Analyzing Field Reality provides a new way of thinking about the analysis of fieldwork that will aid researchers in many disciplines. The book is not about the mechanics of fieldwork, but about how to convey the field's everyday realities and its members' common philosophical engagement -- it provides the researcher with a methodology for understanding meaning in the field.
This book is a result of the Seventh International Conference on Information Sys tems Development-Methods and Tools, Theory and Practice held in Bled, Slovenia, Sep tember 21-23, 1998. The purpose of the conference was to address issues facing academia and industry when specifying, developing, managing, and improving information comput erized systems. During the past few years, many new concepts and approaches emerged in the Information Systems Development (ISD) field. The various theories, methods, and tools available to system developers also bring problems such as choosing the most effec tive approach for a specific task. This conference provides a meeting place for IS re searchers and practitioners from Eastern and Western Europe as well as from other parts of the world. An objective of the conference is not only to share scientific knowledge and in terests but to establish strong professional ties among the participants. The Seventh International Conference on Information Systems Develop ment-ISD'98 continues the concepts of the first Polish-Scandinavian Seminar on Current Trends in Information Systems Development Methodologies held in Gdansk, Poland in 1988. Through the years, the Seminar developed into the International Conference on In formation Systems Development. ISD'99 will be held in Boise, Idaho. The selection of papers was carried out by the International Program Committee. All papers were reviewed in advance by three people. Papers were judged according to their originality, relevance, and presentation quality. All papers were judged only on their own merits, independent of other submissions.
Why has the biotechnology industry failed to perform up to expectations? This book attempts to answer this question by providing a critique of the industry. It reveals the causes of biotech's problems and offers an analysis on how the industry works. It also provides prescriptions for companies, seeking ways to improve the industry's performance.
This interdisciplinary volume arises out of a series of university events arranged by the Scientific and Medical Network between November 2001 and July 2003. The Science, Consciousness and Ultimate Reality project was set up with the support of the John Templeton Foundation in order to examine critical issues at the interface between science, religion and the relatively new field of ‘consciousness studies'. The results give a variety of fascinating perspectives on this emerging area. David Lorimer has brought together an impressive list of contributors representing the diverse fields of physics, neuroscience, psychology, theology and moral philosophy: Denis Alexander, Bernard Carr, Chris Clarke, Guy Claxton, Peter Fenwick, David Fontana, John Habgood, Mary Midgley, Ravi Ravindra, Alan Torrance and Keith Ward.
Despite widespread interest in virtual reality, research and development efforts in synthetic environments (SE)â€"the field encompassing virtual environments, teleoperation, and hybridsâ€"have remained fragmented. Virtual Reality is the first integrated treatment of the topic, presenting current knowledge along with thought-provoking vignettes about a future where SE is commonplace. This volume discusses all aspects of creating a system that will allow human operators to see, hear, smell, taste, move about, give commands, respond to conditions, and manipulate objects effectively in a real or virtual environment. The committee of computer scientists, engineers, and psychologists on the leading edge of SE development explores the potential applications of SE in the areas of manufacturing, medicine, education, training, scientific visualization, and teleoperation in hazardous environments. The committee also offers recommendations for development of improved SE technology, needed studies of human behavior and evaluation of SE systems, and government policy and infrastructure.
Efficiency is a crucial concern across computing systems, from the edge to the cloud. Paradoxically, even as the latencies of bottleneck components such as storage and networks have dropped by up to four orders of magnitude, software path lengths have progressively increased due to overhead from the very frameworks that have revolutionized the pace of information technology. Such overhead can be severe enough to overshadow the benefits from switching to new technologies like persistent memory and low latency interconnects. Resource Proportional Software Design for Emerging Systems introduces resource proportional design (RPD) as a principled approach to software component and system development that counters the overhead of deeply layered code without removing flexibility or ease of development. RPD makes resource consumption proportional to situational utility by adapting to diverse emerging needs and technology systems evolution. Highlights: Analysis of run-time bloat in deep software stacks, an under-explored source of power-performance wastage in IT systems Qualitative and quantitative treatment of key dimensions of resource proportionality Code features: Unify and broaden supported but optional features without losing efficiency Technology and systems evolution: Design software to adapt with changing trade-offs as technology evolves Data processing: Design systems to predict which subsets of data processed by an (analytics or ML) application are likely to be useful System wide trade-offs: Address interacting local and global considerations throughout software stacks and hardware including cross-layer co-design involving code, data and systems dimensions, and non-functional requirements such as security and fault tolerance Written from a systems perspective to explore RPD principles, best practices, models and tools in the context of emerging technologies and applications This book is primarily geared towards practitioners with some advanced topics for researchers. The principles shared in the book are expected to be useful for programmers, engineers and researchers interested in ensuring software and systems are optimized for existing and next generation technologies. The authors are from both industry (Bhattacharya and Voigt) and academic (Gopinath) backgrounds.
