As the Philippines continues to grapple with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, new modalities of instruction are being devised by the administration of Rodrigo Duterte, through the Department of Education (DepEd). Among these are what the DepEd provided as self-learning modules (SLMs) combined with “alternative learning delivery modalities” which include radio-based instruction (DepEd 2020). The SLMs and radiobased instruction are the most common modalities of learning, being the most accessible especially for the poor students of the country. This paper (...) will examine the pedagogical and political dimensions of a radio-based instruction. Coming from the tradition of philosophy of technology that emphasizes the political nature of technology, I will argue how the logic of radio broadcasting predetermines a specific pedagogy and form of communication. I will further argue how this predetermined form of communication carries the danger of being an effective support for authoritarianism. (shrink)

This paper argues that historical research is an important tool for modeling problem-solving in scientific invention and discovery. Two important cases in the history of modern physics—the invention of the transistor by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain and the development of the theory of superconductivity by Bardeen, Leon Cooper, and J. Robert Schrieffer—reveal factors essential to include in such a model. The focus is on problem-solving practices: problem decomposition, analogy, bridging principles, team-work, empirical tinkering, and library research. A complete (...) framework must encompass the full range of factors, including contingent individual traits and environmental circumstances. (shrink)

Digital computers carry out algorithms coded in high level programs. These abstract entities determine what happens at the physical level: they control whether electrons flow through specific transistors at specific times or not, entailing downward causation in both the logical and implementation hierarchies. This paper explores how this is possible in the light of the alleged causal completeness of physics at the bottom level, and highlights the mechanism that enables strong emergence (the manifest causal effectiveness of application programs) to occur. (...) Although synchronic emergence of higher levels from lower levels is manifestly true, diachronic emergence is generically not the case; indeed we give specific examples where it cannot occur because of the causal effectiveness of higher level variables. (shrink)

Solid state physics, the study of the physical properties of solid matter, was the most populous subfield of Cold War American physics. Despite prolific contributions to consumer and medical technology, such as the transistor and magnetic resonance imaging, it garnered less professional prestige and public attention than nuclear and particle physics. Solid State Insurrection argues that solid state physics was essential to securing the vast social, political, and financial capital Cold War physics enjoyed in the twentieth century. Solid state’s (...) technological bent, and its challenge to the “pure science” ideal many physicists cherished, helped physics as a whole respond more readily to Cold War social, political, and economic pressures. Its research kept physics economically and technologically relevant, sustaining its cultural standing and policy influence long after the sheen of the Manhattan Project had faded. (shrink)

Crucial to most research in physics, as well as leading to the development of inventions such as the transistor and the laser, quantum mechanics approaches its centenary with an impressive record. However, the field has also long been the subject of ongoing debates about the foundations and interpretation of the theory, referred to as the quantum controversy. This Oxford Handbook offers a historical overview of the contrasts which have been at the heart of quantum physics for the last 100 (...) years. Drawing on the wide-ranging expertise of several contributors working across physics, history, and philosophy, the handbook outlines the main theories and interpretations of quantum physics. It goes on to tackle the key controversies surrounding the field, touching on issues such as determinism, realism, locality, classicality, information, measurements, mathematical foundations, and the links between quantum theory and gravity. This engaging introduction is an essential guide for all those interested in the history of scientific controversies and history of quantum physics. It also provides a fascinating examination of the potential of quantum physics to influence new discoveries and advances in fields such quantum information and computing. (shrink)

