Books. On Seeing A's and Seeing As. SEHR, volume 4, issue 2: Constructions of the MindUpdated July 22, 1995 Douglas R. Hofstadter Because it began life essentially as a branch of the theory of computation, and because the latter began life essentially as a branch of logic, the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI) has very deep historical roots in logic. The English logician George Boole, in the 1850s, was among the first to formulate the idea--in his famous book The Laws of Thought--that thinking itself follows clear patterns, even laws, and that these laws could be mathematized. For this reason, I like to refer to this law-bound vision of the activities of the human mind as the "Boolean Dream.
"1 Put more concretely, the Boolean Dream amounts to seeing thinking as the manipulation of propositions, under the constraint that the rules should always lead from true statements to other true statements. Another domain that appealed greatly to many of the early movers of AI was chess. What seems to be wrong with it? 101 Atheist Quotes - The Atheist Blogger. Successful Strategies for Commenting Code. Introduction Commenting your code is like cleaning your bathroom—you never want to do it, but it really does create a more pleasant experience for you and your guests. Because I’ve recently adopted a new mantra to use comments frequently and appropriately in my code, I spent a few hours researching the literature on commenting readability, reusability, and guidelines. It was a bit overwhelming to see the sheer amount of information and discussions on the topic. Basically, there are a lot of tough, but fundamental questions out there like what does “frequently and appropriately” mean?
Because there are a million different beliefs and contradictions on the subject, I created this brief overview to present my findings. Types of Comments Code Commenting - This refers to writing descriptive variable names that are self explanatory. Function addUserToDatabase(userName, userAge) Without any additional information, you can tell that the function will add a user’s name and age to a database. InYo: Bushido or Bull: Friday. InYo: Journal of Alternative Perspectives Mar 2001 By Karl F. Friday This article originally appeared in The History Teacher, Volume 27, Number 3, May 1994, pages 339-349. Copyright © 1994 The History Teacher. Reprinted by permission. Photos courtesy Guy Power. It would be difficult to find any facet of Japan’s cultural heritage that exercises as powerful a hold on the world’s popular imagination as the samurai. The samurai tradition is often cited as the source of both the mind-set that launched Japan’s war against China, Southeast Asia and the United States and of the norms and values of the soldiers and officers who fought it.
It was this same perspective that led Lord Russell of Liverpool to title his 1958 litany of Japanese wartime atrocities The Knights of Bushido. The foregoing, then, raises an intriguing question: just how well does Japan’s premodern military tradition explain the comportment of her troops during the Pacific War? Bushidó in Medieval & Early Modern Japan G. What's all this fuss about Erlang. Nobody can predict the future, but I’m going to make a few informed guesses. Let’s suppose Intel is right: let’s suppose that the Keifer project succeeds. If this happens, then 32 core processors will appear on the market as soon as 2009/2010. This comes as no surprise; Sun already ships the Niagara with 8 cores running 4 hyperthreads per core (which is equivalent to 32 cores). This is a development that makes Erlang programmers very happy. They have been waiting 20 years for this to happen, and now it’s payback time.
Here’s the good news for Erlang programmers: Your Erlang program should just run N times faster on an N core processor Is this true? Almost. Sometimes we have to tweak our programs a bit—when I generated some Erlang documentation on a Sun Niagara (with 32 equivalent cores), I had to make a one line tweak to my program (I changed a map to pmap—sorry, I’m getting technical here. pmap is just “parallel map”). Why do our programs just run faster? Mutable State and Concurrency Yes.
Corruption in textbook-adoption proceedings: 'Judging Books. Judging Books by Their Covers Richard P. Feynman I was giving a series of freshman physics lectures [in 1964], and after one of them, Tom Harvey, who assisted me in putting on the demonstrations, said, "You oughta see what's happening to mathematics in schoolbooks! My daughter comes home with a lot of crazy stuff! " I didn't pay much attention to what he said.
But the next day I got a telephone call from a pretty famous lawyer here in Pasadena, Mr. It happened that a lot of the books were on a new method of teaching arithmetic that they called "new math," and since usually the only people to look at the books were schoolteachers or administrators in education, they thought it would be a good idea to have somebody who uses mathematics scientifically, who knows what the end product is and what we're trying to teach it for, to help in the evaluation of the schoolbooks. Immediately I began getting letters and telephone calls from schoolbook publishers. Mrs. I was overwhelmed. "I wound it up. " Mr. Jon Flanders' Blog:BizTalk and Windows Workflow Foundation. Wicked Code: Asynchronous Pages in ASP.NET 2.0 -- MSDN Magazine, Are people ’stuck’ on Windows? « dreamcatching.
OCEAN-FLOOR PLATES collide, shift along giant faults, or crack and spread apart. Two narrow, water-filled splits on the flanks of continents—the Gulf of California and the Red Sea—are oceans of the future just beginning to open, marine geologists say. Their basins are widening; heat comes up from below their floors. In Mexico’s Gulf of California great volumes of sediment carried down by the Colorado River mask the seabed rifting. Someday that rift may rip north, open a seaway through Nevada, and break away much of California as an island. In the Red Sea, in several deep basins or holes, a different sort of mud exists.
