Cloud Computing paradigm has reached a high degree of popularity among all kinds of computer users, but it may not be suitable for mobile devices as they need computing power to be as close as possible to data sources in order to reduce delays. This paper focuses on achieving mathematical models for users moving around and proposes an overlay mobility model for Fog Data Centres based on traditional wireless mobility models aimed at better allocating edge computing resources (...) to client demands. Additionally, the focus is also on providing a model as to how the computing assets related to each user follow it through the fog infrastructure so as to minimise the distance to the user according to a Fat-Tree based Data Centre topology. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this study is to analyze how embedding of self-powered wireless sensors into cloud computing further enables such a system to become a sustainable part of work environment. Design/methodology/approach This is exemplified by an application scenario in healthcare that was developed in the context of the OpSIT project in Germany. A clearly outlined three-layer architecture, in the sense of Internet of Things, is presented. It provides the basis for integrating a broad range of sensors into smart (...) healthcare infrastructure. More specifically, by making use of short-range communication sensors, gateways which implement data transmission and low-level computation and cloud computing for processing the data. Findings A technical in-depth analysis of the first two layers of the infrastructure is given to prove reliability and to determine the communication quality and availability in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, two example use-cases that directly apply to a healthcare environment are examined, concluding with the feasibility of the presented approach. Practical implications Finally, the next research steps, oriented towards the semantic tagging and classification of data received from sensors, and the usage of advanced artificial intelligence-based algorithms on this information to produce useful knowledge, are described together with the derived social benefits. Originality/value The work presents an innovative, extensible and scalable system, proven to be useful in healthcare environments. (shrink)

In the last half century we have gone from storing data on 5-1/4 inch floppy diskettes to cloud and now fog computing. But one should ask why so much data is being collected. Part of the answer is simple in light of scientific projects but why is there so much data on us? Then, we ask about its “interface” through fog computing. Such questions prompt this chapter on the philosophy of big data and fog computing. After some (...) background on definitions, origins and contemporary applications, the main discussion begins with thinking about modern data collection, management, and applications from a complexity standpoint. Big data is turned into knowledge but knowledge is extrapolated from the past and used to manage the future. Yet it is questionable whether humans have the capacity to manage contemporary technological and social complexity evidenced by our world in crisis and possibly on the brink of extinction. Such calls for a new way of studying societies from a scientific point of view. We are at the center of the observation from which big data emerge and are manipulated, the overall human project being not only to create an artificial brain with an attendant mind but a society that might be able to survive what “natural” humans cannot. (shrink)

In order to explore one aspect of the engaging nature of computer games, this study will propose a method that aims at classifying the experience of engagement in video games. Inspired by a literature review, we will focus on the fundamental causes of engagement that motivate a player so much that he or she wants to continue playing. By organizing this willingness to continue playing into six broad types of causes of engagement—intellectual, physical, sensory, social, narrative, and emotional—we describe a (...) typology of player engagement and a method that is intended to map players’ experience of engagement while playing video games. The engagement mapping method is inspired by card sorting found from a perspective of usability testing, and in order to exemplify the use of the method, occurrences of the six types of engagement were investigated during gameplay in Angry Birds and Wii Sports. (shrink)

Because humans cannot know one another’s minds directly, every form of communication is a solution to the same basic problem: how can privately held information be made publicly accessible through manipulations of the physical environment? Language is by far the best studied response to this challenge. But there are a diversity of non-linguistic strategies for representation with external signs as well, from facial expressions and fog horns to chronological graphs and architectural renderings. The general thesis of this dissertation is that (...) there is an impressively wide spectrum of conventional systems of representation, corresponding to the many ways that the problem of communication can be solved, and that these systems can be described and explained using the tools of contemporary mathematical semantics. As a partial corrective to the countervailing norm, this work concentrates on the class of systems arguably most different from language— those governing the interpretation of pictorial images. Such representations dominate practical communication: witness the proliferation of maps, road signs, newspaper photographs, scientific illustrations, television shows, engineering drawings, and even the fleeting imagery of manual gesture. I argue that systems of depiction and languages embody a parallel technologies of communication. Both are based on semantics: systematic and conventional mappings from signs to representational content. But I also provide evidence that these semantics are profoundly divergent. Whereas the semantics of languages are based on arbitrary associations of signs and denotations, the semantics of systems of depiction are based on rules of geometrical transformation. Drawing on recent research in computer graphics and computational vision, I go on to develop a precise theory of pictorial semantics. This in turn facilitates a detailed comparison of iconic, image-based representation, and symbolic, language-based representation. A consequence of these conclusions is that the traditional, language-centric conception of semantics must be overhauled to allow for a more general semantic theory, one which countenances the wide variety of interpretive mechanisms actually at work in human communication. (shrink)

