Although strictly speaking simple tools are a type of technology made by one person, we tend to think of technology as something much more complicated. But in fact technology is anything designed by a mind. Technology includes not only nuclear reactors and genetically modified crops, but also bows and arrows, hide tanning techniques, fire starters, and domesticated crops. Technology also includes intangible inventions such as calendars, mathematics, software, law, and writing, as these too derive from our heads. But technology also must include birds' nests and beaver dams since these too are the work of brains.
All technology, both the chimp's termite fishing spear and the human's fishing spear, the beaver's dam and the human's dam, the warbler's hanging basket and the human's hanging basket, the leafcutter ant's garden and the human's garden, are all fundamentally natural. We tend to isolate human-made technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals a tool is as natural as our life.
Contents contributed and discussions participated by Todd Suomela
The Technium: Ordained-Becoming - 0 views
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by Kevin Kelly
The Technium: The World Without Technology - 0 views
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The gravity of technology holds us where we are. We accept our attachment. But to really appreciate the effects of technology – both its virtues and costs -- we need to examine the world of humans before technology. What were our lives like without inventions? For that we need to peek back into the Paleolithic era when technology was scarce and humans lived primarily surrounded by things they did not make. We can also examine the remaining contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes still living close to nature to measure what, if anything, they gain from the small amount of technology they use.
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Then about 50,000 years ago something amazing happened. While the bodies of early humans in Africa remained unchanged, their genes and minds shifted noticeably. For the first time hominins were full of ideas and innovation. These newly vitalized modern humans, which we now call Sapiens, charged into new regions beyond their ancestral homes in eastern Africa. They fanned out from the grasslands and in a relatively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands in Africa to an estimated 8 million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
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Human Computer Interaction (HCI) by John M. Carroll - Interaction-Design.org: HCI, Usab... - 0 views
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The challenge of personal computing became manifest at an opportune time. The broad project of cognitive science, which incorporated cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and the philosophy of mind, had formed at the end of the 1970s. Part of the programme of cognitive science was to articulate systematic and scientifically-informed applications to be known as "cognitive engineering". Thus, at just the point when personal computing presented the practical need for HCI, cognitive science presented people, concepts, skills, and a vision for addressing such needs. HCI was one of the first examples of cognitive engineering. Other historically fortuitous developments contributed to establishment of HCI. Software engineering, mired in unmanageable software complexity in the 1970s, was starting to focus on nonfunctional requirements, including usability and maintainability, and on non-linear software development processes that relied heavily on testing. Computer graphics and information retrieval had emerged in the 1970s, and rapidly came to recognize that interactive systems were the key to progressing beyond early achievements. All these threads of development in computer science pointed to the same conclusion: The way forward for computing entailed understanding and better empowering users.
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One of the most significant achievements of HCI is its evolving model of the integration of science and practice. Initially this model was articulated as a reciprocal relation between cognitive science and cognitive engineering. Later, it ambitiously incorporated a diverse science foundation, notably Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology, and a culturally embedded conception of human activity, including the activities of design and technology development. Currently, the model is incorporating design practices and research across a broad spectrum. In these developments, HCI provides a blueprint for a mutual relation between science and practice that is unprecedented.
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In the latter 1980s and early 1990s, HCI assimilated ideas from Activity Theory, distributed cognition, and ethnomethodology. This comprised a fundamental epistemological realignment. For example, the representational theory of mind, a cornerstone of cognitive science, is no longer axiomatic for HCI science. Information processing psychology and laboratory user studies, once the kernel of HCI research, became important, but niche areas. The most canonical theory-base in HCI now is socio-cultural, Activity Theory. Field studies became typical, and eventually dominant as an empirical paradigm. Collaborative interactions, that is, groups of people working together through and around computer systems (in contrast to the early 1980s user-at-PC situation) have become the default unit of analysis. It is remarkable that such fundamental realignments were so easily assimilated by the HCI community.
