Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

In Smalltalk, we say that each object decides for itself how it responds to a message. This is called polymorphism. The same message selector may be sent to objects of different Classes. The shape (morph) of the computation is different depending on the specific class of the many (poly) possible classes of the object receiving the message.

But just what is an object? At its simplest, an object has two components: Internal state. This is embodied by variables known only to the object. A variable only visible within the object is called a private variable. As a consequence, it is impossible – if the object decides so – to know the internal state of the object from another object. A repertoire of behaviors. These are the messages an object instance responds to. When the object receives a message it understands, it gets its behavior from a method with that name known by its class or superclass.

A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. — Alan Perlis

“A tool to think with, not a tool to publish with” — this seems to me essential. I feel that I spend a lot of time trying to think with tools meant for publishing.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

to the bottom of the next image, about a fifth of a second later, like that. And they're getting faster and faster each time, and if I stack these guys up, then we see the differences; the increase in the speed is constant. And they say, "Oh, yeah. Constant acceleration. And how shall we

And to prove it, she says, "The exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same, and I'm going to prove it to you." She does this with cardboard, but since I have an expensive computer here I'll just rotate this little guy around and ... Now having seen that -- and I've seen it hundreds of times, because I use this in every talk I give -- I still can't see that they're the same size and shape, and I doubt that you can either. So what do artists do? Well, what artists do is to measure. They measure very, very carefully. And if you measure very, very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge, you'll see that those two shapes are xactly the same size. And the Talmud saw this a long time ago, saying, "We see things not as they are, but as we are." I certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then,

Alan Kay Personal Computing

A Drawing of the FLEX Machine A Turrle Ena.. ,- “$IShown On Its Own Display Screen*c ‘T.L.,,8-= x-4c a . 1968[3]

Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size andshape of an ordinary notebook. How would you use it if it had enough power to outrace yoursenses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalentsof reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms,dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to create, remember, and change?

1: Why Do We Need Something Different? Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0004 Open the PDF Link PDF for 1: Why Do We Need Something Different? in another window 2: Questioning the Foundations of Traditional Safety Engineering Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0005 Open the PDF Link PDF for 2: Questioning the Foundations of Traditional Safety Engineering in another window 3: Systems Theory and Its Relationship to Safety Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0006 Open the PDF Link PDF for 3: Systems Theory and Its Relationship to Safety in another window II: STAMP: An Accident Model Based On Systems Theory [ Opening ] Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0029 Open the PDF Link PDF for [ Opening ] in another window 4: A Systems-Theoretic View of Causality Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0008 Open the PDF Link PDF for 4: A Systems-Theoretic View of Causality in another window 5: A Friendly Fire Accident Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0009 Open the PDF Link PDF for 5: A Friendly Fire Accident in another window III: Using STAMP [ Opening ] Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0030 Open the PDF Link PDF for [ Opening ] in another window 6: Engineering and Operating Safer Systems Using STAMP Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0011 Open the PDF Link PDF for 6: Engineering and Operating Safer Systems Using STAMP in another window 7: Fundamentals Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0012 Open the PDF Link PDF for 7: Fundamentals in another window 8: STPA: A New Hazard Analysis Technique Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0013 Open the PDF Link PDF for 8: STPA: A New Hazard Analysis Technique in another window 9: Safety-Guided Design Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0014 Open the PDF Link PDF for 9: Safety-Guided Design in another window 10: Integrating Safety into System Engineering Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0015 Open the PDF Link PDF for 10: Integrating Safety into System Engineering in another window 11: Analyzing Accidents and Incidents (CAST) Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0016 Open the PDF Link PDF for 11: Analyzing Accidents and Incidents (CAST) in another window 12: Controlling Safety during Operations Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0017 Open the PDF Link PDF for 12: Controlling Safety during Operations in another window 13: Managing Safety and the Safety Culture Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0018 Open the PDF Link PDF for 13: Managing Safety and the Safety Culture in another window 14: SUBSAFE: An Example of a Successful Safety Program Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0019 Open the PDF Link PDF for 14: SUBSAFE: An Example of a Successful Safety Program in another window Epilogue Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0020 Open the PDF Link PDF for Epilogue in another window Appendixes A: Definitions Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0022 Open the PDF Link PDF for A: Definitions in another window B: The Loss of a Satellite Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0023 Open the PDF Link PDF for B: The Loss of a Satellite in another window C: A Bacterial Contamination of a Public Water Supply Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0024 Open the PDF Link PDF for C: A Bacterial Contamination of a Public Water Supply in another window D: A Brief Introduction to System Dynamics Modeling Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0025 Open the PDF Link PDF for D: A Brief Introduction to System Dynamics Modeling in another window References Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0026 Open the PDF Link PDF for References in another window Index Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0027 Open the PDF Link PDF

this system by giving it desired goals and it will figure out how to do these goals so again he wants uh to put a hole in this flange so that he says make these guys uh parallel and mutually perpendicular and then he says i want these gu lines to be collinear

less well known is that the same person was really 00:01:02 interested in morphogenesis

Moving Beyond Problem Solving: A Potential-Based Approach

circulation is the lifeblood of reading.