Electronic machinic phenomena yield fascinating links with biological processes. Either in the macro-micro-structure of binary encoded information ‐ bytes on media ‐ to the processual flow programs execute on hardware while operating it. Observing micro-electronic worlds akin to living entities: electronic voltages running throughout electronic architectures pipelining data to memory registers; operating systems executing programs on electronic substrates; data flows taking place in machines and in communications protocols within networks. Static art-sci constructs explore and visualize these observations as 2D drawings (...) (Neon Paleolitikos Drawings, 2017‐present) or 3D sculptures (Binary and Biological Sculpture Series, 2018‐present), creatively exposing their inherent rhythmic organization of information, while dynamic installations (Phoenix.Wolfanddotcom.info, Wolfanddotcom, Half-Plant, 2017, Ant Ennae Labyrinths, 2019‐present) propose immersive interference mechanisms that attempt user entanglement in non-human environments. Seven aesthetic case examples are introduced and explored, observing and seeking resonances between micro-granular electronic, biological and hybrid data as source synthesis. This research proposes a look at bio-electronic aggregates on Neon Paleolitikos strata. After the Anthropocene, Neon Paleolitikos is an imaginary epoch dating since the decline of mankind until the zenith of bio-electronic life forms: operational symbioses combined among ruins of silica, transistors, algorithms, cells, plants, animals and electricity. (shrink)

This paper presents the algebraic and Kripke modelsoundness and completeness ofa logic over Boolean monoids. An additional axiom added to thelogic will cause the resulting monoid models to be representable as monoidsof relations. A star operator, interpreted as reflexive, transitiveclosure, is conservatively added to the logic. The star operator isa relative modal operator, i.e., one that is defined in terms ofanother modal operator. A further example, relative possibility,of this type of operator is given. A separate axiom,antilogism, added to the logic (...) causes the Kripke models to support acollection of abstract topological uniformities which become concretewhen the Kripke models are dual to monoids of relations. The machineryfor the star operator is shownto be a recasting of Scott-Montague neighborhood models. An interpretationof the Kripke frames and properties thereof is presented in terms ofcertain CMOS transister networks and some circuit transformation equivalences.The worlds of the Kripke frame are wires and the Kripke relation is a specializedCMOS pass transistor network. (shrink)

At the start of the twentieth century, the first quantum revolution upset our vision of the world. New physics offered surprising realities, such as wave-particle duality, and led to major inventions: the transistor, the laser, and computer's integrated circuits. Less known is the second quantum revolution, arguably initiated in 1935 during a debate between giants Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. This revolution is still unfolding. Its revolutionaries--including the author of this short accessible book, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Alain Aspect--explore the (...) notion of entangled particles, able to interact at seemingly impossible distances. Aspect has investigated entangled particles since the beginning of the 1980s and has helped to show how entanglement may both upend existing technologies, like cryptography, and usher in entirely new ones, like quantum computing. Explaining this physics of the future, this work tells a story of how philosophical debates can shape new realities. (shrink)

The breakthroughs that have had the most transformative practical impacts, from thermodynamics to the Internet. Physics informs our understanding of how the world works - but more than that, key breakthroughs in physics have transformed everyday life. We journey back to ten separate days in history to understand how particular breakthroughs were achieved, meet the individuals responsible and see how each breakthrough has influenced our lives. It is a unique selection. Focusing on practical impact means there is no room for (...) Stephen Hawking's work on black holes, or the discovery of the Higgs boson. Instead we have the relatively little-known Rudolf Clausius (thermodynamics) and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (superconductivity), while Albert Einstein is included not for his theories of relativity but for the short paper that gave us E=mc2 (nuclear fission). Later chapters feature transistors, LEDs and the Internet. Finally we ask: what could the eleventh day be? - i.e. the greatest development yet to come. (shrink)

Using an original approach, Mauro Dardo recounts the major achievements of twentieth-century physics--including relativity, quantum mechanics, atomic and nuclear physics, the invention of the transistor and the laser, superconductivity, binary pulsars, and the Bose-Einstein condensate--as each emerged. His year-by-year chronicle, biographies and revealing personal anecdotes help bring to life the main events since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901. The work of the most famous physicists of the twentieth century--including the Curies, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, Fermi, Feynman, Gell-Mann, (...) Rutherford, and Schrödinger--is presented, often in the words and imagery of the prize-winners themselves. Mauro Dardo is Professor of Experimental Physics at Amedeo Avogadro University. He has served as Dean of the new Faculty of Sciences at the University of Turin in Alessandria, Piedmont, and has also served as Director of the university's new department of Sciences and Advanced Technologies. (shrink)

