Technical World Research Articles

The cloud goes mainstream [Editor's Note

Coud computing is a hot topic in the technical world these days, but if you asked people on the street about cloud computing, they would probably think you were talking about the weather. Surveys have found that most people are completely unaware of what cloud computing means or whether they are using it. At best someone might be aware of cloud computing as web services or, as Steve Jobs described it at WWDC 2011, as a "hard disk in the sky."

Die künstliche Intelligenz des Sinns1 Sinngeschichte und Technologie im Anschluss an Jean-Luc Nancy

The paper presents Jean-Luc Nancy's outline of a history of sense and especially his thinking of exteriorization as an expression and working-through of the technological condition which characterizes the cybernetic culture of machines and objects. Furthermore, the paper suggests to ground the enthusiasm for the open and external (which is dominant in philosophical politics since 1950 and culminates in Nancy's work) in the supplementary, prothetic and transcategorical logic of the technical world.

LIFE WORLD AND GLOBAL CIVILIZATION

The article is designed to demonstrate that the Western modern life world is constituted by the reconstruction of the natural environment in accordance with formal logical rules that are not derivable from contingent facts. Logical rules are selected as techniques in terms of their value to fulfill “needs” and hence to shape the environment into a “technical life world” that becomes globalized as “scientific” demanding that the life worlds of the others develop to become modern and technical. This means that the globalized technical life world is not a set of facts but signitive systems of logical, non‐temporal and non‐spacial vectors of “communication” taking precedence over the material‐productive levels of any society.

Religion, Faith and Toleration

AbstractThe religious intolerance that nowadays feeds a number of current conflicts leads us to rethink our modern conception of toleration, which emerged from the theological and philosophical debates accompanying or thrown up by the doctrinal controversies and politico-religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. It is defined by respect for distinct orders: that of conscience and that of the law, private and public, faith and reason. It bears the mark of religion and theology and relates to the idea of human dignity which was given its ethical foundation in the 18th century by Kant's doctrine of autonomy. Current events teach us that still today people kill and persecute in the name of faith, in the name of God, in the name of religion, because they have a different opinion or belief. If toleration, child of the Enlightenment and critical reason, has not definitively gained the upper hand in a rational, technical world, we need to ask whether it is not because we have neglected faith. To conclude from the distinction between reason and faith that they are antagonistic has not led to uprooting the human spirit's intolerance. Might we have forgotten that peace is also the business of religion? What should we expect, what should we hope for from dialogue between religions? Could faith be the antidote to intolerance?

Best Practices for Standards Communities

The technical standards world is in danger of being broken, hijacked, and exploited by partisan legal and political maneuvering. Today we confront a pivotal moment in the world of technology standards, one that also involves the global economy and ecology. The need to rebuild our financial infrastructure and implement ways to preserve and conserve the environment has given many in the technical community a moment of clarity with regard to the role standards must play in these times. There is a growing realization that while the technical standards world has functioned well enough for decades, the system is in danger of being broken, hijacked, and exploited by partisan legal and political maneuvering. Many of us now recognize an opportunity to restore trust and implement consistent and pervasive safeguards in the standards community.

From a physics discharge program to device control—Linking the scientific and technical world at Wendelstein 7-X

Wendelstein 7-X is designed to be a steady state experiment. One discharge may last up to 30 min and will be divided into many segments (elementary experimental program parts). Physics programs need to be pre-planned and technical parameters need to be adjusted in the long run. The technical parameters are a complete set of parameters for all participating components, which describe their behavior within a segment. To enable the diagnosticians to focus on physical experiment parameters only, an abstraction layer above the technical parameters has been developed, the so-called high level parameters. The high level parameters specify a subset of the technical parameters on a physics level and are therefore used to hide technical details. During ordinary program planning, the diagnosticians only see and work with these physics parameters. Having finished editing, the high level parameters will be mapped by a user-defined transformation function onto technical parameters. For all technical parameters which are not defined by the high level parameters, the default values will be taken from one particular predefined pattern. Hence a complete segment is defined by a set of high level parameters including a pattern. In comparison to shot-based and other existing experiments, this is an entirely new, scientifically oriented approach to plan experiments. The motivation and concept of the high level parameters will be discussed. The successful implementation of this concept at the W7-X CoDaC prototype – the small stellarator experiment WEGA – will be presented.