Atypical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. In 1991, at the bottom of the recession, a survey of workers at large firms by International Survey Research Corporation indicated that 25 percent feared being laid off. In 1996, despite the sharply lower unemployment rate and the tighter labor market, the same survey organization found that 46 percent were fearful of a job layoff.

So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.

Barry was a street singer “discovered” by the folklorist Alan Lomax in the 1950s; she busked with a banjo and a beautiful bray of a voice, brazenly Irish, singing songs of the day alongside traditional ballads.

dans les images avec ordinateur, nous ne pouvons même pas suspecter quel type d’imagination conceptuelle le futur nous réserve

à différentes strates de compétences

The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

In fact,Descartes argued that the only sure indication that another body possesses ahuman mind, that it is not a mere automaton, is its ability to use language inthe normal way;

Reid, A. J. (Ed.). (2018). Marginalia in Modern Learning Contexts. New York: IGI Global.

In the twelfth century Peter Comestor and Alan of Lille had “published” distinctiones, which listed alphabetically some words found in the Bible (action words, abstract words, and concrete words), along with expla-nations of their various allegorical meanings, as an aid to preachers in search of appropriate biblical passages on a theme.119

If by the ’90s, psychiatry had not totally succeeded in winning the public’s belief in its beneficence, there was at least widespread consensus that mental illnesses were disease entities, with as much of a biological basis as cancer or diabetes.

"The best way to predict the future is to build it," computer scientist Alan Kay famously said.

s Alan Turing proved only years later, these machines merely need (1) a (theoretically infi nite) partitioned paper tape, (2) a writing and reading head, and (3) an exact

“Culture catechizes,” Alan Jacobs, a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, told me. Culture teaches us what matters and what views we should take about what matters. Our current political culture, Jacobs argued, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing—television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.

Turing was an exceptional mathematician with a peculiar and fascinating personality and yet he remains largely unknown. In fact, he might be considered the father of the von Neumann architecture computer and the pioneer of Artificial Intelligence. And all thanks to his machines; both those that Church called “Turing machines” and the a-, c-, o-, unorganized- and p-machines, which gave rise to evolutionary computations and genetic programming as well as connectionism and learning. This paper looks at all of these and at why he is such an often overlooked and misunderstood figure.

We had a contest [at CDG] to come up with the most innocuous name that didn’t sound ridiculous. “Communications Design Group” is pretty vague, because what we’re likely to [invent] will be something other than what we’d put on a list. [But] the communication and design aspects do mean something. People communicate with each other, with themselves, in groups, with computers, and computers communicate with each other. If you take all the things in the world that can communicate and think of a future in which all those communications are qualitatively richer, then you have a vision.We live in a world full of hype. When I look at most of the Silicon Valley companies [claiming to do invention research], they’re really selling pop culture. Pop culture is very incremental and is about creating things other than high impact. Being able to do things that change what business means is going to have a huge impact–more than something that changes what social interaction means in pop culture.

I’m reminded of how Greenspan’s observers in the financial industry tended to project all manner of genius onto him simply because he refused to articulate, in any concrete way that involved anything so crass as a narrative, what he was thinking or doing. For market watchers and finance industry savants, Greenspan was a human koan upon which they were expected to puzzle out their own economic enlightenment. If you didn’t get it, you were the idiot. 

One way to look at this is that when a new powerful medium of expression comes along that was not enough in our genes to be part of traditional cultures, it is something we need to learn how to get fluent with and use. Without the special learning, the new media will be mostly used to automate the old forms of thought. This will also have effects, especially if the new media is more efficient at what the old did: this can result in gluts, that act like legal drugs (as indeed are the industrial revolution’s ability to create sugar and fat, it can also overproduce stories, news, status, and new ways for oral discourse.

To understand what has happened, we only need to look at the history of writing and printing to note two very different consequences (a) the first, a vast change over the last 450 years in how the physical and social worlds are dealt with via the inventions of modern science and governance, and (b) that most people who read at all still mostly read fiction, self-help and religion books, and cookbooks, etc.* (all topics that would be familiar to any cave-person).

Bob Barton [said] "The basic principle of recursive design is to make the parts have the same power as the whole." For the first time I thought of the whole as the entire computer, and wondered why anyone would want to divide it up into weaker things called data structures and procedures. Why not divide it up into little computers... Why not thousands of them, each simulating a useful structure?

Encouraged by his friend Saul Bellow, he decided to turn the article into a book. “The Closing of the American Mind,” which Simon & Schuster brought out in February, 1987, launched a campaign of criticism of American higher education that has taken little time off since.

I recognize that much of what provoked me to turn to literature in the first place—vital, daring, and meditative expressions of human experience—is there. It is there in the naked lyric of a blog post celebrating or mourning some personal or public event. It is there in the classical drama of a brawling, controversial Wikipedia article whose behind-the-scenes “talk” page stages the chorus of the “rule of many” or “wisdom of crowds.”16 And it is there in the epic of all the social-news, shared-bookmark, or similar sites that build a portrait of collective life from constantly reshuffled excerpts, links, and tags from that life akin to Homeric formulae. Above all, as a literature professor, I recognize that—viral YouTube videos aside—the vast preponderance of Web 2.0 is an up-close and personal experience of language.

the materiality of our (textual) scholarship and its material modes of production, is and should not in any way be separate from a discussion on the content of our work.