Holding On to Reality :: Albert Borgmann Philosophy Technology Essays

Holding On to Reality Professor and philosopher Albert Borgmann proposes a respectful balance between current technology and the way it interacts with society in his recent book, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium. Like many technological theorists, Borgmann ponders, "the deeper question of whether the recent and imminent flood of information is good for anybody" (4). In response to this uncertainty, the author devises a theory and ethics of information with the intention of rectifying society's often-troubling relationship with science and technology. Borgmann's theory divides information into three distinct parts based on the way they affect reality - natural information illuminates reality, cultural information transforms reality, and technological information displaces reality. To understand these categories, and how they highlight key developments in information technology, it is important to know what the author means when using the term "information." In Borgmann's theory, information is ordered around the relationship between a person, a sign, and a thing. A person uses his or her intelligence - both native and acquired mental ability - to place a framework of context around a messenger or signal, known as a sign, in order to understand the message, or thing, which is presented to them (38). To provide an illustration: Imagine yourself on the shore of your local beach. As you are putting down your towel, you notice a trail of deep marks in the sand, stretching a great distance down the shoreline. Since you have been to the beach before, you know that these marks are footprints. You also know that if these were old footprints, the tide would have washed them away. After a moment of thought, you interpret this trail to mean that other human beings are present farther along the beach. In this case, the sign (footprints) communicates to us the presence of a thing (humans). Since the recipient of the sign (you), has the intelligence f rom previous experience or education to know what footprints are and what happens to them, you are able to place the sign in its proper context, and understand the signal of footprints to mean the presence of human beings. If we could not formulate a relationship between the footprints in the previous example and the presence of human beings, the footprints would be just another piece of formless matter and energy. The meanings we construct out of the signs and messages that we receive are important because they help us to make sense of our environments, identities, and realities.

sunday too far away :: essays research papers

Sunday Too Far Away is set on an Australian sheep station in 1955. It shows the life of a shearer, Foley (played by Jack Thompson), In the hardships of living through the union action of that year and the consequences of age in the demanding and competitive world of the shearers.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   the film traces the actions of Foley . Foley is a long time gun shearer who has returned from retirement for one last season to make the most of a pay rise to shearers. Though out shawn by a new comer Foley is the uncontested leader of the shearing gang. Through him and scenes like the unmotivated break down in front of the owner's daughter, the only feminine aspect of the film, the audience receives the emotion of the film. His predicament and the feel of the film are emphasized with the parellelism of the older alchoholic Garth and his young clumsy counter part. Foley is the most active character initiating brawls and jeering the arriving scabs. Director Ken Hannam uses the eclectic character range of the film to demonstrate the masculinity and mateship of Australian culture in the era. The competitiveness, alchoholism, gambling and distain for the daughter reak â€Å"Aussie† maleness and provide a bleak but relative humour to the film. Through out the film speech is kept to a minimum and the feel of the film is replaced by actions such as the scene where Foley and his â€Å"mate† compete in washing clothes while naked. Through similar scenes it seems that Ken Hannam is showing the nessecity and pain of masculine culture through the characters and situations presented. sunday too far away :: essays research papers Sunday Too Far Away is set on an Australian sheep station in 1955. It shows the life of a shearer, Foley (played by Jack Thompson), In the hardships of living through the union action of that year and the consequences of age in the demanding and competitive world of the shearers.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   the film traces the actions of Foley . Foley is a long time gun shearer who has returned from retirement for one last season to make the most of a pay rise to shearers. Though out shawn by a new comer Foley is the uncontested leader of the shearing gang. Through him and scenes like the unmotivated break down in front of the owner's daughter, the only feminine aspect of the film, the audience receives the emotion of the film. His predicament and the feel of the film are emphasized with the parellelism of the older alchoholic Garth and his young clumsy counter part. Foley is the most active character initiating brawls and jeering the arriving scabs. Director Ken Hannam uses the eclectic character range of the film to demonstrate the masculinity and mateship of Australian culture in the era. The competitiveness, alchoholism, gambling and distain for the daughter reak â€Å"Aussie† maleness and provide a bleak but relative humour to the film. Through out the film speech is kept to a minimum and the feel of the film is replaced by actions such as the scene where Foley and his â€Å"mate† compete in washing clothes while naked. Through similar scenes it seems that Ken Hannam is showing the nessecity and pain of masculine culture through the characters and situations presented.