With the rapid development of emerging technologies such as electric vehicles and high-speed railways, the insulated gate bipolar transistor is becoming increasingly important as the core of the power electronic devices. Therefore, it is imperative to maintain the stability and reliability of IGBT under different circumstances. By predicting the junction temperature of IGBT, the operating condition and aging degree can be roughly evaluated. However, the current predicting approaches such as optical, physical, and electrical methods have various shortcomings. Hence, the (...) backpropagation neural network can be applied to avoid the difficulties encountered by conventional approaches. In this article, an advanced prediction model is proposed to obtain accurate IGBT junction temperature. This method can be divided into three phases, BP neural network estimation, interpolation, and Kalman filter prediction. First, the validities of the BP neural network and Kalman filter are verified, respectively. Then, the performances of them are compared, and the superiority of the Kalman filter is proved. In the future, the application of neural networks or deep learning in power electronics will create more possibilities. (shrink)

Poreskoro, with three cat and four dog heads and a snake with a forked tongue as his tail, is responsible for epidemics of contagious diseases in Romany folklore. The Pishachas of Vedic mythology lurk in charnel houses and graveyards, waiting for humans to infect with madness. In Christian demonology, Pythius is known as the ruler of the eighth circle of the Inferno, bestowing heinous and unspeakable tortures on those who have committed fraud. Demons are the stuff of legends, and they (...) are everywhere in mythology and theology. These are just three of the more than thirty I counted that start with the letter P.How lucky we are for the advent of science. A rational tonic, it scatters our demons, demystifying the world for us—or so, at least, we think. As Canales brilliantly shows in this book, our assumption has been far off the mark. In physics, computer science, genetics, neuroscience, and economics, not to mention in the very foundations of rationality itself, an underworld of imaginary creatures has sustained and continues to inhabit modern science. Scientific demons appear in many guises: as atomic and subatomic particle manipulators, as feedback and parallel-processing experts, as messengers who can travel faster than the speed of light, as computer-code spies, gene and bit selectors in evolution and in informatics, as triggers of cascades from the nano level to the level of full-blown ecological and astrophysical theaters. By inventing them, we have learned that causality does not always hold at the level of atoms, that the speed of message transmission is limited, that living systems spend energy, that perpetual-motion machines are impossible, and that there are corners of the universe we have not imagined.We have all heard of Laplace's Demon, and Maxwell's, but who knew that, borrowing from physics, the historian Henry Adams considered the action of demons in geopolitics or that the economist Paul Samuelson analyzed their role in producing more efficient markets? Who knew that the generation that gave us the Internet and artificial intelligence were tasked by their teachers in graduate school to insert as many demons as possible into their programs? Who among us has heard of Darwin's Demon, or Maxwell-Szilárd-Brillouin's, or Monod's, or Loschmidt's? Who is aware of Norbert Weiner's use of demons in conceptualizing cybernetics, or of the great scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem's comparison between Israel's superfast computers and the Golem?As Canales shows convincingly, it has been difficult for both historians and scientists to countenance demons in science, and so they have been written out, in many ways and many instances, of the histories of which they are part and parcel. Thomas Kuhn and even the more radical philosopher Paul Feyerabend both failed to acknowledge in their social critiques of science the extent to which an imaginary underworld of beings has been constitutive of the modern scientific imagination. Ironically, it was the man who provided a hard-and-fast criterion by which to distinguish scientific and nonscientific pursuits, Karl Popper, who ultimately saw the light. Revisiting his classic book The Logic of Scientific Discovery from 1934, he clarified in Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1982 the extent to which every historical era has been characterized by a particular demon. We moderns believe that science is about facts and numbers, but we are mistaken. As Canales beautifully summarizes the stakes of her project, “What first sets science on its path of discovery—then as now—is the continued use of the imagination.”Tracking the fate of demons in modern thought from Descartes to Lord Kelvin to H. G. Wells to David Bohm, and from Conrad Hal Waddington to Henry Compton to Stephen Hawking and Steven Pinker, Bedeviled assumes that the demons of the church or of paganism and the demons of science differ and resemble each other in ways that can be usefully elaborated. What is more crucial, however, is how such demons become real, how they morph from fears to hopes, and from thought experiments into real experiments, and ultimately to things in this world like computer programs, transistors, and nanorobots. From weather systems to messenger RNAs to black holes, demons emerge everywhere. The hard question is: How does the imagination actually drive discovery and understanding? How does it change our world?Perhaps it has been a sidetrack to consider whether we have or have never been modern. Clearly, what reason will not allow, it perennially recruits for a shadowland that helps us to better see our world. Rather than aiming to exorcise science, one day, of all of its methodological and epistemological ghosts, perhaps we might make peace with the notion that every culture struggles with distinguishing truth from falsehood in its own unique way. Such struggles are sensitive to their times and are accomplished through leaps of imagination. But fear not: the debunking of “Western rationality” casts no wet blanket on the project of Enlightenment. If anything, as Canales writes, “an account of science that considers how scientists themselves do science only risks adding new insights into our repertoire of knowledge.” Perhaps, therefore, there is solace to be gained from the dictum, Always choose the Devil you know. Ultimately, there may be no other way forward. (shrink)

