Molding the Physical World Upon Francis Bacon's Anvil

This examination of the division of the sciences offered by Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon compares the ontological approach to the sciences proposed by Aquinas and the modern pragmatic scientific theory of Bacon. The author weighs a proposed elimination of metaphysics from the thinking of Bacon and its implications for modem scientific thought, concluding finally that metaphysics is extremely important as the governing agent of the sciences

Geography and Physical Processes of the Circumpolar World

This module provides a brief introduction to the physical features and processes of the Arctic region and the significant factors that influence them, which include: the climate, including very low winter temperatures, relatively high summer temperatures, and the subsequent freeze-thaw cycle; the long-term glaciation cycle; and the presence or absence of water and the dynamics and influence thereof, both as liquid and ice, on the northern landscape. A review of map reading skills is also included. Educational levels: High school, Undergraduate lower division

Ubic: Bridging the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world

Advances in computing technology increasingly blur the boundary between the digital domain and the physical world. Although the research community has developed a large number of cryptographic primitives and has demonstrated their usability in all-digital communication, many of them have not yet made their way into the real world due to usability aspects. We aim to make another step towards a tighter integration of digital cryptography into real world interactions. We describe Ubic, a framework that allows users to bridge the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world. Ubic relies on head-mounted displays, like Google Glass, resource-friendly computer vision techniques as well as mathematically sound cryptographic primitives to provide users with better security and privacy guarantees. The framework covers key cryptographic primitives, such as secure identification, document verification using a novel secure physical document format, as well as content hiding. To make a contribution of practical value, we focused on making Ubic as simple, easily deployable, and user friendly as possible.Comment: In ESORICS 2014, volume 8712 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 56-75, Wroclaw, Poland, September 7-11, 2014. Springer, Berlin, German

Virtual Location-Based Services: Merging the Physical and Virtual World

Location-based services gained much popularity through providing users with helpful information with respect to their current location. The search and recommendation of nearby locations or places, and the navigation to a specific location are some of the most prominent location-based services. As a recent trend, virtual location-based services consider webpages or sites associated with a location as 'virtual locations' that online users can visit in spite of not being physically present at the location. The presence of links between virtual locations and the corresponding physical locations (e.g., geo-location information of a restaurant linked to its website), allows for novel types of services and applications which constitute virtual location-based services (VLBS). The quality and potential benefits of such services largely depends on the existence of websites referring to physical locations. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of linking virtual and physical locations. For this, we analyze the presence and distribution of virtual locations, i.e., websites referring to places, for two Irish cities. Using simulated tracks based on a user movement model, we investigate how mobile users move through the Web as virtual space. Our results show that virtual locations are omnipresent in urban areas, and that the situation that a user is close to even several such locations at any time is rather the normal case instead of the exception

Understanding the Physical World

Lecture delivered in Hamman Hall on February 21, 1962, as the first of the Alumni Association's Distinguished Scholar Progra

Modeling IoT-aware Business Processes - A State of the Art Report

This research report presents an analysis of the state of the art of modeling Internet of Things (IoT)-aware business processes. IOT links the physical world to the digital world. Traditionally, we would find information about events and processes in the physical world in the digital world entered by humans and humans using this information to control the physical world. In the IoT paradigm, the physical world is equipped with sensors and actuators to create a direct link with the digital world. Business processes are used to coordinate a complex environment including multiple actors for a common goal, typically in the context of administrative work. In the past few years, we have seen research efforts on the possibilities to model IoT- aware business processes, extending process coordination to real world entities directly. This set of research efforts is relatively small when compared to the overall research effort into the IoT and much of the work is still in the early research stage. To create a basis for a bridge between IoT and BPM, the goal of this report is to collect and analyze the state of the art of existing frameworks for modeling IoT-aware business processes.Comment: 42 page