Historically, there has been great deliberation about the limits of human knowledge. Isaac Newton, recognizing his own shortcomings, once described himself as “a boy standing on the seashore... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all underscored before me.” In _Ignorance,_ Nicholas Rescher presents a broad-ranging study that examines the manifestations, consequences, and occasional benefits of ignorance in areas of philosophy, scientific endeavor, and ordinary life. Citing philosophers, theologians, and scientists from Socrates to Steven Hawking, Rescher seeks to uncover the (...) factors that hinder our cognition. Rescher categorizes ignorance as ontologically grounded, or epistemically grounded. He then defines the basis of ignorance: inaccessible data; statistical fogs; secreted information; past data that have left no trace; future discoveries; future contingencies; vagrant predicates; and superior intelligences. Such impediments set limits to inquiry and mean that while we can always extend our existing knowledge-variability here is infinite-there are things that we will never know. Cognitive finitude also hinders our ability to assimilate more than a certain number of facts. We may acquire additional information, but lack the facility to interpret it. More information does not always increase knowledge; it may point us further down the path toward an erroneous conclusion. In light of these deficiencies, Rescher looks to the role of computers in solving problems and expanding our knowledge base, but finds limits to their reasoning capacity. As Rescher's comprehensive study concludes, ignorance itself is a fertile topic for knowledge, and recognizing the boundaries of our comprehension is where wisdom begins. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 17-29 [Access article in PDF] Intersections Form, Feeling, and Isomorphism Mary J. Reichling University of Louisiana at Lafayette These three concepts hold meanings that differ among musicians and aestheticians. In this essay I shall explore them in the writings of Susanne Langer. Contemporary musicians and aestheticians continue today to engage Langer albeit some favorably and others with disdain. Whatever their reasons, she (...) remains a dominant force in the philosophy of music.1 My purpose is not to defend her against her detractors, but rather to examine and to elucidate various aspects of these three concepts in her writing, as they are fundamental to an understanding of her aesthetic theory and to the construction of a philosophy of music and music education.First, I consider the broad and complex notion of form and the various ways Langer employs it in her aesthetic theory. Next, the rather all-encompassing idea of feeling as Langer conceives it is studied in relation to the form of the musical work. The intersection of form and feeling in the concept of isomorphism concludes the discussion. [End Page 17] Form In her various writings Langer uses several adjectives associated with the word "form" which seem to organize well into three groups. The first concerns the dynamic, living, organic, and vital qualities of form; the second speaks to its logical and abstract nature; and the last relates to the emotional or feeling aspect of form including expressive and significant characteristics.2 These groupings overlap and intertwine, but focusing on each specifically rather than all as a totality offers important insights.Form as dynamic, living, organic, and vital suggests metaphorical reference. Obviously the form is not physically, biologically, alive; reference is to the apparent movement, growth, and aliveness of the musical form as it is heard or performed. Thus this idea of form implies an actual performance to be realized or perceived. Langer is sometimes criticized for giving little attention to the actual making of music, that is, performance, yet her theory assumes music as heard. Essential to perceiving a dynamic form or hearing a feeling is a processual event, namely, performance or listening to a performance. Rarely a professional musician or gifted amateur might be able to engage this concept of form by reading through a score and hearing the music in imagination.Dynamic form parallels Eduard Hanslick's notion of tonend bewegte Formen. One might object that Hanslick and Langer are in conflict as Hanslick opposes while Langer supports the conviction that form is expressive of feeling, but that is moving beyond the matter at hand and suggests a superficial reading of both Hanslick and Langer. Hanslick asserts emphatically that music's meaning is not the arousal of emotion but does not deny feeling in music; Langer holds the same view. But Hanslick allows that "the words content and form are used not in the purely logical, but in an artistic sense." To me this suggests that he recognizes a nonliteral or metaphorical interpretation. He writes about the relationship of musical tones as "fraught with significance... congruity and opposition, their separating and combining, their soaring and subsiding-this is what comes in spontaneous forms before our inner contemplation and pleases us as beautiful." Certainly this parallels Langer's description of dynamic form.3 What is significant is that both philosophers are addressing the fluid, processual, active, movement-of-notes-through-time nature of musical form.The premise that forms are created by motion, are dynamic, is easily grasped by offering some examples. Fast cameras are able to take a series of photos of the movements of a pianist's hands giving still pictures of the moving forms created while performing a given passage.4 Alternately, forms are created by the movements of clouds or fog through the mist and early light; they are, in effect, quite literally moving forms. Cartoon characters generate moving forms through the [End Page 18] use of many drawings or more recently by means of computer animation. Time is a dynamic or moving form which we divide into hours... (shrink)