The basic computer components are universal. Whatever can be built from transistors can also be built from vacuum tubes, relays, fluidic elements, McCulloch-Pitts neurons, connectionist neurons, or from any of the other kinds of neuron Marvin Minsky proved universal in his 1954 Princeton PhD dissertation.

The very rapid developments in the field of computers in the last few years have made it possible to solve, with their aid, problems utterly new in character. The first "generation" of electronic computers, in the 1950's, was one of capricious and cumbersome vacuum-tube devices, but even it brought a fundamental change in our notions of the kind of tasks machines were capable of solving. The second "generation" - transistorized computers - is a substantial improvement. More compact and dependable, these (...) machines have come into wide use in the control of various processes. Today the third "generation" is in birth, consisting of microminiaturized computers employing solid-state circuits. Such computers are no larger than a small suitcase and it is supposed, not without reason, that in the future they will become pocket-size. It is clear that these possibilities create an utterly new situation. Whereas formerly there was still some validity in posing the question of a clear-cut division of functions between man and a large stationary computer that carried out certain calculations on his instructions, today the question of man-computer interaction takes the center of the stage. (shrink)

For a long time, the natural sciences owed their success to the strategy of reducing phenomena to a few effective causes. Today, an additional approach is emerging: thinking in terms of complex systems.It explains a kind of illusory world that is beginning to establish itself between reality and humans, e.g., passionate gamers: the world of simulation. The most explosive example is so-called artificial intelligence. It claims to be able to emulate human characteristics. This bold claim confronts us with old and (...) new questions: Can machines really learn? Are they even intelligent? Can a robot be more than wires, transistors and programs? And last but not least: Who are we – the humans? (shrink)

Simondon is scarcely known to English-language philosophers, though with these translations that may begin to change. They have been a long time coming. Simondon writes a complicated academic prose in French and calls on an unusually wide range of expertise, but reading his books is worth the effort. Individuation in the Light of Notions of Form and Information (1964) is a dense and at times technical contribution to the philosophy of biology, though there is little in metaphysics that is not (...) implicated in his argument. Science and philosophy are enjoined to pursue knowledge of individuation, a genetic process, rather than starting with individuals of any sort. Individuation, the process, is primitive, and individuals a relative reality.On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) is the best work ever in the philosophy of technology. Contributions by Heidegger and others pale in comparison. Simondon analyzes a wide variety of technical objects with a mastery of engineering science. Heidegger would not know a diode from a triode. He thought meditation on ancient Greek words would take philosophy closer to “the essence of Teknik” than anything learned from science and engineering. Simondon shows why this view is mistaken. In this one, very technical difference (diode and triode), which is replicated ubiquitously in modern technology, he discerns what makes something technical rather than natural or accidental. He applies his thesis about the priority of individuation. Technical objects are phases of a technical individuation that he calls concretization, by which their operation becomes more internally resonant, as for example in the step from diode to triode (to pentode, to transistor and integrated circuit). There is much, much more of value in this book; for instance, his argument is implicitly anti-Marxist. Workers’ alienation is not attributable to economy. Industrial technology alienates workers because machines do what used to be the most satisfying, skillful (and expensive) part of industrial production, leaving workers with only regulative and custodial functions—which is alienating to people born, as we all are, to the technical life. (shrink)

