Organizing Engineering Work - A Comparative-Analysis

This article analyzes the organization of engineering work in six industrial capitalist countries. It identifies four major models for the organization of engineering work; the engineering profession did not succeed in achieving professional “closure” in any of the six countries under review. A review of the historical evolution of the organization of engineering work in each of the six countries reveals that engineering has been shaped by a complex interaction among the profession itself, employers, the state, labor, and preindustrial forces. However, none of the national variations on the four models for organizing engineering labor is stable or without internal contradiction because of the ambiguous “intermediate” position of engineers

Telling histories or accounting for aspects of the past: A historiographical choice in a European historical perspective

The article departs from the difference between two types of historical writings, one narrating stories about actors and the other trying to bring about evidence that justify claims to know certain things about specific aspects of the past. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, telling stories have been a common way of presenting past events. Inscriptions and annals, as well as graves and monuments, urged to present posterity with evidence for acts and occurrences. Storytelling was always more popular than searching for evidence. In the 19th century, historians began to systematise their doubts about the truth of many stories. This source criticism has been refuted by many “historical theorists” in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries with the argument that claims that it is impossible to bring truth about the past and that all history is to be regarded as a kind of literature with, at best, symbolic “truth”. I want to reject this standpoint as based only on an internal “theory of history”-discourse and ask for analyses of actual historical research, which claims to produce new historical knowledge

DIRECTIONS OF KNOWLEDGE AND SCHOOLS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY

After a short terminological introduction, this article discusses the origin of schools as collective knowledge producers. European historiography had not seen such schools until Leopold von Ranke started his teaching, which included historical research through seminars. His school became paradigmatic. However, from the late 19th century, nationalist historians, who rallied around political ideas rather than around new historical knowledge, challenged the Rankean conception. Another challenge came from historians gathering around a French journal, the Annales. From Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, these historians had different ideas about historical research, but there were links between the conceptions of history in the second and third generation of editors. Thereby, they also came to precede the present with its different directions of historiography based on ideas of fruitful areas for research.</jats:p

TELLING HISTORIES OR ACCOUNTING FOR ASPECTS OF THE PAST: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CHOICE IN A EUROPEAN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

The article departs from the difference between two types of historical writings, one narrating stories about actors and the other trying to bring about evidence that justify claims to know certain things about specific aspects of the past. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, telling stories have been a common way of presenting past events. Inscriptions and annals, as well as graves and monuments, urged to present posterity with evidence for acts and occurrences. Storytelling was always more popular than searching for evidence. In the 19th century, historians began to systematise their doubts about the truth of many stories. This source criticism has been refuted by many “historical theorists” in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries with the argument that claims that it is impossible to bring truth about the past and that all history is to be regarded as a kind of literature with, at best, symbolic “truth”. I want to reject this standpoint as based only on an internal “theory of history”-discourse and ask for analyses of actual historical research, which claims to produce new historical knowledge.</jats:p

Heap architectures for concurrent languages using message passing

We discuss alternative heap architectures for languages that rely on automatic memory management and implement con-currency through asynchronous message passing. We de-scribe how interprocess communication and garbage collec-tion happens in each architecture, and extensively discuss the tradeos that are involved. In an implementation set-ting (the Erlang/OTP system) where the rest of the runtime system is unchanged, we present a detailed experimental comparison between these architectures using both synthetic programs and large commercial products as benchmarks. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.3 [Programming Languages]: Language Construct