy; Where survival of the human species is the goal, all is heuristic; A quantitative measure of ethics is defined.
Issues concerning posthumanist theories would require other sources.

Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time to Superintelligence, edited by Susan Schneider, 2009

This book is an advanced treatment of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and scifi which can be considered narrative of thought experiments about puzzling scenarios. The editor is especially interested in neural enhancements, AI and the problems of disparity between Humans 2.0, whose flaws can only be judged by their own, and those who have not been upgraded. The book prevents a variety of views and methods rather than a concluding thesis. Authors range from classic philosophers, such as Plato and Descartes, through scifi writers such as Asimov and Bradbury. Others of each type are discussed in the contents. There are a couple of entries each from the modern literature of Dennett, Kurzweil and Andy Clark. There are five parts for twenty-seven papers, some of which have additional references. Each part lists related works of scifi, mostly from movies. There are diagrams for some of the mathematical and scientific concepts. Rather than commenting on each entry, there is a lengthy introduction by the editor about the themes and philosophical questions including reality as simulation, free will, mind and ethics and politics, and spacetime. A few recommendations that provide more depth in technology and risks are listed. Superintelligence is expected to arise due to the computational theory of mind, and identity based on information patternism. The philosophies of the reader’s favorite authors may yield to the kinds of approaches here, but there would probably be interest in more of such comparative volumes, also for the newest engineering fields, at least until a cyborg editor can do this in realtime for anyone as hinted by the iRobot-style cover picture.

The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, edited by Steven M. Sanders, 2008

The editor lists three types of analysis: context, film, and topics. Classic films were selected for philosophical treatment, e.g. the Matrix is likened to Plato’s Cave. Other popular philosophers are Descartes, Heidegger, Hobbes, Hume and Nietzsche. There are three parts having four papers each, by a total of thirteen contributors. Films often quote influential predecessors and seek either general or improved solutions, e.g. Metropolis’ machine woman is like Wizard of Oz’ tin woodsman later echoed in C3PO. Settings are often case studies for logic problems that may introduce new assumptions, e.g. previously hidden forces or actors. Paradoxes are highlighted and heuristics proposed. The look and feel may have unique aesthetic texture, e.g. tech noir. Ethical questions often form themes and may be treated mythically, displaced by alien culture or time travel, for a different perspective that changes the intellectual and political constraints, e.g. involving power, laws, sex or war. Metaphysical questions around death are pursued, e.g. resurrection. The future may be seen as utopian or dystopian, or time may be flexible so that future or past can be changed. Reviewers are sometimes aware of their own cognitive processes so that interpretation is an art.

Minds and Computers: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence By Matt Carter 2007

This book is a basic introduction to AI as a philosophical theory of mind. It covers cognitive science topics on the human mind, computation, reasoning, language and philosophical considerations. For example, humans recognize repetitive sensory patterns and dedicate response structures to them; embodied experience is a basis for semantics. Each chapter indicates theory and objections. The style is mildly technical and philosophical. History of the field is broadly sketched and problems are not really delved into, e.g. consciousness, identity and emotions are briefly summarized in a chapter at the end. It does get into some detail about functional neuroanatomy and neural networks. There are twenty chapters, occasional exercises, some of which are labeled “challenge”, further readings, glossary, and index.
Further advanced conclusions are out of the scope of this text, e.g. by Minsky, Kurzweil, Hawkins or Wolfram on computation,.or Noë on consciousness. It does not discuss biological reuse for robotics, e.g. as has been demonstrated using animal brains, or cloning for this purpose. Trends such as functional brain emulation models from scopes and visualization, quantum mechanics and computation, or synthetic life would need additional sources.

 

 

Documents of interest:

An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto, Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, 2008 (PDF)

 

Blogs of interest:

The New Atlantis – A Journal of Technology & Society

Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual: Illustrated Interactive Fiction from Retropolis and Beyond

 

Videos of interest:

Authors@Google: Paolo Bacigalupi