Digital myths

Much of the early work on information theory was directed towards the study of the transmission of telegraph signals. These theoretical treatments lend themselves to descriptions of signals as digital phenomena they are much less convenient for dealing with descriptions of signals as analogue phenomena. Although attempts were made to accommodate analogue and digital signals in the same theory the results were elaborate, hard to follow and difficult to apply. Thus there remain incompatibilities between the common theoretical treatments of analogue and digital signals and hence difficulties in framing criteria for the comparison of analogue and digital techniques. In spite of the difficulty of any formalised comparison it is frequently presumed that digital systems offer greater capacity, better quality, better accuracy, versatility, freedom from error and greater realism in the effects they produce. Digital systems have also been strongly supported as candidates for human biological mechanisms and thus by implication are, seen by some, to be natural. These myths about digital systems have breached the engineers's linguistic closures and have become commonplace. With their promise of perfection, digital systems have become symbols of the modern, the progressive and the revolutionary. Engineers caught up in this tide have come to extoll uncritically particular claimed virtues of going digital so that other options are treated as obsolescent . But through its common usage the word digital is losing its discriminating power and trapped in an image of a controllable world it is becoming a metaphor for modernist aesthetic

Dealing with Climate Change: Paleoclimate research in Australia

Palaeoclimate research relevant to marine systems in Australia includes the collection and analysis of: (a) shallow-water and deep-sea corals, which provide highresolution archives, (b) deep-sea sediment and ice cores, which span longer time scales, and (c) palaeoclimate modelling, which gives us insights into mechanisms, dynamics and thresholds underlying past climate states. Palaeoclimate research in Australia is mature and well recognised internationally. To further advance Australian palaeoclimate research, we must address major challenges that include insufficient research vessel access, insufficient targeted research funding, as well as the lack of a well funded national centre to coordinate research efforts (e.g. academic institution or ARC Centre of Excellence for Palaeoclimate Research)

Critical Foundations of the Contextual Theory of Mind

The contextual mind is found attested in various usages of the term complement, in the background of Kant. The difficulties of Kant's intuitionism are taken up through Quine, but referential opacity is resolved as semantic presence in lived context. A further critique of rationalist linguistics is developed from Jakobson, showing generic functions in thought supporting abstraction, binding and thereby semantic categories. Thus Bolzano's influential philosophy of mathematics and science gives way to a critical view of the ancient heritage acknowledged by Plato.\ud \u

Neurons and symbols: a manifesto

We discuss the purpose of neural-symbolic integration including its principles, mechanisms and applications. We outline a cognitive computational model for neural-symbolic integration, position the model in the broader context of multi-agent systems, machine learning and automated reasoning, and list some of the challenges for the area of neural-symbolic computation to achieve the promise of effective integration of robust learning and expressive reasoning under uncertainty

On the possible Computational Power of the Human Mind

The aim of this paper is to address the question: Can an artificial neural network (ANN) model be used as a possible characterization of the power of the human mind? We will discuss what might be the relationship between such a model and its natural counterpart. A possible characterization of the different power capabilities of the mind is suggested in terms of the information contained (in its computational complexity) or achievable by it. Such characterization takes advantage of recent results based on natural neural networks (NNN) and the computational power of arbitrary artificial neural networks (ANN). The possible acceptance of neural networks as the model of the human mind's operation makes the aforementioned quite relevant.Comment: Complexity, Science and Society Conference, 2005, University of Liverpool, UK. 23 page

With All Deliberate Speed: Brown II and Desegregation\u27s Children

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Norbert and Gregory: Two strands of cybernetics

In this article, I shall examine the way in which information was central to the development of cybernetics. I particularly contrast the different uses of the concept by two key participants in that development – Norbert Wiener, who argued that information was a quasi-physical concept related to the degree of organisation in a system; and Gregory Bateson, who considered information to be a process of human meaning formation. I suggest that these two authors exemplify a hard and a soft strand of cybernetics, present from the start of the field. I trace through these two different interpretations of information as they developed in the cybernetics movement, and on the way they have fed into more recent understandings of information within cybernetics and related fields, especially in family therapy and sociology. I also relate these ideas to the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway and others