The sum, difference, product and quotient of two functions with different domains are usually defined only on their common domain. This paper extends these definitions so that the sum and other operations are essentially defined anywhere that at least one of the components is defined. This idea is applied to propositions and events, expressed as indicator functions, to define conditional propositions and conditional events as three-valued indicator functions that are undefined when their condition is false. Extended operations of "and", "or", (...) "not" and "conditioning" are then defined on these conditional events with variable conditions. The probabilities of the disjunction and of the conjunction of two conditionals are expressed in terms of the conditional probabilities of the component conditionals. In a special case, these are shown to be weighted averages of the component conditional probabilities where the weights are the relative probabilities of the various conditions. Next, conditional random variables are defined to be random variables X whose domain has been restricted by a condition on a second random variable Y. The extended sum, difference, product and conditioning operations on functions are then applied to these conditional random variables. The expectation of a random variable and the conditional expectation of a conditional random variable are recounted. Theorem 1 generalizes the standard result that the conditional expectation of the sum of two conditional random variables with disjoint and exhaustive conditions is a weighted sum of the conditional expectations of the component conditional random variables. Because of the extended operations, the theorem is true for arbitrary conditions. Theorem 2 gives a formula for the expectation of the product of two conditional random variables. After the definition of independence of two random variables is extended to accommodate the extended operations, it is applied to the formula of Theorem 2 to simplify the expectation of a product of conditional random variables. Two examples end the paper. The first concerns a work force of n workers of different output levels and work shifts. The second example involves two radars with overlapping surveillance regions and different detection error rates. One radar's error rate is assumed to be sensitive to fog and the other radar's error rate is assumed to be sensitive to air traffic density. The combined error rate over the combined surveillance region given heavy fog and moderate air traffic is computed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley HopkinsRichard D. LordThe Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Franco Marucci; 261 pp. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994, $44.95.Paging one day through Hopkins’s notebooks in the library at Campion Hall, I was startled to find the draft of “Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves” placed directly opposite the (...) tortuous grade computations for one of his classes. This book presents a similar contrast—insights into “The Wreck of the Deutschland” buried in the technical language of structuralism, semiotics, and rhetoric.In his preface, the author calls his book “a revised and updated translation of my I fogli della Sibilla. Retorica et medievalismo in Gerard Manley Hopkins” (p. ix). As the title indicates, it is divided into two parts, the former dealing with Hopkins’s poetic rhetoric viewed synchronically and the latter with his “textuality as a confluence of... cultural codes” (p. 89).In the chapter introducing part one, Marucci dismisses, with few exceptions, criticism from 1918 to the present as being of little use to one investigating “the function and functionality of Hopkins’s poetic rhetoric” (p. 3). The exemplifying portion of this chapter (“Amplification”) addresses “God’s Grandeur” and “The Wreck of the Deutschland” as judicial speech (persuasive), with the reader performing the judicial function. The analysis is useful in providing insights into the poet’s rhetorical planning as he guides the reader in this persuasive process.Moving from the “Deutschland” to the “terrible sonnets” as exemplifications of “autocommunication,” Marucci notes that here the interlocutor gradually disappears as the sender-receiver relationship fades. He believes that Hopkins became “no longer capable of finding in himself (or, more probably, of offering to a receiver who had proved cold and indifferent) the necessary stimuli” (p. 76) and names the editor of The Month, Bridges, and other correspondents as the probable receivers.In the second (and major) part of the book, the author sets out to examine the cultural codes influencing the poet’s textuality. The chapter introducing this section, “‘Integrated’ and ‘Apocalyptic’ Writers,” first looks at “the global syntagmatic model of the Victorian Age” (p. 98) and then divides its texts according to this model into three categories. The first two either reflect or modify the syntagmatic codes (“integrated” writers) while the third opposes these codes (“apocalyptic” writers). The author’s thesis is that Hopkins is not fully any one of these, but that his Victorianism is subsumed in various ways and ultimately subordinated to his medievalism. His position is that Victorian codes essentially ceased to affect the poet after his entrance into the Society of Jesus, when they were replaced by medieval codes. This is developed in some detail in the chapter entitled “Hopkins and Duns Scotus.”Although the book takes a narrow critical approach to Hopkins, it still might [End Page 149] well have been enriched by allowing for the ways in which the Ignatian method of meditation, with its emphasis on the “application of the senses,” so clearly drew Hopkins to find a kindred spirit in Scotus. This, together with the kind of seminary training in vogue in the Catholic Church until after Vatican II, certainly contributed to the medievalism that Marucci finds in the later Hopkins.This is a useful and provocative book for scholars, but many of the footnotes seem unnecessarily long and some chapters conclude too abruptly. The highly specialized language of structuralism and semiotics requires an expertise that probably eludes most undergraduate students.Richard D. LordWillamette UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Recent findings in evolutionary psychology explain how moral disciplining is connected to the need for collective action. Morals are strict in societies affected by war or perceived collective danger, but loose where peace and security prevail. This theory supplements the moral disciplining theory by providing an evolutionary explanation for the postulated link between puritanism and the need for cooperation.