From the Dugout to the Classroom: Why Good Baseball Coaches Have Much to Offer Good Professors

Professors are many things. We are scholars who publish. We engage in service our campuses and in our communities. But we are teachers first and foremost. We prepare young people to be successful in the classroom as well as in society. Despite what many see as an inherent tension campus between faculty members and athletic coaches, those of us who teach students in the classroom have much to learn from those who coach student-athletes the field. Yes, many athletic coaches receive more fame and fortune than most professors. And baseball coaches are certainly better known for their great pregame speeches, intimate knowledge of double-switch substitutions, and keen offensive strategies than professors are for their best lectures and finest articles. But the best coaches are also primarily teachers, and professors have much to learn from them. In many ways, baseball coaches--and perhaps most coaches--are much the same as the professor who teaches English, math, or history, for the best coaches use the teaching principles and skills used by the best classroom teachers. THE TEACHING PHILOSOPHY OF GOOD BASEBALL COACHES Let me explain. Armed with a solid knowledge of our respective disciplines, professors have information to share with our students. If we are interested in improving how we teach and educate our students, then we would be wise to borrow from the coaches' playbook how better to impart this disciplinary information to our students. For example, baseball coaches seek to understand how the body operates and how the mechanics of the sport should be executed. Thus, a coach can teach players what to do, how to do it, and most importantly why it should be done in that manner. All coaches teach what to do: on this play, you go over there and field the ball. Some coaches teach how to do it: your feet fairly close together and reverse pivot, but the best coaches teach why: you keep your feet closer together, it will enable you to stay balanced, rotate the body faster, and move into the throwing motion even before you get completely turned around! Teaching players why is the coach's opportunity to sell the technique to the player, and salesmanship is just as important in coaching as it is in life insurance, real estate, or refrigerators. Salesmanship gives the coach a chance to convince the players that this particular technique will make it easier to do the job successfully. Unlike the stereotype of the coach who berates players, the best coaches do not discourage players from asking why something is being taught a certain way, because the why leads to an opportunity to sell the players a particular method of execution. While selling a player a particular skill or technique is much less problematic for a coach than for a professor who sells a student a particular theory, ideology, or philosophy, there does exist a remarkable parallel between the two. Think about it: all professors teach what our subject matter is about. We give students factual material concerning dates and important events and people for them to remember. But if all we teach is the what, our students may become well-instructed, but few will be well-educated. Many professors teach how these facts and dates and people came to be important, but they know all too well that facts and skills learned from textbooks can change quickly as more facts and better skills are learned. The best professors teach why these facts and skills came to be seen as important and why asking questions and challenging our own conclusions about the data is vital to being educated. Education involves inquiring, close reading, interpreting, recognizing parallels, and understanding causes and consequences. An increasingly technical world needs people who come from backgrounds that enable them to remain critical and allow them to adjust to changing conditions and information. Good coaches have already figured this out! …

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (review)

