well, my issue was … [read full article]
Posts tagged with 'engineering'
Here’s what it is: Lawyers apply general law to specific cases. Doctors apply general medicine to specific cases. Engineers apply general mathematical, scientific and engineering principles to specific cases. But Scientists are creating principles, not applying principles to specific cases. This is why Mathematicians do not get paid big money either. They do not apply general principles to specific cases: they generate principles.
Here’s what it is:
… [read full article]“one wonders how much farther he might have gone and how much greater might have been his contribution to knowledge had his talents been recognized early and adequate guidance and motivation been provided.” This was the line that ‘got me’ as a teenager reading this. I ‘felt’ his story. Even though it was mostly a book of statistics, it was statistics that interested me and it had the occasional little stories like these. —- THE GIFTED GROUP AT MID-LIFE, 1959 It is not surprising, of course, that the gifted men who have had the advantage of college training, often at the graduate level, should be in positions of importance and prestige in the professions and the business world. It is, however, of special interest when those without such edu- cational advantages rise to positions of importance in competition with college-trained men. One such example follows. C. J., whose formal schooling was limited to high school and 6 units of college mathematics taken in extension courses, moved from Group III to Group I between 1940 and 1955. He was one of a family of two children (brother and sister), both of whom were selected for the gifted study. For various reasons the boy, although he had had a strong interest in science and engineering since childhood, did not go to college. The fact that he completed high school at a time of economic stress (the early 1930’s) may have been one determining factor behind his failure to enter college. His parents, although they had hoped he would con- tinue his education, were not able to help him financially. More impor- tant, however, were his poor school grades, which made it necessary that he take “make-up” courses to qualify for college, and at that time he could see no reason for spending time on subjects in which he was not interested. Probably the most crucial factor in his dropping out of school was the failure of the school itself to recognize his unusual ability or to offer any real guidance during his high-school years. His reluctance to conform to a school routine and his lack of application to his studies even though, according to the report from the high school, he showed “occasional flashes of brilliance” apparently obscured his great gifts. Left entirely on his own with little sympathetic stimula- tion and no guidance, he went to work on leaving high school, with the Intention of saving money for college study and a degree in engineering. It was an unfavorable time for financial progress, but C. J. remained employed all through the depression. He began at a fairly unskilled level but after a few years found work in the field of machine design where he made excellent progress. During this period he studied in- formally and still clung to his ambition of taking an engineering degree and as he came to hope a graduate degree in physics. When his income became sufficiently secure that he might have gone to college, war threatened and he turned instead to war work. During World War II he was on the research staff of a highly secret and important laboratory, working side by side with graduate physicists, often on his own projects, an honor usually accorded only Ph.D/s. When this re- search laboratory was discontinued at the end of the war, he was ap- pointed to the engineering staff at a military ordnance laboratory. Because of his fine work as a project engineer on important military developments, he received a promotional appointment to the GS-12 level under a “meritorious exception.” This was a distinct honor since, under Civil Service regulations, an individual without a college degree is ineligible for advancement beyond the grade of GS-7. However, greater honors were in store for C. J. He was recently fully qualified as a mechanical engineer, GS-12, thus removing the “meritorious exception” qualification. This action made further pro- motion possible and he now heads a branch of the optical engineering division in a military research and development center. His work, on a high professional level, is concerned with guided missile instrumenta- tion. C. J. is now in his early forties, married, and the father of three children. He is active in school and community affairs and his hobbies include music, photography, and reading. Among the magazines read regularly are the Atlantic Monthly and Scientific American, and books he has recently read include Modern Arms and Free Men ( Vannevar Bush), Language in Action (Hayakawa), and Human Destiny (Le- comte du Noiiy). His Binet IQ at age 10 was 154 and his Terman Group Test score in 1928 at age 17 was within a few points of a per- fect score. And it was then that the school complained of his argu- mentativeness and failure to respond to discipline, and noted his fail- ure in various school subjects, despite the A he received in chemistry! On the Concept Mastery tests taken in 1940 and 1951 he scored far higher than the average college graduate and placed nearly 20 points above the average of the gifted men. In view of his continued high intelligence rating and his remarkable scientific ability especially in physics and engineering one wonders how much farther he might have gone and how much greater might have been his contribution to knowledge had his talents been recognized early and adequate guidance and motivation been provided.