The agenda informing this compact book has the transparency of crystal. Against the widely repeated claim that the so‐called Information Age began with the invention of the transistor in 1947, a claim trumpeted both by the knowledgeable and the ignorant , Daniel Headrick seeks a more distant source for the information‐saturated environment in which we now live. He sensibly points out that human demand for information is as old as humanity itself, and consequently we should not look to name (...) any single moment as the “dawn” of the Information Age. Instead we should be attentive to historical periods during which the availability of information accelerates sharply. Often such moments are associated with particular technical innovations, such as the appearance of double‐entry bookkeeping, printing, the telegraph, and, yes, the computer. But Headrick wants to direct attention away from particular machines and technologies as accelerators of information and toward the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a period during which a host of novel information systems were introduced.On this basis the book discusses a series of developments in information systems under five headings. The first, “Organizing Information,” describes how Linnaeus and Lavoisier and Guyton de Morveau created new languages to process and communicate scientific information. The creation of the metric system finds a niche in this chapter as well. Headrick's second heading, “Transforming Information,” discusses the attempt by governments to collect statistics about populations, culminating in the specification of a decennial census in the American Constitution and the repeated attempts by French revolutionary regimes to conduct a census during the 1790s. The third heading, “Displaying Information,” turns to innovations in mapmaking during the eighteenth century and the invention of graphical representation. Under the fourth heading, “Storing Information,” Headrick describes eighteenth‐century encyclopedias and dictionaries, an overview that thankfully ranges considerably more widely than Diderot's Encyclopédie. Finally, the heading “Communicating Information” discusses the development of postal systems in various European countries and North America, as well as the invention of telegraphy. Of particular interest here is the extensive network of visual telegraphs established in France during the 1790s and then elsewhere in Europe.This breadth of coverage is impressive and suggests the comprehensiveness and significance of Headrick's story, but it also betrays certain weaknesses. First, the treatment of topics is highly uneven. The discussion of encyclopedias and dictionaries, for example, is deep and well informed by the primary sources. The treatment of Linnaeus's taxonomy, Lavoisier's chemical nomenclature, and the metric system is far more superficial, as is the analysis of postal systems. Second, this same breadth causes one to wonder just what the phenomenon is that Headrick means to describe. Such concerns are certainly not diminished by the wholly unsatisfactory definition provided for the book's central concept, information. As the book defines it, information is “the patterns of energy and matter that humans understand” . That somewhat underdetermines the object, I should say.Disappointing too was the book's failure to engage very deeply with an explanation of why these changes occurred. Leaving aside the question of whether all of the changes described really constitute changes in information systems , and also the question of whether all of these eighteenth‐century novelties could not be traced farther back in time, as several surely could, we can still ask what brought such developments together. A book of such synthetic reach ought to be ideal for such ruminations. As one might expect, Headrick does attribute the rising demand for information to the attempt by enlightened absolutist governments and later revolutionary regimes to develop policies to stimulate economic growth, along with the needs of actors in an increasingly complex and robust economic system. But all too often the book simply asserts that because this was the Age of Reason, the innovations occurred because they were inherently more rational. Linnaeus's nomenclature appealed to the “orderly minds of mid‐eighteenth‐century rationalists” , while the physician William Farr's statistical compilation of disease data for the English General Register Office gave “a more scientific basis to the classification of diseases” , and so on. (shrink)