Reviewed by: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism Susan B. Barnes (bio) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. By Fred Turner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. x+327. $29. “Relationships” are a central idea in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, especially the relationships that Stewart Brand built and developed through the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL online community, and the Global Business Network. Brand was an obscure photographer who established the Whole Earth Catalog, which made him a spokesperson for the American counterculture. Then in the 1980s he started the electronic community called the WELL and wrote a book on the MIT Media Lab, which made him an oft-quoted source for the potential of computing technology. Unlike technology-and-society books that focus on the social implications of a specific technology, this book by Fred Turner is about human connections [End Page 824] and how ideas spread through a society. The forums, books, and articles that were circulated by the Whole Earth organization enabled representatives from the technological world to mix with world leaders in politics and business. Additionally, the linking and arranging of the Whole Earth Catalog reflected Brand’s interpersonal relationships. After the demise of the catalog, “Brand continued to bring together representatives of the technical world and former New Communalists, and to link computers to Whole Earth accounts of tool use” (p. 247). Turner uses the term New Communalists to describe people who saw a transformation in consciousness as the basis for the reformation of American social structure. Ideas from communes in the 1960s, mixed with concepts in Wired magazine, brought New Communalists from “back to the land” to the technology frontier of the 1990s. Turner traces how this happened and Brand’s role in events both actual and ideological. A key ideological concept behind his book is that computers are personal tools of liberation. Like the tools advertised in the Whole Earth Catalog, computers can help people to imagine their own futures. Like the viral videos of YouTube, ideas such as cybernetics can influence an entire group. In today’s networking, relationship-oriented culture it is important to know how ideas circulate and come together to form worldviews. Unlikely friendships can be built around common ideals and goals. It is interesting to read how a Merry Prankster from the 1960s can become a media guru of the 1990s. Along the way, Brand influenced writers, businessmen, and politicians. The journey is complex and the book is entertaining. An important part of the story is the WELL and how it brought together a wide range of writers who have contributed to works about the electronic frontier. Turner writes that “its contributors included a substantial number of professionals from other industries that had long depended on networks, including academe, journalism, and consulting. For these users, the WELL offered an electronic forum in which they could meet, exchange information, build reputations, and collaborate” (p. 151). Social capital has become an important topic since we passed the 2000 mark and this book illustrates social capital at work. Human relationships and technology come together through ideological concepts. Simply stated, Brand helped people to collaborate and build social capital with each other on business projects and media ventures. There are chapters on the politics of the computational metaphor, cybernetic counterculture, the Whole Earth Catalog, taking the Whole Earth digital, the WELL, networking the new economy, and Wired—this last chapter is particularly interesting because it describes the relationships and connections between unlikely personalities. What joins everyone together is technology and the ways in which computers are altering cultural worldviews. Throughout the book, Turner addresses events in the history of personal computing in order to establish a historical framework. [End Page 825] From Counterculture to Cyberculture clearly demonstrates how interpersonal networks can combine with technology to change culture. The tools promoted in the Whole Earth Catalog can be compared to the computer tools we all use everyday. This tale of the cultural changes and personalities involved with the evolution of computer culture is well worth reading. Susan B. Barnes Dr. Barnes is...

Promoting Sustainable Development in Arabia through Initiating an Arab Architecture Accrediting Board

Across the Arab world, there is no single architectural accreditation body overseeing architectural education in the region. This paper makes the case for establishing an Arab Architecture Accreditation Board and discusses the role it will play in developing architectural education and in particular moving towards sustainable development. First, it describes architectural education and what it entails, how architecture pedagogy takes on different criteria ensuring that academia responds to technical advancement, society requirements and future world strategies. Then it moves to describing architecture accreditation bodies in the UK, USA, Australia and the Commonwealth countries in terms of their history, validation criteria and specific differences between them. Finally, it will detail a short sequential review of some schools of architecture in Arabia in terms of their pedagogical criteria, the syllabi specifications for obtaining a Bachelor of Architecture degree and their validation criteria. Given that the achievement of sustainable development requires developing better building design through improving the educational system, the future of architecture professions in Arabia relies on rethinking how they educate their students and accredit their schools of architecture as part of a strategy towards achievable sustainable development.

Is 'designing' cyberinfrastructure -or even, definining it- possible?

In the technical world, ‘design’ implies having a set of specifications to which the resulting design responds. This, in turn, implies that you know what it is that you are designing — i.e. that you can describe or define it. The current state of understanding of cyberinfrastructure calls into question both of these assertions. This brief paper will suggest some important considerations.

Biomimetic materials research: what can we really learn from nature's structural materials?