A collective action problem exists not only in offensive warfare, but also in defensive situations. The collective action problem is dealt with in the same way in offensive and defensive warfare: by strong leadership, discipline, rewards and punishments, strong group identification, strict religiosity, and intolerance of deviants. This behavior is explained in terms of evolutionary psychology.

A group in intergroup conflict needs to overcome the collective action problem in order to defend itself against an external enemy. This leads to increasing complexity that cannot be adequately covered by just scaling up the model of intragroup conflicts. Research on cultural evolution and evolutionary psychology shows that external conflict has profound effects on group organization.

The PRDM family has recently spawned considerable interest as it has been implicated in fundamental aspects of cellular differentiation and exhibits expanding ties to human diseases. The PRDMs belong to the SET domain family of histone methyltransferases, however, enzymatic activity has been determined for only few PRDMs suggesting that they act by recruiting co‐factors or, more speculatively, confer methylation of non‐histone targets. Several PRDM family members are deregulated in human diseases, most prominently in hematological malignancies and solid cancers, where they (...) can act as both tumor suppressors or drivers of oncogenic processes. The molecular mechanisms have been delineated for only few PRDMs and little is known about functional redundancy within the family. Future studies should identify target genes of PRDM proteins and the protein complexes in which PRDM proteins reside to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the biological and biochemical functions of this important protein family. (shrink)

