Computing Nature

The articles in this volume present a selection of works from the Symposium on Natu-ral/Unconventional Computing at AISB/IACAP (British Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour and The International Association for Computing and Philosophy) World Congress 2012, held at the University of Birmingham, celebrating Turing centenary. This book is about nature considered as the totality of physical existence, the universe. By physical we mean all phenomena - objects and processes - that are possible to detect either directly by our senses or via instruments. Historically, there have been many ways of describ-ing the universe (cosmic egg, cosmic tree, theistic universe, mechanistic universe) and a par-ticularly prominent contemporary approach is computational universe

Volume 78 - Issue 3 - December, 1966

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Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

COMMUNICATION INTERFACE PROXIMITY AND USER ANXIETY: COMPARING DESKTOP, LAPTOP, AND HAND-HELD DEVICES AS MEDIA PLATFORMS FOR EMERGENCY ALERTS

This study is an experiment investigating the effects of communication interface proximity on college students' anxiety when they receive the alerts about on-campus crimes via e-mails and text messages. It proposes a new dimension for the traditional concept of proximity in journalism and suggests a shift in the emphasis of proximity from audience-to-event to user-to-interface. It draws the theoretical framework from multiple disciplines: human-computer interaction research, the information processing model, media effects research, as well as the psychological research of anxiety. A total of 97 college students in a large mid-Atlantic university participated in this experiment. Communication interface proximity was conceptualized as three different media platforms: desktop computer (stationary), laptop computer (portable), and hand-held device (mobile). The students were assigned to one of the three device groups based on their self-reported computer usage and received four crime alerts per day for two days through one of the devices. They were required to carry a Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) pictorial scale during the experiment and reply to the alerts as soon as possible using the SAM and felt anxiety scales. They also filled out an online questionnaire at the beginning of the study, at the end of the first day, and at the end of the study, respectively. Subjects who received the crime alerts on hand-held devices reported higher anxiety upon alert receipt than those receiving the alerts on desktop or laptop computers. Anxiety, valence, and arousal reported upon alert receipt for the laptop and desktop groups decreased significantly in early day two, suggesting an "overnight effect" of the crime alerts on these two groups. However, the hand-held group still reported a high level of anxiety upon alert receipt in early day two, suggesting the ubiquitous hand-held device is just under our skin, with no "down time". This study also found that anxiety predicted latency time of response to the alerts and memory for the crime alerts, indicating that anxiety serves as an adaptive heuristic in an emergency and helps people allocate their limited cognitive mental resources, as suggested by the information processing model

Re- imaging visual information complexity : a creative approach to information entropy, perception, identification and understanding

The author considers the material nature and aesthetic role of information complexity in creative production. Outlining the context of computer based artworks within the visual/fine arts and the relationship of dematerialised media to digital code, computer science techniques are redefined as both artwork, and method of creative investigation. A discussion of several of the author’s artworks illustrates these themes