The Significance Of The Erosion Of The Prohibition Against Metabasis To The Success And Legacy Of The Copernican Revolution

Although one would not wish to classify Copernicus’ own intentions as belonging to the late-medieval and Renaissance tradition of nominalist philosophy, if we are to turn our consideration to what was responsible for the eventual success of the Copernican Revolution, we must also attend to other features of the dialectical context in relation to which the views of Copernicus and his followers were articulated, interpreted, and evaluated. Accordingly, this paper discusses the significance of the erosion of the Aristotelian prohibition against metabasis to the eventual success of the Copernican Revolutio

Im-position: Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of modern technology

[Excerpt] "One of Heidegger’s initial moves in “The Question Concerning Technology” is to call attention to the difference between Technik and its essence. When we are looking for the essence of a tree, he notes, we are not looking for something that is itself a tree. So, too, the essence of Technik is “completely and utterly nothing Technisches.” Initially, Heidegger offers no argument for this claim (pragmatists might dispute it), but it has a certain prima facie plausibility. What a bit of know-how is—the essence of Technik as a technique or mechanical art—is arguably not itself necessarily a bit of know-how, any more than what technical equipment is—the essence of Technik as equipment—is itself a piece of equipment."Accepted manuscrip

A survey on subjecting electronic product code and non-ID objects to IP identification

Over the last decade, both research on the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-world IoT applications have grown exponentially. The IoT provides us with smarter cities, intelligent homes, and generally more comfortable lives. However, the introduction of these devices has led to several new challenges that must be addressed. One of the critical challenges facing interacting with IoT devices is to address billions of devices (things) around the world, including computers, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices, sensors, and embedded computers, and so on. This article provides a survey on subjecting Electronic Product Code and non-ID objects to IP identification for IoT devices, including their advantages and disadvantages thereof. Different metrics are here proposed and used for evaluating these methods. In particular, the main methods are evaluated in terms of their: (i) computational overhead, (ii) scalability, (iii) adaptability, (iv) implementation cost, and (v) whether applicable to already ID-based objects and presented in tabular format. Finally, the article proves that this field of research will still be ongoing, but any new technique must favorably offer the mentioned five evaluative parameters.Comment: 112 references, 8 figures, 6 tables, Journal of Engineering Reports, Wiley, 2020 (Open Access

The cultural capitalists: notes on the ongoing reconfiguration of trafficking culture in Asia

Most analysis of the international flows of the illicit art market has described a global situation in which a postcolonial legacy of acquisition and collection exploits cultural heritage by pulling it westwards towards major international trade nodes in the USA and Europe. As the locus of consumptive global economic power shifts, however, these traditional flows are pulled in other directions: notably for the present commentary, towards and within Asia

An ontological approach for recovering legacy business content

Legacy Information Systems (LIS) pose a challenge for many organizations. On one hand, LIS are viewed as aging systems needing replacement; on the other hand, years of accumulated business knowledge have made these systems mission-critical. Current approaches however are often criticized for being overtly dependent on technology and ignoring the business knowledge which resides within LIS. In this light, this paper proposes a means of capturing the business knowledge in a technology agnostic manner and transforming it in a way that reaps the benefits of clear semantic expression - this transformation is achieved via the careful use of ontology. The approach called Content Sophistication (CS) aims to provide a model of the business that more closely adheres to the semantics and relationships of objects existing in the real world. The approach is illustrated via an example taken from a case study concerning the renovation of a large financial system and the outcome of the approach results in technology agnostic models that show improvements along several dimensions

Paper-based web connected objects and the Internet of Things through EKKO

Paper has existed as a communications ‘platform’ for thousands of years. It’s ‘versioning history’ spans papyrus, parchment and pulp, and when paper became a scalable and mass-production item, most famously via the Guttenberg press, it sparked unparalleled social and political change. It’s a technology that’s had ‘impact’. More recently, News and Information - a sector with paper at its core - has seen substantial editorial and commercial disruption from digital communications networks. This paper outlines a collaborative project between journalism, media and technology researchers, and commercial product designers, exploring the potential of paper-based web-connected objects. Our work examines how emergent conductive ink technologies could offer a disruptive alternative to existing media products, and explores how to create, power and populate a connected paper platform, and analyse user activity. Through a range of industry partnerships with newspaper, magazine and book publishers, our research creates new paper affordances and interactions, and positions paper as a digital disruptor

Using Java for distributed computing in the Gaia satellite data processing

In recent years Java has matured to a stable easy-to-use language with the flexibility of an interpreter (for reflection etc.) but the performance and type checking of a compiled language. When we started using Java for astronomical applications around 1999 they were the first of their kind in astronomy. Now a great deal of astronomy software is written in Java as are many business applications. We discuss the current environment and trends concerning the language and present an actual example of scientific use of Java for high-performance distributed computing: ESA's mission Gaia. The Gaia scanning satellite will perform a galactic census of about 1000 million objects in our galaxy. The Gaia community has chosen to write its processing software in Java. We explore the manifold reasons for choosing Java for this large science collaboration. Gaia processing is numerically complex but highly distributable, some parts being embarrassingly parallel. We describe the Gaia processing architecture and its realisation in Java. We delve into the astrometric solution which is the most advanced and most complex part of the processing. The Gaia simulator is also written in Java and is the most mature code in the system. This has been successfully running since about 2005 on the supercomputer "Marenostrum" in Barcelona. We relate experiences of using Java on a large shared machine. Finally we discuss Java, including some of its problems, for scientific computing.Comment: Experimental Astronomy, August 201