One recursively enumerable real α dominates another one β if there are nondecreasing recursive sequences of rational numbers (a[n] : n ∈ ω) approximating α and (b[n] : n ∈ ω) approximating β and a positive constant C such that for all n, C(α − a[n]) ≥ (β − b[n]). See [R. M. Solovay, Draft of a Paper (or Series of Papers) on Chaitin’s Work, manuscript, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, 1974, p. 215] and [G. J. (...) Chaitin, IBM J. Res. Develop., 21 (1977), pp. 350–359]. We show that every recursively enumerable random real dominates all other recursively enumerable reals. We conclude that the recursively enumerable random reals are exactly the Ω-numbers [G. J. Chaitin, IBM J. Res. Develop., 21 (1977), pp. 350–359]. Second, we show that the sets in a universal Martin-Lof test for randomness have random measure, and every recursively enumerable random number is the sum of the measures represented in a universal Martin-Lof test. (shrink)

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Computer Science Logic, CSL '97, held as the 1997 Annual Conference of the European Association on Computer Science Logic, EACSL, in Aarhus, Denmark, in August 1997. The volume presents 26 revised full papers selected after two rounds of refereeing from initially 92 submissions; also included are four invited papers. The book addresses all current aspects of computer science logics and its applications and thus presents the state (...) of the art in the area. (shrink)

The idea of culture has been subject to critical debate in anthropology during the past decade as the result of a shift in emphasis from the bounded local culture to transnational cultural flows. But at the very same time that cultural mobility is being emphasized by anthropologists, the people they study are recasting culture as a place of belonging as they construct local identities. Siting Culture argues that it is only through rich ethnographic studies that anthropologists may explore the significance (...) of place in the global space of relations which mold the lives of people throughout the world. By examining the concept of culture through case studies from Europe, Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean, it probes the methodological and theoretical implications of the divergent scholarly and popular concepts of culture. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, there has been an increased focus on gender in the research literature concerning British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, which most likely is caused by the increasing interest in the social aspects of gender inspired by poststructuralist thinking. Although such readings have been illuminative and fruitful, focusing on the social and the interconnections between Wollstonecraft and modernity seems to have brought with them a neglect of two interesting aspects of Wollstonecraft’s notion about gender. On the one hand, her thoughts (...) on the body seem somewhat underexposed, while her impact on the subsequent British romanticists is equally neglected. The article focuses on these two aspects. Here the analyses are based on Wollstonecraft’s discussions with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke about the relations gender has to nature, bodies, and aesthetics; discussions which inform a conception of gender that the later romantics would take inspiration from. (shrink)

In Sandrine Bergès’s article ‘Revolution and Republicanism: Women Political Philosophers of Late Eighteenth-Century France and Why They Matter’ [2021], neo-Athenian and neo-Roman principles of republicanism are fused in order to show the idiosyncratic political position of Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland, and Sophie de Grouchy. As Bergès acknowledges, this amalgamation renders possible republican readings of women’s writings which so far have not been regarded as republican. Through my reading of Germaine de Staël and Mary Wollstonecraft, my aim will be (...) to show how Staël and Wollstonecraft embody the principles that Bergès highlights, but also venture into other areas tied to republican thinking that Bergès leaves untouched: religion and progress. Wollstonecraft and Staël both tie Christianity closely to their republicanism, maintaining that a future republican state will come through divine intervention. In this way, I hope to add complexity to Bergès’s project by expanding our knowledge of female republicans. (shrink)

Social studies of interdisciplinary science investigate how scientific collaborations approach complex challenges that require multiple disciplinary perspectives. In order for collaborators to meet these complex challenges, interdisciplinary collaborations must develop and maintain integrative capacity, understood as the ability to anticipate and weigh tradeoffs in the employment of different disciplinary approaches. Here we provide an account of how one group of interdisciplinary fog scientists intentionally catalyzed integrative capacity. Through conversation, collaborators negotiated their commitments regarding the ontology of fog systems and the (...) methodologies appropriate to studying fog systems, thereby enhancing capabilities which we take to constitute integrative capacity. On the ontological front, collaborators negotiated their commitments by setting boundaries to and within the system, layering different subsystems, focusing on key intersections of these subsystems, and agreeing on goals that would direct further investigation. On the methodological front, collaborators sequenced various methods, anchored methods at different scales, validated one method with another, standardized the outputs of related methods, and coordinated methods to fit a common model. By observing the process and form of collaborator conversations, this case study demonstrates that social studies of science can bring into critical focus how interdisciplinary collaborators work toward an integrated conceptualization of study systems. (shrink)

