88 research outputs found

    What is a Robot?

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    A robot is a mechanical hand and arm, controlled by a computer. It is nothing more than another type of machine. Its ancestry combines two different, but related, technologies: mechanisation and control. The history of the computer has been essential to both. The history of mechanisation began with Oliver Evans' automated mill (1784), continued with Joseph Jacquard's loom (1801), and reached a high state of perfection at the end of the nineteenth century with Steward Babbitt's designs for a motorised crane which had a mechanical gripper to remove ingots from furnaces (1892). In the 1820s the technology of mechanisation cross-fertilised with the emerging science of information and control technology when the English mathematician, Charles Babbage, sometimes known as 'the father of the computer', developed an automatic calculator which he called his 'Difference Engine' (1823). Joseph Jacquard's loom proved to be the plateau from which all subsequent innovations in mechanisation and control took off. His invention was software, the novel idea that you could program a weaver's loom with punched cards that carried a coded 'model' of the patterns being woven. The Jacquard loom appeared in 1801, the last and most significant of a series of innovations in silk weaving which came out of Lyons from the early nineteenth century. It was so successful that by 1812 there were more than 11,000 in France alone. The punched card was a breakthrough in information technology: a Jacquard loom could carry as much as three megabytes of information on perforated paper. This technique of information storage became one of the fundamental components of the automatic memory calculators which gave birth to computers

    Complejidad y dimensiones en los estudios sobre Babbage: la máquina analítica. Un análisis del fracaso cultural del primer proyecto de calculadora digital programable secuencialmente.

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    En este artículo se analiza el caso histórico de la máquina analítica de Babbage junto con algunos otros ejemplos relacionados, con la intención de comprender qué tipo de condiciones retrasaron el advenimiento de la > hasta un siglo después de los primeros diseños de calculadoras programables multi-propósito. La respuesta a este interrogante proviene de una hibridación entre el enfoque socioeconómico de los estudios de ciencia, tecnología y sociedad y la teoría de la complejidad aplicada a los fenómenos sociales en la historia de la técnica. Como conclusión se prueba que el propio Babbage pudo ser consciente de estas constricciones en la estructura social de los medios de producción que retrasarían la emergencia del cálculo automático durante un siglo.This article analyses the historical case of the Babbage's machine and other related examples in order to understand the conditions delaying the coming of the •computer revolution· during one century since the first designs of programmable calculators. The response derives from the joining of both che STS socioeconomic approach and the complexity theory applied to social phenomena in the history of technology. As a result, it is showed that Babbage could be conscious of these constrictions in the social structure, which would be responsible for the delay of the emergence of automatic calculus during one century

    "Revolution? What Revolution?" Successes and limits of computing technologies in philosophy and religion

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    Computing technologies like other technological innovations in the modern West are inevitably introduced with the rhetoric of "revolution". Especially during the 1980s (the PC revolution) and 1990s (the Internet and Web revolutions), enthusiasts insistently celebrated radical changes— changes ostensibly inevitable and certainly as radical as those brought about by the invention of the printing press, if not the discovery of fire.\ud These enthusiasms now seem very "1990s�—in part as the revolution stumbled with the dot.com failures and the devastating impacts of 9/11. Moreover, as I will sketch out below, the patterns of diffusion and impact in philosophy and religion show both tremendous success, as certain revolutionary promises are indeed kept—as well as (sometimes spectacular) failures. Perhaps we use revolutionary rhetoric less frequently because the revolution has indeed succeeded: computing technologies, and many of the powers and potentials they bring us as scholars and religionists have become so ubiquitous and normal that they no longer seem "revolutionary at all. At the same time, many of the early hopes and promises instantiated in such specific projects as Artificial Intelligence and anticipations of virtual religious communities only have been dashed against the apparently intractable limits of even these most remarkable technologies. While these failures are usually forgotten they leave in their wake a clearer sense of what these new technologies can, and cannot do

    1.5 million years of information systems : From hunters-gatherers to the domestication of the networked computer

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    This paper develops the argument that information systems have not only existed for the last 50 years (as most accounts of ICT argue) or since the 1700 century (as some more accurate readings would propose), but they are indeed as old as mankind. It provides a historical account of how information and communication systems have greatly interacted with some major transformations in human society, in addition to demonstrating the implications of the most recent changes in the last 10 years with the Internet. It builds on literature which distinguishes 3 major phases in the history of mankind and provides accounts of the role of information and communication systems in each of these phases. The main argument is that the “domestication of information systems” is better understood when previous regime transformations and their dynamics are taken into account and investigated. Implications of these developments in relation to innovation and learning are provided.The past and the future of information systems: 1976-2006 and beyondRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

    1.5 million years of information systems : From hunters-gatherers to the domestication of the networked computer

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    This paper develops the argument that information systems have not only existed for the last 50 years (as most accounts of ICT argue) or since the 1700 century (as some more accurate readings would propose), but they are indeed as old as mankind. It provides a historical account of how information and communication systems have greatly interacted with some major transformations in human society, in addition to demonstrating the implications of the most recent changes in the last 10 years with the Internet. It builds on literature which distinguishes 3 major phases in the history of mankind and provides accounts of the role of information and communication systems in each of these phases. The main argument is that the “domestication of information systems” is better understood when previous regime transformations and their dynamics are taken into account and investigated. Implications of these developments in relation to innovation and learning are provided.The past and the future of information systems: 1976-2006 and beyondRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

    Philosophers and artisans : the relationship between men of science and instrument makers in London 1820-1860

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    This thesis examines the changed status of the instrument maker in the London-based scientific community of the nineteenth century, compared with the eighteenth century, and seeks to account for the difference. Chapter 1 establishes that the eighteenth-century maker could aspire to full membership of the scientific community. The following chapters show that this became impossible by the period 1820-1860. Among reasons suggested for the change are that the instrument maker's educational context to some extent precluded him from contributing to scientific innovation, and also the changed market for his products in an industrial Britain required that he devote more time to his business, thus decreasing the time available to pursue new developments. However, the decline is attributed mainly to the tendency of the scientific community to refine its own criteria of membership, in an era in which its self-consciousness as a distinct group increased, and its members articulated claims to status in terms of their value to the State. This ideology and its consequences are analysed in a number of studies. Chapter 2 deals with the burgeoning of collective identity in the context of the Royal Society, while the next four chapters study individual members of the scientific elite - Wheatstone, Babbage, Airy and Faraday, and their relationships with instrument makers. The studies demonstrate that the philosopher recognised the artisan's work as important, but not as vital as his own, and not classifiable as scientific work. As an institutional manifestation of the motives of the leading philosophers, the B.A.A.S. is the focus of Chapter 7. The final case study centres on the maker's tactics of self-promotion in business terms, thus linking more fully the factors at work in ensuring the rise of the philosopher and the decline in status of the artisan in the scientific community

    1.5 million years of information systems : From hunters-gatherers to the domestication of the networked computer

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    This paper develops the argument that information systems have not only existed for the last 50 years (as most accounts of ICT argue) or since the 1700 century (as some more accurate readings would propose), but they are indeed as old as mankind. It provides a historical account of how information and communication systems have greatly interacted with some major transformations in human society, in addition to demonstrating the implications of the most recent changes in the last 10 years with the Internet. It builds on literature which distinguishes 3 major phases in the history of mankind and provides accounts of the role of information and communication systems in each of these phases. The main argument is that the “domestication of information systems” is better understood when previous regime transformations and their dynamics are taken into account and investigated. Implications of these developments in relation to innovation and learning are provided.The past and the future of information systems: 1976-2006 and beyondRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI
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