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Erin Hamson

Preliminary Discourse - 0 views

    • Erin Hamson
       
      doesn't go with the divisions of the knowledge map
    • Erin Hamson
       
      and then this other paragraph begins the division
  • If one reflects somewhat upon the connection that discoveries have with one another, it is readily apparent that the sciences and the arts are mutually supporting, and that consequently there is a chain that binds them together. But, if it is often difficult to reduce each particular science or art to a small number of rules or general notions, it is no less difficult to encompass the infinitely varied branches of human knowledge in a truly unified system
  • We can divide all our knowledge into direct and reflective knowledge. We receive direct knowledge immediately, without any operation of our will; it is the knowledge which finds all the doors of our souls open, so to speak, and enters without resistance and without effort. The mind acquires reflective knowledge by making use of direct knowledge, unifying and combining it.
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  • Let us sto
  • p here a moment and glance over the journey we have just made. We will note two limits within which almost all of the certain knowledge that is accorded to our natural intelligence is concentrated, so to speak. [34] One of those limits, our point of departure, is the idea of ourselves, which leads to that of the Omnipotent Being, and of our principal duties. The other is that part of mathematics whose object is the general properties of bodies, of extension and magnitude. Between these two boundaries is an immense gap where the Supreme Intelligence seems to have tried to tantalize the human curiosity, as much by the innumerable clouds it has spread there as by the rays of light that seem to break out at intervals to attract us. One can compare the universe to certain works of a sublime obscurity whose authors occasionally bend down within reach of their reader, seeking to persuade him that he understands nearly all. We are indeed fortunate if we do not lose the true route when we enter this labyrinth! Otherwise the flashes of light which should direct us along the way would often serve only to lead us further from it. The limited quantity of certain knowledge upon which we can rely, relegated (if one can express oneself this way) to the two extremities of space to which we refer, is far indeed from being sufficient to satisfy all our needs. The nature of man, the study of which is so necessary and so highly recommended by Socrates, is an impenetrable mystery for man himself when he is enlightened by reason alone; and the greatest geniuses, after considerable reflection upon this most important matter, too often succeed merely in knowing a little less about it than the rest of men. The same may be said of our existence, present and future, of the essence of the Being to whom we owe it, and of the kind of worship he requires of us. Thus, nothing is more necessary than a revealed Religion, which may instruct us concerning so many diverse objects. Designed to serve as a supplement to natural knowledge, it shows us part of what was hidden, but it restricts itself to the things which are absolutely necessary for us to know. The rest is closed for us and apparently will be forever. A few truths to be believed, a small number of precepts to be practiced: such are the essentials to which revealed Religion is reduced. Nevertheless, thanks to the enlightenment it has communicated to the world, the common people themselves are more solidly grounded and confident on a large number of questions of interest than the sects  [35] of the philosophers have been.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The role of religion is to fill in the gaps that man cannot discover on his own. The difference for us is that someday we will know.
  • The advantage men
  • found in enlarging the sphere of their ideas, whether by their own efforts or by the aid of their fellows, made them think that it would be useful to reduce to an art the very manner of acquiring information and of reciprocally communicating their own ideas. This art was found and named Logic. It teaches how to arrange ideas in the most natural order, how to link them together in the most direct sequence, how to break up those which include too large a number of simple ideas, how to view ideas in all their facets, and finally how to present them to others in a form that makes them easy to grasp. This is what constitutes this science of reasoning, which is rightly considered the key to all our knowledge. However, it should not be thought that it [the formal discipline of Logic] belongs among the first in the order of discovery. The art of reasoning is a gift which Nature bestows of her own accord upon men of intelligence, and it can be said that the books which treat this subject are hardly useful except to those who can get along without them. People reasoned validly long before Logic, reduced to principles, taught how to recognize false reasonings, and sometimes even how to cloak them in a subtle and deceiving form. [38]
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The last couple sentences are interesting because they talk about the human perspective timeline, how we seem to think that simply because something was recently discovered doesn't mean it didn't exist before then. Atom for examplke have always existed but we only recently have begun to discover their true nature.
  • Too much communication can sometimes benumb the mind and prejudice the efforts of which it is capable. If one observes the prodigies of some of those born blind, or deaf and mute, one will see what the faculties of the mind can perform if they are lively and called into action by difficulties which must be overcome.
  • The science of communication of ideas is not confined to putting order in ideas themselves. In addition it should teach how to express each idea in the clearest way possible, and consequently how to perfect the signs that are designed to convey it; and indeed this is what men have gradually done.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The importance of both sharing ideas, for the general benefit of man, and discovering things on our own, for our progression.
  • The general system of the sciences and the arts is a sort of labyrinth, a tortuous road which the intellect enters without quite knowing what direction to take. Impelled, first of all, by its needs and by those of the body to which it is united, the intelligence studies the first objects that present themselves to it. It delves as far as it can into the knowledge of these objects, soon meets difficulties that obstruct it, and whether through hope or even through despair of surmounting them, plunges on to a new route; now it retraces its footsteps, sometimes crosses the first barriers only to meet new ones; and passing rapidly from one object to another, it carries through a sequence of operations on each of them at different intervals, as if by jumps. The discontinuity of these operations is a necessary effect of the very generation of ideas. However philosophic this disorder may be on the part of the soul, [57] an encyclopedic tree which attempted to portray it would be disfigured, indeed utterly destroyed.
  • It is only after having considered their particular and palpable properties that we envisaged their general and common properties and created Metaphysics and Geometry by intellectual abstraction. Only after the long usage of the first signs have we perfected the art of these signs to the point of making a science of them. And it is only after a long sequence of operations on the objects of our ideas that, through reflection, we have at length given rules to these operations themselves.
  • nature of the different minds that determines which route is chosen
Madeline Rupard