Personal identity and social identity are two very different concepts and the idea of getting them together, as Bhikhu Parekh proposes, within an integrated bundle of some `overall identity' raises serious questions of coherence. Personal identity demands the `sameness' of a person (Who is this guy? Am I still the same person that I was ten years ago?). Social identity is focused instead on our social affiliations, such as identifying with others with, say, the same nationality, or the same religion, (...) or same political partnership. We can make reasoned choices about our priorities in social affiliation. Those who want to make our social affiliation a matter of `discovery' rather than of choice may frighten us by saying that we would lose our overall identity if we were to choose to affiliate differently (for example as an Indian and not just as a Hindu, or as British and not just as a Muslim). To understand that there is no threat to personal identity involved in such choices is important both for clarity of analysis and for standing up against the herd behaviour of identity politics. (shrink)

The problem of intentional identity, as originally offered by Peter Geach, says that there can be an anaphoric link between an indefinite term and a pronoun across a sentential boundary and across propositional attitude contexts, where the actual existence of an individual for the indefinite term is not presupposed. In this paper, a semantic resolution to this elusive puzzle is suggested, based on a new quantified intensional logic and game-theoretic semantics (GTS) of imperfect information. This constellation leads to an expressive (...) intensional language with a property of informational independence, argued to produce a purely semantic explication to intentional identity statements. One consequence is that various extra-logical and pragmatic factors become of secondary concern; it is possible to solve the puzzle by logico-semantic methods, albeit somewhat radically renewed ones. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM), the cognitive capacity to attribute internal mental states to oneself and others, is a crucial component of social skills. Its formal study has become important, witness recent research on reasoning and information update by intelligent agents, and some proposals for its formal modelling have put forward settings based on Epistemic Logic (EL). Still, due to intrinsic idealisations, it is questionable whether EL can be used to model the high-order cognition of ‘real’ agents. This manuscript proposes a (...) framework that takes visibility, memory, perspective and communication as the main factors underpinning mental attributions. This is more in-line with findings in cognitive science and allows us to model well-known False-Belief Tasks that are typically used in testing people's ToM. We discuss some of the framework's technical features, arguing why it does justice to empirical observations. (shrink)

The author agrees with James Moor that computer technology, because it is ‘logically malleable’, is bringing about a genuine social revolution. Moor compares the computer revolution to the ‘industrial revolution’ of the late 18th and the 19th centuries; but it is argued here that a better comparison is with the ‘printing press revolution’ that occurred two centuries before that. Just as the major ethical theories of Bentham and Kant were developed in response to the printing press revolution, so a new (...) ethical theory is likely to emerge from computer ethics in response to the computer revolution. The newly emerging field of information ethics, therefore, is much more important than even its founders and advocates believe. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of selected papers presented at the Second Asia-Pacific Computing and Philsosophy Conference, which was held in Bangkok, Thailand in January 2005. The conference was organized by the Center for Ethics of Science and Technology, Chulalongkorn University on behalf of the International Association of Computing and Philosophy (www.ia-cap.org). Computing have had a long relationship with philosophy, starting from the problem of how symbols being manipulated in computing bear a relation to the outside (...) world, to those of artificial intelligence, robotics, computer simulation, and so on. Moreover, as computer technologies have become thoroughly pervasive in today's environment, there are also issues concerning social and ethical impacts brought about by them. The papers in the volume represent a wide variety of concerns and various dimensions within which computing and philosophy are related. Furthermore, it also represents some of the first attempts to highlight cultural dimensions of computing and philosophy, which became prominent when the conference was held for the first time within the milieu of an Asian culture. (The First Asia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy was held in Canberra, Australia.) Hence, many of the papers in the volume address this added dimension. Apart form the usual problems of how computers and human lives are interconnected, the papers here also discuss how computers are related to human lives as lived in a specific culture. Thus the book breaks a new ground and should be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students who are interested, not only on computing and philosophy generally construed, but also on this exciting new dimension of how the cultures of Asia, the West, and others bear upon the traditional issues in computing and philosophy, and on how this dimension raises some new concerns and agenda. Among the topics discussed in this volume are: political online forums in Saudi Arabia, e-democracy and structural transformation of public sphere, the Buddhist informational person, a glance into the lives of computerized generation in Thailand, technology and journalism in the market, local approaches and global potential (?) of information ethics, computer-enhanced good life, computer teaching ethics, and many others. (shrink)

This makes his book especially valuable." -- Yuri Gurevich, Professor of Computer Science, University of Michigan Computability and complexity theory should be of central concern to practitioners as well as theorists.