Falling for Science - The MIT Press - 4 views
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In this collection, distinguished scientists, engineers, and designers as well as twenty-five years of MIT students describe how objects encountered in childhood became part of the fabric of their scientific selves. In two major essays that frame the collection, Turkle tells a story of inspiration and connection through objects that is often neglected in standard science education and in our preoccupation with the virtual.
The Technium: Reasons to Diminish Technology - 0 views
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Arguments against technology: contrary to nature, to humans, to technology itself (self-destruction), to God.
On Being a Scientist: Third Edition - 0 views
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The scientific research enterprise is built on a foundation of trust. Scientists trust that the results reported by others are valid. Society trusts that the results of research reflect an honest attempt by scientists to describe the world accurately and without bias. But this trust will endure only if the scientific community devotes itself to exemplifying and transmitting the values associated with ethical scientific conduct.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - 1 views
Rands In Repose: The Makers of Things - 0 views
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musings on Brooklyn Bridge.
Rationally Speaking: Could it be? Science critics calls for a truce - 0 views
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reaction to Harry Collins article in Nature "We cannot live by skepticism alone"
Strange Horizons Reviews: The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton, reviewed by Bruce Ste... - 0 views
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Edgerton's major line of attack is the assertion that we falsely imagine that "technology" is the same as "innovation" and "invention." That the vast bulk of "technology" is the installed base. The old stuff.
Just Another Deisidaimon - 0 views
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Philosophy of rationality much more than sociology of knowledge.
Hello, Darkness - 96.03 - 0 views
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But the implication of electricity in the sleep deficit seems hard to argue with. Whatever it is that we wish or are made to do--pursue leisure, earn a living--there are simply far more usable hours now in which to do it
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In the United States at midnight more than five million people are at work at full-time jobs. Supermarkets, gas stations, copy shops--many of these never close.
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Living with electric lights makes it difficult to retrieve the experience of a non-electrified society. For all but the very wealthy, who could afford exorbitant arrays of expensive artificial lights, nightfall brought the works of daytime to a definitive end. Activities that need good light--where sharp tools are wielded or sharply defined boundaries maintained; purposeful activities designed to achieve specific goals; in short, that which we call work--all this subsided in the dim light of evening. Absent the press of work, people typically took themselves safely to home and were left with time in the evening for less urgent and more sensual matters: storytelling, sex, prayer, sleep, dreaming.
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Speculative connections between electric lighting, sleep deficits, and health.
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I wonder if the driving force behind the sleep deficit is in fact more pervasive, and indeed global in nature: the triumph of light.
Rationally Speaking: The very foundations of science - 0 views
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The first way to think about probability is as a measure of the frequency of an event: if I say that the probability of a coin to land heads up is 50% I may mean that, if I flip the coin say 100 times, on average I will get heads 50 times. This is not going to get us out of Hume’s problem, because probabilities interpreted as frequencies of events are, again, a form of induction
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Secondly, we can think of probabilities as reflecting subjective judgment. If I say that it is probable that the coin will land heads up, I might simply be trying to express my feeling that this will be the case. You might have a different feeling, and respond that you don’t think it's probable that the coin will lend heads up. This is certainly not a viable solution to the problem of induction, because subjective probabilities are, well, subjective, and hence reflect opinions, not degrees of truth.
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Lastly, one can adopt what Okasha calls the logical interpretation of probabilities, according to which there is a probability X that an event will occur means that we have objective reasons to believe (or not) that X will occur (for instance, because we understand the physics of the solar system, the mechanics of cars, or the physics of coin flipping). This doesn’t mean that we will always be correct, but it does offer a promising way out of Hume’s dilemma, since it seems to ground our judgments on a more solid foundation. Indeed, this is the option adopted by many philosophers, and would be the one probably preferred by scientists, if they ever gave this sort of thing a moment’s thought.
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short summary of some probabilistic responses to the problem of induction
IPY 2007-2008 - 0 views
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IPY = International Polar Year, concluding statement
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Todd Suomela
I'm a peripatetic wanderer through the awesome edifice of human knowledge, intent on self-development, reflection, and the synthesis of disparate ideas. I have always been, and will remain, a student. My interests are truly marvelous but this text box is too small to contain them.