Simple Living Simplified - 1 views

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    One of a few "Simplify" blogs that I have discovered recently. It seems to be a growing popular lifestyle choice. "Life is frittered away with detail. Simplify, Simplify" -Thoreau.
Madeline Rupard

The Non-Consumer Advocate - 1 views

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    One of a few "Simplify" blogs that I have discovered recently. It seems to be a growing popular lifestyle choice. "Life is frittered away with detail. Simplify, Simplify" -Thoreau.
Brad Twining

CPSC 343: A Sketch of Database History - 0 views

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    History of Databases---they are much more recent and new than you may think.
Katherine Chipman

The Crystal Palace/ The Great Exhibition of 1851 - 0 views

  • Over 13,000 exhibits were displayed and viewed by over 6,200,000 visitors to the exhibition.
  • The London Borough of Bromley, who own the park today, together with the Crystal Palace Foundation, have recently submitted an outline proposal the National Heritage Lottery Fund to restore much of the park to its former glory.
  • The Crystal Palace itself was destroyed by fire on  November 30th 1936, following which the area lost much of its focus and began to decline. But many of the most important events in the history of the Crystal Palace took place in the grounds, which retain much of their original overall layout today and are a Grade II listed historic park.
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  • The park also contained unrivaled collections of statues, many of which were copies of great works from around the world, and a geological display which included a replica lead mine and the first attempts anywhere in the world to portray life-size restorations of extinct animals, including dinosaurs.
  • This "bigger and better" building was divided into a series of courts depicting the history of art and architecture from ancient Egypt through  the Renaissance, as well as exhibits from industry and the natural world.
  • The Crystal Palace was originally designed by Sir Joseph Paxton in only 10 days and was a huge iron goliath with over a million feet of glass.
  • The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London was conceived to symbolize this industrial, military and economic superiority of Great Britain. 
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    More on the crystal palace.
Jeffrey Chen

romanticism overview - 0 views

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    For those who are not too keen on romanticism, this is the site for you!
Katherine Chipman

The Engines - The Babbage Engine | Computer History Museum - 0 views

  • Difference engines are strictly calculators. They crunch numbers the only way they know how - by repeated addition according to the method of finite differences. They cannot be used for general arithmetical calculation. The Analytical Engine is much more than a calculator and marks the progression from the mechanized arithmetic of calculation to fully-fledged general-purpose computation.
  • Physical Legacy Aside from a few partially complete mechanical assemblies and test models of small working sections, none of Babbage's designs was physically realized in its entirety in his lifetime. The major assembly he did complete was one-seventh of Difference Engine No. 1, a demonstration piece consisting of about 2,000 parts assembled in 1832. This works impeccably to this day and is the first successful automatic calculating device to embody mathematical rule in mechanism. A small experimental piece of the Analytical Engine was under construction at the time of Babbage's death in 1871. Many of the small experimental assemblies survived, as does a comprehensive archive of his drawings and notebooks. The designs for Babbage's vast mechanical computing engines rank as one of the startling intellectual achievements of the 19th century. It is only in recent decades that his work has been studied in detail and that the extent of what he accomplished becomes increasingly evident.
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    Great explanation of the difference between difference engines and analytical engines.
Brian Earley

NSG IT World: History of Computers - 0 views

    • Brian Earley
       
      Sticky note marks the spot of beginning.
Katherine Chipman

The Story of the Triangle Fire: Part 2 - 0 views

  • Even today, sweatshops have not disappeared in the United States. They keep attracting workers in desperate need of employment and illegal immigrants, who may be anxious to avoid involvement with governmental agencies. Recent studies conducted by the U.S. Department of Labor found that 67% of Los Angeles garment factories and 63% of New York garment factories violate minimum wage and overtime laws. Ninety-eight percent of Los Angeles garment factories have workplace health and safety problems serious enough to lead to severe injuries or death.
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    Yikes! Horrible working conditions are not completely gone from even our society today.
Katherine Chipman

The Story of the Triangle Fire: Part 3 - 0 views

  • Many of the Triangle factory workers were women, some as young as 15 years old. They were, for the most part, recent Italian and European Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States with their families to seek a better life. Instead, they faced lives of grinding poverty and horrifying working conditions.
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    It is so sad to see that the freedom that people come to America hoping to find sometimes instead turns out to be worse than what they may have left behind.
Madeline Rupard