Fog in August is a German film based on Robert Domes' historical novel of the same name. The film provides a fictionalized account of the institutionalization and eventual killing of children and adults labelled as a burden on the State and unworthy of life. On one level, this is a story of good versus evil, where innocent patients are manipulated by callous doctors and nurses. At a deeper level, however, it is possible to read the characters as more complex and (...) such a reading gives an insight into the paradox of how a genocidal policy was able to be systematically implemented by health care professionals who had previously taken an oath to provide care to all people. Carl Jung argued that powerful stories, told across generations, contain mythical archetypes that help drive the plot and convey beliefs about humanity. The aims of this paper are to explore Jungian ideas within Fog in August that help the historical story it is based on resonate with viewers today, and demonstrate how the application of these insights can help health care professionals more fully understand morally distressing events and, as a result, support and improve the safety of patients. (shrink)

This paper seeks to understand machine cognition. The nature of machine cognition has been shrouded in incomprehensibility. We have often encountered familiar arguments in cognitive science that human cognition is still faintly understood. This paper will argue that machine cognition is far less understood than even human cognition despite the fact that a lot about computer architecture and computational operations is known. Even if there have been putative claims about the transparency of the notion of machine computations, these claims do (...) not hold out in unraveling machine cognition, let alone machine consciousness (if there is any such thing). The nature and form of machine cognition remains further confused also because of attempts to explain human cognition in terms of computation and to model/simulate (aspects of) human cognitive processing in machines. Given that these problems in characterizing machine cognition persist, a view of machine cognition that aims to avoid these problems is outlined. The argument that is advanced is that something becomes a computation in machines only when a human interprets it, which is a kind of semiotic causation. From this it follows that a computing machine is not engaged in a computation unless a human interprets what it is doing; instead, it is engaged in machine cognition, which is defined as a member or subset of the set of all possible mappings of inputs to outputs. The human interpretation, which is a semiotic process, gives meaning to what a machine does, and then what it does becomes a computation. (shrink)

Since the late 1970s, the field of evolutionary biology has undergone empirical and theoretical developments that have threaten the pillars of evolutionary theory. Some evolutionary biologists have recently argued that evolutionary biology is not experiencing a paradigm shift, but an expansion of the modern synthesis. Philosophers of biology focusing on scientific practices seem to agree with this pluralistic interpretation and have argued that evolutionary theory should rather be seen as an organized network of multiple problem agendas with diverse disciplinary contributors. (...) In this paper, I apply a computational analysis to study the dynamics and conceptual structure of one of the main emerging problem agendas in evolutionary biology: evolvability. I have used CiteSpace, an application for visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature that applies cocitation analysis to identify scientific specialities. I analyze the main clusters of the evolvability cocitation network with the aim to identify the main research lines and the interdisciplinary relationships that structure this research front. I then compare these results with the existing classifications of evolvability concepts, and identify four main conceptual tensions within the definitions of evolvability. Finally, I argue that there is a lot of usefulness in the inconsistency in which the term evolvability is used in biological research. I claim that evolvability research has set up “trading zones” in biology that make possible interdisciplinary exchanges. (shrink)