Ever since the first Challenger’s cruise a century ago, it has been known that potato-size lumps rich in manganese and iron cover wide areas of the ocean floor, almost as thick as cobblestones. The twin mysteries of exactly how these nodules form, and what keeps most of them unburied by seafloor ooze, remain to be solved. “We drove Alvin up to one of the black smokers. Is Design Dead? For many that come briefly into contact with Extreme Programming, it seems that XP calls for the death of software design. Not just is much design activity ridiculed as "Big Up Front Design", but such design techniques as the UML, flexible frameworks, and even patterns are de-emphasized or downright ignored. In fact XP involves a lot of design, but does it in a different way than established software processes. XP has rejuvenated the notion of evolutionary design with practices that allow evolution to become a viable design strategy.
It also provides new challenges and skills as designers need to learn how to do a simple design, how to use refactoring to keep a design clean, and how to use patterns in an evolutionary style. Extreme Programming (XP) challenges many of the common assumptions about software development. Of these one of the most controversial is its rejection of significant effort in up-front design, in favor of a more evolutionary approach. Planned and Evolutionary Design.
Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » Four implementation. Many of the tests that currently use browser-driving tools like Selenium, Watir, or Silk could use different implementation technologies. In the rest of this note, I describe the pros and cons of browser driving, HTTP driving, the Rails variant of HTTP driving, and app-layer driving. Context There are certain kinds of automated business-facing tests whose job is to show how a user can accomplish some task. I’m going to call them “workflow tests.” The purposes of these tests are: to help the programmer understand what the business wants.to help everyone agree what it means to say the current story is done.to help the product director (or perhaps a user experience designer) to think through what it is that she wants—to be a concrete way of exploring ideas.to find bugs introduced by programmers making changes. Here’s an example of such a test: Except for usual spacing and indentation, it looks pretty much like English.
In each case below, the test continues to look the same. Driving HTTP Huh. Structured Procrastination. Educate Your Stakeholders! As much as it hurts to admit it, most of the important decisions of website development are not made by design professionals. They’re made by the business owners and middle managers who hire us.
After all, it is they who hold the purse strings, so it’s only fair that they set the online priorities. Unfortunately, this situation does have one major drawback. Although such people may be very well meaning, they are often blissfully unaware of the factors that should and do influence decision making on the web. The unhappy result is that poor investment choices are often made. For example, an executive who is oblivious to the potential of handheld computing might commission a site that is unusable on mobile phones. Similarly, an application that is built in ignorance of internet law might end up costing a small fortune in legal fees. Setting the scene#section1 Those of us who make a career out of website planning have a duty to help such people. Global and industry factors#section2. Why the 9 to 5 Office Worker Will Become a Thing of the Past. The Natural Productivity Cycle In your personal life, when attending to business or working on side projects, how often do you spend 8 consecutive hours in front of a computer?
It doesn’t make sense because we lose the ability to concentrate effectively within a few hours. Everyone goes through alternating periods of high and low mental acuity. There are days when I work on personal projects for well over 8 hours, but the time is always divided into multiple sessions. I might spend a few hours coding a design, a few hours writing, and a few hours reading feeds, moderating comments, and responding to email. I work this way because it aligns with my mental energy cycle. Any more than 3 hours in front of a computer and my eyes start hurting and I become restless.
The Problem with an 8 Hour Work Day A continuous 8 hour work day is a relic of the past. In the case of the modern information worker, nearly all tasks involve creative or strategic thinking. This number isn’t caused by slacking. From design to meaning: a whole new way of pre. My favorite book of the summer is Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind. A simple book in many ways, and a most profound and well-researched one as well. At 267 pages (in paperback), it's a quick read. In fact, I read it twice, the second time underlining, highlighting, and taking notes as I went along.
"The future belongs to a different kind of person," Pink says. "...an age animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life — one that prizes aptitudes that I call 'high concept' and 'high touch.' — Dan Pink, A Whole New Mind The whole left-brain (L-directed thinking) and right-brain (R-directed thinking) exploration put forth logically enough in the first part of the book is highlighter-worthy, even if it's nothing really new for many of us who keep up on this stuff (my mother survived a very serious stroke on the left side of her brain ten years ago; I have read a good deal and learned a lot about this subject since then).
A whole new way of of presenting? (1) Design. All For Games: An Interview with Warren Spector. Warren Spector is probably most acclaimed for his work on Deus Ex, but his experience has spanned many studios. From Origin, to Looking Glass Studios, to Ion Storm, Spector has made his mark, especially in terms of interactive story and depth of character immersion. Now, with his new Houston-based studio Junction Point (taking the title from a cancelled Looking Glass game), Spector plans to take all of that a step further, with a brand new intellectual property.
In this exclusive interview, we spoke with Spector about his stance on MMOs (preview: he doesn’t like them), writing in games, dynamic storytelling, and the potential of the medium. Gamasutra: What's going on with Junction Point now? Warren Spector: We're working away on a project that I can't really talk about too much, but it's pretty exciting. Gamasutra: Can you say if this was the game you were talking about for Steam some time ago, or is this something new? WS: Well, I left Ion Storm, which was an Eidos studio, back in 2004. Erlang For The Practical Man.