Algorithmic Art- Animation for Sufjan Stevens - 2 views

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    I just found this live visual for one of my favorite musicians--Sufjan Stevens. According to the animator's website, she uses tons and tons of algorithms to make this happen. Its kind of mesmerizing and strangely enough reminds me of kidpix. Anyways.
Morgan Wills

Freud, "Civilization and its Discontents," 1930 (excerpt) - 0 views

  • If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men.
  • But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the systems based are an untenable illusion.
    • Megan Stern
       
      Freud says something worthwhile.
  • It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness
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  • horrors of the recent World War
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Something people would like to forget, but which shapes their world views. 
    • Morgan Wills
       
      definitely. Looking at much of Europe's reticence to join the US in armed conflict is a case in point.
  • s the factor which disturbs our relations with our neighbor and which forces civilization into such a high expenditure [of energy]
  • civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Tyranny to Anarchy to Tyranny
  • instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests.
  • commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself -- a commandment which is really justified by the fact that nothing else runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man
  • liverance from our evil
  • The communists believe they have found  the path to de
  • Since everyone's needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The problem is that people have more than needs. 
  • but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property
  • If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow at there.
  • We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier
  • n this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts;
  • find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois
  • s Civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man's sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in that civilization.
  • primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct.  To counterbalance this, his prospects of enjoying this happiness for any length of time were very slender.
  • Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      John Locke
  • But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods.
Jeffrey Whitlock

Theory of Relativity Tests - Einstein's Theory of General Relativity Studies - Popular ... - 0 views

    • Jeffrey Whitlock
       
      It is quite impressive how right Einstein was. 
Brandon McCloskey

BBC News - Why companies watch your every Facebook, YouTube, Twitter move - 0 views

  • These days one witty Tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video - forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse - can snowball and kill a product or damage a company's share price.
  • It's a dramatic shift in consumer power. But what if companies could harness this power and turn it to their advantage?
  • At the most basic, these tools measure the volume of social media chatter. Researchers at Hewlett Packard showed that they can accurately predict a Hollywood movie's box office takings by counting how often it is mentioned on Twitter before it opens.
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  • One European clothing company, popular with inner city youth in the United States, admits privately that its social media team is baffled by its customers' ever changing slang, and even the online Urban Dictionary provides little help.
  • Social media is quickly becoming a customer relationship management system, as companies have "for the first time access to people's minds in real-time," says Jorn Lyseggen. The tools on offer provide companies with dashboards that show trends, hot topics, the reach of brands, customer mood and how competitors are doing.
  • Social media may be all the buzz, but in reality "only a few firms get it [and use it], it's of peripheral interest for most", says Tom Austin at technology consultancy Gartner. Few realise that using social media has become much more than customer service and reputation management.
  • many social media tools are poorly integrated into the corporate workflow
  • But there are dangers. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway warns that the obsession with social networking can make management lose focus.
  • To survive the world of social media, companies have to throw away their old marketing playbook.
  • "don't push... and don't pretend you are hip"
  • "Once companies have worked out that they should do something with social media, they usually don't know how to do it,"
  • "If you want to influence the people who influence your customers, that's a very powerful game, but it's also very dangerous if you get it wrong."
  • it's not about how many friends or followers somebody has, but whether they make an impact.
  • When Virgin America recently launched new routes from California to Toronto, it used Klout to identify a small group of social media "influencers" and gave them free flights. This generated thousands of tweets, triggered press coverage and delivered more immediate impact than traditional advertising.
  • "Consumers are spending their attention on social media," he says, but firms don't know how to repay them properly. "There's no manual for that yet."
  • Social media are dynamic, and today's Twitter may be tomorrow's forgotten website. "Don't assume that what works today will work tomorrow," says Tom Austin at Gartner. "Your model has to be continually adapted."
Kristen Nicole Cardon

Cellphones - Third World and Developing Nations - Poverty - Technology - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.
  • Text messaging, or S.M.S. (short message service), turns out to be a particularly cost-effective way to connect with otherwise unreachable people privately and across great distances. Public health workers in South Africa now send text messages to tuberculosis patients with reminders to take their medication. In Kenya, people can use S.M.S. to ask anonymous questions about culturally taboo subjects like AIDS, breast cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, receiving prompt answers from health experts for no charge.
  • A cellphone in the hands of an Indian fisherman who uses it to grow his business — which presumably gives him more resources to feed, clothe, educate and safeguard his family — represents a textbook case of bottom-up economic development, a way of empowering individuals by encouraging entrepreneurship
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  • For this reason, the cellphone has become a darling of the microfinance movement
  • companies like Wizzit, in South Africa, and GCash, in the Philippines, have started programs that allow customers to use their phones to store cash credits transferred from another phone or p
  • urchased through a post office, phone-kiosk operator or other licensed operator
  • Interestingly, the recent post-election violence in Kenya provided a remarkable case study for the cellphone as an instrument of both war and peace.
  • Carrying a full-featured cellphone lessens your needs for other things, including a watch, an alarm clock, a camera, video camera, home stereo, television, computer or, for that matter, a newspaper. With the advent of mobile banking, cellphones have begun to replace wallets as well.
  •  
    Chipchase has a cool job :)
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