In Polish historiography on radio in the Stalinist period, the official propaganda broadcast by Polish Radio is very often juxtaposed with the free and unbiased broadcasting of Radio Free Europe (RFE), which can create the impression that RFE was the only source of information in Poland and tends to diminish the importance of Polish Radio. In fact, both broadcasting institutions were crucial players in Cold War warfare, which was described by George F. Kennan in terms of Clausewitz's “fog of war.” (...) Indeed, both RFE and Polish Radio were listening to each other through the Iron Curtain because “white propaganda” (along with the intelligence obtained from political refugees) was one of the most important sources of information. The two broadcasting stations were more alike than we are willing to admit. For instance, the Polish section of RFE mimicked the post-war strategy of Polish Radio. While the latter pretended to be the continuation and successor of the pre-war institution, RFE's propaganda shaped the programme of Polish Radio for many years. Using this case study on RFE's attitude toward Poland's western borders along the Odra and Nysa Rivers, I show how these two opposing broadcasting stations functioned within an endless propaganda feedback loop. (shrink)

This volume presents the proceedings of the workshop CSL '91 (Computer Science Logic) held at the University of Berne, Switzerland, October 7-11, 1991. This was the fifth in a series of annual workshops on computer sciencelogic (the first four are recorded in LNCS volumes 329, 385, 440, and 533). The volume contains 33 invited and selected papers on a variety of logical topics in computer science, including abstract datatypes, bounded theories, complexity results, cut elimination, denotational semantics, infinitary queries, Kleene algebra (...) with recursion, minimal proofs, normal forms in infinite-valued logic, ordinal processes, persistent Petri nets, plausibility logic, program synthesis systems, quantifier hierarchies, semantics of modularization, stable logic, term rewriting systems, termination of logic programs, transitive closure logic, variants of resolution, and many others. (shrink)

Combining physics, mathematics and computer science, quantum computing and its sister discipline of quantum information have developed in the past few decades from visionary ideas to two of the most fascinating areas of quantum theory. General interest and excitement in quantum computing was initially triggered by Peter Shor (1994) who showed how a quantum algorithm could exponentially “speed-up” classical computation and factor large numbers into primes far more efficiently than any (known) classical algorithm. Shor’s algorithm was soon followed (...) by several other algorithms that aimed to solve combinatorial and algebraic problems, and in the years since theoretical study of quantum systems serving as computational devices has achieved tremendous progress. Common belief has it that the implementation of Shor’s algorithm on a large scale quantum computer would have devastating consequences for current cryptography protocols which rely on the premise that all known classical worst-case algorithms for factoring take time exponential in the length of their input (see, e.g., Preskill 2005). Consequently, experimentalists around the world are engaged in attempts to tackle the technological difficulties that prevent the realisation of a large scale quantum computer. But regardless whether these technological problems can be overcome (Unruh 1995; Ekert and Jozsa 1996; Haroche and Raimond 1996), it is noteworthy that no proof exists yet for the general superiority of quantum computers over their classical counterparts. -/- The philosophical interest in quantum computing is manifold. From a social-historical perspective, quantum computing is a domain where experimentalists find themselves ahead of their fellow theorists. Indeed, quantum mysteries such as entanglement and nonlocality were historically considered a philosophical quibble, until physicists discovered that these mysteries might be harnessed to devise new efficient algorithms. But while the technology for harnessing the power of 50–100 qubits (the basic unit of information in the quantum computer) is now within reach (Preskill 2018), only a handful of quantum algorithms exist, and the question of whether these can truly outperform any conceivable classical alternative is still open. From a more philosophical perspective, advances in quantum computing may yield foundational benefits. For example, it may turn out that the technological capabilities that allow us to isolate quantum systems by shielding them from the effects of decoherence for a period of time long enough to manipulate them will also allow us to make progress in some fundamental problems in the foundations of quantum theory itself. Indeed, the development and the implementation of efficient quantum algorithms may help us understand better the border between classical and quantum physics (Cuffaro 2017, 2018a; cf. Pitowsky 1994, 100), and perhaps even illuminate fundamental concepts such as measurement and causality. Finally, the idea that abstract mathematical concepts such as computability and complexity may not only be translated into physics, but also re-written by physics bears directly on the autonomous character of computer science and the status of its theoretical entities—the so-called “computational kinds”. As such it is also relevant to the long-standing philosophical debate on the relationship between mathematics and the physical world. (shrink)

First-ever comprehensive introduction to the major new subject of quantum computing and quantum information.