What does it mean to be human? Why do we feel and behave in the ways that we do? The classic answer is that we have a special kind of intelligence. But to understand what we are as humans, we also need to know what we are like motivationally. And what is central to this story, what is special about human motivation, is that humans want to share with others their inner experiences about the world--share how they feel, what they believe, and what they want to happen in the future. They want to create a shared reality with others. People have a shared reality together when they experience having in common a feeling about something, a belief about something, or a concern about something. They feel connected to another person or group by knowing that this person or group sees the world the same way that they do--they share what is real about the world. In this work, Dr. Higgins describes how our human motivation for shared reality evolved in our species, and how it develops in our children as shared feelings, shared practices, and shared goals and roles. Shared reality is crucial to what we believe--sharing is believing. It is central to our sense of self, what we strive for and how we strive. It is basic to how we get along with others. It brings us together in fellowship and companionship, but it also tears us apart by creating in-group "bubbles" that conflict with one another. Our shared realities are the best of us, and the worst of us.
Ervin Laszlo's tour de force, What is Reality?, is the product of a half-century of deep contemplation and cutting-edge scholarship. Addressing many of the paradoxes that have confounded modern science over the years, it offers nothing less than a new paradigm of reality, one in which the cosmos is a seamless whole, informed by a single, coherent consciousness manifest in us all. Bringing together science, philosophy, and metaphysics, Laszlo takes aim at accepted wisdom, such as the dichotomies of mind and body, spirit and matter, being and nonbeing, to show how we are all part of an infinite cycle of existence unfolding in spacetime and beyond. Augmented by insightful commentary from a dozen scholars and thinkers, along with a foreword by Deepak Chopra and an introduction by Stanislav Grof, What is Reality? offers a fresh and liberating understanding of the meaning and purpose of existence.
The human species is special because we contain general intelligence. Engineers believe they can build computerized artificial intelligent (AI) versions of human behaviors, because they believe our brains are classical computers. But, humans are Real Intelligent (RI) living systems that exhibit many extraordinary behaviors that are not possible to produce by purely classical mechanisms of any kind. Extraordinary behaviors are also exhibited by advanced quantum computing (QC) machines, thereby creating a technology race and investment boom in both AI and QC technologies. The deep reality explored by this book combines these two ideas (QC + AI) in a conversational style between two world renowned PhD scientists. We propose that our quantum minds exist independently of and interact with our individual brains. We support this model by reviewing the research where people have directly interacted with other quantum and probabilistic systems. Our source science model proposes that thought is intimately connected to the science of informational protophysics, which is the quantum source of our universe and every "thing" in it. This narrative journey recognizes that information, thought, and meaning are primarily dependent on the hyperdimensional states used by both neural and quantum computing. Just like all quantum models, source science leads to extraordinary understanding regarding the space-like entangled nature of thoughts, meaning, emotions, space, and time. After describing our deep, holistic, intimate, and sacred nature, we conclude by making unexpected predictions about our human potential and the future of our human society.
Were one to characterize the aims of this book ambitiously, it could be said to sketch the philosophical foundations or underpinnings of the scientific world view or, better, of the scientific conception of the world. In any case, it develops a comprehensive philosophical view, one which takes science seri ously as the best method for getting to know the ontological aspects of the world. This view is a kind of scientific realism - causal internal realism, as it is dubbed in the book. This brand of realism is "tough" in matters of ontology but "soft" in matters of semantics and epistemology. An ancestor of the book was published in Finnish under the title Tiede, toiminta ja todellisuus (Gaudeamus, 1983). That book is a shortish undergraduate-level monograph. However, as some research-level chapters have been added, the present book is perhaps best regarded as suited for more advanced readers. I completed the book while my stay at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a Visiting Professor under the Exchange Program between the Universities of Wisconsin and Helsinki. I gratefully acknowledge this support. I also wish to thank Juhani Saalo and Martti Kuokkanen for comments on the manuscript and for editorial help. Dr Matti Sintonen translated the Finnish ancestor of this book into English, to be used as a partial basis for this work. His translation was supported by a grant from Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden edistamisvarat. Finally, and as usual, I wish to thank Mrs.