Nature provides a wide range of materials with different functions and which may serve as a source of bio-inspiration for the materials scientist. The article takes the point of view that a successful translation of these ideas into the technical world requires more than the observation of nature. A thorough analysis of structure-function relations in natural tissues must precede the engineering of new bio-inspired materials. There are, indeed, many opportunities for lessons from the biological world: on growth and functional adaptation, about hierarchical structuring, on damage repair and self-healing. Biomimetic materials research is becoming a rapidly growing and enormously promising field. Serendipitous discovery from the observation of nature will be gradually replaced by a systematic approach involving the study of natural tissues in materials laboratories, the application of engineering principles to the further development of bio-inspired ideas and the generation of specific databases.

Being John Doe Malkovich: Truth, Imagination, and Story in Medicine

In the context of evidence-based science, where all truth has become knowable though rigorous experimentation and interpretation, the ambiguity and complexity of patient stories render them too often at the margins of medical practice. Stories that are not corroborated by "scientific evidence" are "false" and their tellers deemed "bad historians." In the increasingly technical world of medicine, this logic is in danger of becoming extended to almost all patient stories. Efforts in medical education to honor stories of illness must grapple with the profession's vexed expectations of veracity in patient narratives. This essay will address the issues of truth, representation, and story in medicine with the goal of complicating medicine's understanding of patient narratives. This essay will use narrative cinema—Charlie Kaufman's unusual 1999 film Being John Malkovich—as well as the disciplines of oral history and trauma studies, to expand the frame around medicine's understanding of truth in illness stories.

Reasons for teaching electronics

Electronics is increasingly becoming embedded in the fabric of our material and social lives. The electronics industry underpins almost all other business activity, including product and service development, product manufacture, and service provision. So all children, in a rounded educational experience, should have some exposure to how the technical world they live in is constructed and operated.

Science, Philosophy and Religion as Categoriesfor the Rising of the Arab Mind: Past and Present

One cannot deny or ignore the huge contributions made by the Arabs in the area ofsciende and philosophy during the golden era of the Islamic civilization. This eraattests to the capacity of the Arabs to challenge the impediments of progress, and to,overcome the difficulties that prevented them from mobilizing their creative energies in various fields. Not only enabling them to accommodate to the cultural environment left behind by the retreating (ireco-Roman civilization, but also to develop an intellectual and technical world of genuine Arab character, a world that complies With the religion, the language, and the spiritual and moral characteristics that define ‘what could be called the distinctive Arab identity. The aim of this paper is not to praise the achievements of Arabs in the various and diverse branches of science and philosophy. This has been the aim of many writers since the sunset of the Arab-Islamic civilization. Nor does this paper aim at mourning the collapse of the Arab-Islamic civilization, ‘since I am fully aware that every civilization has its specific spatio-temporal Nourishment and decline. This’ was proposed for example by Ibn Khaldun (732—808 A.H., i.e. 1332—1406), and Oswald Spengler (1880—1963). Both described civilizations as organisms that arise, grow and prosper, and then come into age and perish, even though I equally agree with Arnold Towhee’s (1889—1975) claim that a civilization does not perish by destiny, but by ‘suicide’ ¶‘ This happens when it becomes unable to meet the requirements of spiritual leadership, thus losing creativity and falls into the abyss of political conflict, or into what was called by the American senator William Fulbright (1905—1995) ‘The Arrogance ofPower’. The paper primarily aims at taking an objective look at the factors that have led to the launching of the Arab cultural project and at its flourishing in the Middle Ages, as well as at identi~ing the ‘local’ elements of originality with regard to what was produced by the Arab mind in science and philosophy, something that — has been often overseen by historians and philosophers of science of later epochs under the influence of their special historical situation. In other words. I will try to determine the exact position of the Arab-Islamic civilization in the course of the development of the human civilization in general. The results of my efforts will be used in order to answer a pivotal question, namelyif it is possible — in the light of the current ‘locality’ — to launch a contemporary Arab civilizational project, which can be comparable to the great project of our ancestors?.