“one wonders how much
… [read full article]Ok, going up the chain:
Ok, going up the
… [read full article]Me: “Information is Physical” said Landauer in 1961 and established a lower limit of thermodynamic cost of information: “Information is not free” basically. The number has been confirmed numerous times, despite many attempts to break it with quantum erasure, although it can be switched to angular momentum instead of heat. Still, information can be LOGICALLY reversible “for free” even if it cannot be PHYSICALLY reversible for free. But the costs can be made physically small to where a being like a human won’t notice much. Ignorance is bliss. The abstract for the paper: —————— Stochastic thermodynamics of computation – David H. Wolpert One of the major resource requirements of computers – ranging from biological cells to human brains to high-performance (engineered) computers – is the energy used to run them. Those costs of performing a computation have long been a focus of research in physics, going back to the early work of Landauer. One of the most prominent aspects of computers is that they are inherently nonequilibrium systems. However, the early research was done when nonequilibrium statistical physics was in its infancy, which meant the work was formulated in terms of equilibrium statistical physics. Since then there have been major breakthroughs in nonequilibrium statistical physics, which are allowing us to investigate the myriad aspects of the relationship between statistical physics and computation, extending well beyond the issue of how much work is required to erase a bit. In this paper I review some of this recent work on the `stochastic thermodynamics of computation’. After reviewing the salient parts of information theory, computer science theory, and stochastic thermodynamics, I summarize what has been learned about the entropic costs of performing a broad range of computations, extending from bit erasure to loop-free circuits to logically reversible circuits to information ratchets to Turing machines. These results reveal new, challenging engineering problems for how to design computers to have minimal thermodynamic costs. They also allow us to start to combine computer science theory and stochastic thermodynamics at a foundational level, thereby expanding both.
Me: “Information is Physical”
… [read full article]It’s about the limits of knowability. It may not be attractive but it’s not wrong.
It’s about the limits … [read full article]
hierarchy backup in ordered list – folders not separated but are in order
hierarchy backup in ordered … [read full article]
CELLULAR AUTOMATA / COMPLEX SYSTEMS THEORY QUANTITY / MATHEMATICAL CONCEPTS GENRES / STYLE TEACHING / BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION POLITICAL THEORIES / SCHOOLS_OF_THOUGHT ROTE LEARNING / MEMORY SCIENTIFIC LITERACY / STANDARDS-BASED EDUCATION TERMINOLOGY / LEXICOGRAPHY PROBABILITY THEORY / MEASURE THEORY ASYMMETRY / SYMMETRY STATISTICAL MECHANICS / TURBULENCE PERCOLATION THEORY / COMBINATORICS SYMETRY / GEOMETRY PERCOLATION / SELF-ORGANIZATION PERCOLATION / PERCOLATION THEORY SELF-ORGANIZATION / STATISTICAL MECHANICS PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE TOPICS / COMPUTER PROGRAMMING PERSONAL COMPUTING / COMPUTING AND SOCIETY PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE FAMILIES / GROUPING PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES / COMPUTER LANGUAGES PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE IMPLEMENTATION / PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE TOPICS NUMERICAL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE / NUMERICAL SOFTWARE DECLARATIVE PROGRAMMING / PROGRAMMING PARADIGMS QUALITY MANAGEMENT / PRODUCTION AND MANUFACTURING LOGISTICS / SYSTEMS ENGINEERING GOODS (ECONOMICS) / ARTIFICIAL OBJECTS GOODS (ECONOMICS) / SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT SEQUENTIAL METHODS / STATISTICAL METHODS ENTERTAINMENT / SERVICE INDUSTRIES MANAGEMENT BY TYPE / CATEGORIES BY TYPE QUEUE MANAGEMENT / LOGISTICS QUEUEING THEORY / NETWORK PERFORMANCE CONTROL THEORY / CONTROL ENGINEERING RELIGIOUS PLURALISM / PLURALISM (PHILOSOPHY) SOLID MECHANICS / MECHANICS FACTORS OF PRODUCTION / PRODUCTION AND MANUFACTURING GOVERNANCE / LEADERSHIP GOVERNANCE / POLICY SCIENCE IAND CULTURE / SCIENCE IN SOCIETY EARTH_PHENOMENA / PHYSICAL PHENOMENON SCIENTIFIC_CLASSIFICATION / SCIENCE ACTUARIAL SCIENCE / INSURANCE SCIENCE IN SOCIETY / SOCIETY
CELLULAR AUTOMATA / COMPLEX
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