Understanding Lessig: implications for European Union cyberspace policy

In his famous book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace Lawrence Lessig examined the impact of the code of cyberspace on our lives. He criticized the concepts that hold that cyberspace is by its nature free and therefore should be free from any government interference. On the contrary, he stated that ‘[l]liberty in cyberspace will not come from the absence of the state’ and argued that ‘the invisible hand of cyberspace [is] constructing an architecture that perfects control’. To underpin this statement he evolved the concept according to which the software code that constitutes cyberspace is law. On the basis of this precondition he called for the regulation of code and code makers in order to avoid the disappearance of the freedoms that we enjoy in our ‘bricks and mortar world’. He said ‘[w]e may be antigovernment, but for the most part we believe that there are collective values that ought to regulate private action. We are also committed to the idea that collective values should regulate the emerging technical world. Our problem is that we do not know how it should be regulated, or by whom.’ The present article examines how this question was reflected and answered by the European Union institutions in the last decade and analyses the adequacy of the European cyberspace policy in relation to this challenge.

Guest Editorial: What, may I ask is happening to nursing knowledge and professional practices? What is nursing thinking at this turn in human history?

Guest Editorial: What, may I ask is happening to nursing knowledge and professional practices? What is nursing thinking at this turn in human history?

Quality in tunnelling: ITA-AITES Working Group 16 Final report

Abstract Quality in tunnelling means knowledge. Knowledge is necessary to answer correctly to the requirements of the Design that has been prepared for an underground work, planned for a solution in civil, environmental or industrial fields. Knowledge is necessary to learn and “copy” better what the previous Designers have done to find new solutions for tunnel construction. Knowledge is necessary to spread all over the technical world both the reasons of failures and the keys for success. Experience, good contracts, professionality, self responsibility and simple rules are the basis to reach the objectives fixed in the Design, that is to perform the underground work following the Quality procedures. The Working Group (WG) No. 16, appointed by the International Tunnelling Association (ITA) council during the annual meeting in Oslo on 1999, defined the main topics in Milan on 2001 and closed in Amsterdam on 2003 this document, which is aimed to give a comprehensive contribution for a good behaviour in the various stages of tunnelling. This is not a handbook, because each single phase is not analyzed in extreme detail, but it allows one to go through the interacting activities of the involved parties. It is not so easy to write about generics of Quality without the knowledge of what goes wrong: this was the main difficulty that the Working Group (WG) has encountered during its effort to give good suggestions. The members of the WG hope however that the culture of spreading of knowledge will reach the people involved in tunnelling, thus contributing to one of ITA aims, that is the contribution for a common language in the practice of tunnelling. It is necessary to promote a link between Committents or Contractors on one side and the national and international organizations, working groups and the Universities on the other, in each field of activity, aimed to a continuous and updated collection of references, because only this link will provide an enormous base of lessons learned directly from case histories. The difficulties due to the uncertainties of the geological characters can determine huge consequences and each effort should be done to define the position of the tunnel, the excavation and support methods, the environmental and safety effects, the time and cost of the alternative solutions. The purpose of this document is to encourage all the involved parties to develop and maintain good organization and communications and to put each stage of a work in a common layout.

Managing people in a technical world

Managing people is a tough call but managing them in an engineering environment can be even more challenging. The author shares his views on the role of managers in engineering.

Knowledge Management in the Socio Technical World—The Graffiti Continues

Knowledge Management in the Socio Technical World—The Graffiti Continues

Speaking/Creating Reality: Religion, Feminism and Cultural Transformation

This article argues that we live in a highly technical world in which people are disappearing. Religion does not have the tools to help us resist this extinction since it has itself diminished humanity by positing a perfect Other Being, which controls our lives. The author argues that we need to reclaim a sense of ourselves as essentialising animals. We need to have a more body-based sense of humanity, which will lead to a fuller awareness and acceptance of difference and combat hierarchical and alienating thinking.