Advanced Boot Options

The recovery tools available in windows 7 are ? ? ? Advanced Boot Options Menu Startup Repair Tool Backup & Restore Center System Protections Frequently used recovery techniques are Event Viewer – if OS doesn’t load in normal or safe mode, check the event viewer for problems occur in security, system and apps logs. Safe Mode: Loads minimum of services & drivers only needed to load win 7. Can troubleshoot the devices and drivers. Last Known Good Configuration Startup Repair Tool Backup & Restore Center System Restore Using Advanced Boot options: Used to troubleshoot error that allows windows 7 from successful booting.To access press F8 while startup. The options available are Safe mode Safe mode with networking– safe mode with networking enabled Safe mode with command prompt – safe mode in CLI Enable Boot logging– creates log file â€Å"ntbtlog. txt† records all process occur during booting. Enable low resolution video (640Ãâ€"480)- uses stan dard vga drivers for display. Last known good configuration– Restores last Config that runs in good condition. Directory Services Restore Mode- Used for domain controllers Debugging Mode- Runs kernel debugger.Advanced troubleshooting tools Disable Automatic Restart on System failure- prevents system from restarting when it fails to boot. Disable driver signature enforcement- enforces driver to install that don’t have valid signature Start windows normally- Normal startup Startup Repair Tool: If system files of windows 7 is failed to boot or corrupted or deleted, using windows 7 media can able to restore it. But this tool cannot handle Hardware failures Backup and Restore: Used for user of windows 7 to protect their personal data from disaster.This tool is used for making a backup of your data and also it can able to restore the backup data. This tool can be opened in â€Å"control panelackup and restore† In that console user can find advanced boot options o Tur n off the schedule – backup schedule is turned off o Create a system restore image – Backup OS files o Create a system repair disk – Create bootable disk Creating System Image: It captures the snapshot of entire hdd & stored in specified location Control panel -> Backup & Restore center-> CREATE system Image link -> choose location -> START backup-> no for system repair disk.After the above process the image is created Restoring Image: Load win 7 media to dvd rom, reboot the machine ->enter in to â€Å"Repair your computer† Now select OS-> system recover option appears->choose windows complete pc restore-> select the image-> Restore it.Using System Protection: It creates backup and saves the configuration info of system files and settings It don’t overwrite, it saves in previous versions which is called as â€Å"restore point† So user can return to multiple possible configurations It creates restores points automatically if file system in NT FS, manually also can create. To open â€Å"sysdm. cpl† open system protection tab.

Dancing at Lughnasa

In the time ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’ was set Gerry and Chris’s relationship would have been extremely unorthodox and would have circulated a lot of town gossip. Having a child out of wedlock was extremely shocking and making the decision to then keep Michael even more so. In 1936 women had very few rights and with the shock of Michael being born only the towns respect for their brother, a missionary, kept them from being societal lepers. Friel presents the relationship between Gerry and Chris by using stage directions to show the true feelings between them and how their relationship is sustained.Having Gerry and Chris talking in the garden while the four other sisters are inside listening intently shows how little privacy the two have in their relationship. When Gerry first arrives Chris appears extremely cold and offhand in front of him using one word answers ‘Chris: Hello, Gerry†¦ yes†¦yes. ’ All of this gives the impression that she has very little time for him and doesn’t particularly care about him. However Friel’s staging shows the audience that she really does care because we see her reaction before Gerry comes on stage.Friel portrays her as standing stock still in shock then, when coming to her senses, rushing around panicking, ‘adroitly adjusts her hair and clothes. ’ It is the panic before the extract that shows her much Chris truly does care about Gerry and also about how little the sisters have in their lives due to the their scramble to make themselves presentable.This highlights how Gerry is a key romantic figure in the play because even though all the while the sisters are saying ‘Kate: He won’t stay the night here’ and ‘Rose: I hate him!’ they still all end up crowding around the window to listen in and watch, suggesting that though disapproving they still half wish to be in Chris’s shoes. The social constraints of the situation lead them t o wanting Gerry out of the families lives, but still the desire is there through the constant comments. These comments are key to the suggestion of an invasion of privacy, ‘Maggie: you should see the way she’s looking at him†¦Kate: they’re not still talking are they?’Friel is trying to show how hard it must be for Gerry and Chris to live in such an enclosed area where everyone knows everyone’s business, thus exploring a theme of romance, or lack of romance. This is continued throughout the extract, the fact that Gerry never visits ‘Chris: 13 months’ making the relationship seem very one sided – Chris remembering the last visit to the day while Gerry can’t remember the month. Gerry proposes to Chris at the very end of the extract and this gives a sign that maybe he does care about her.Even though Chris turns him down there is still the slight remembrance of this moment throughout the rest of the play, leading to the au diences opinion that maybe Gerry does truly care for Chris despite leaving her alone with child. However through Michael’s narrative closer to the end of the play in the second act we find out that Gerry already had ‘a wife and three grown children’, Friel choosing to leave this revelation till the end to produce a far more dramatic climax to their relationship. It is then that the audience realises that Gerry never intended to marry Chris and only offered in the knowledge that she would refuse.This all gives the impression that there is never any real closeness or intimacy for the two of them and the whole summer of happiness before, ‘suddenly he takes her in his arms and dance. ’ was a lie. A large influence on Friel when writing ‘Dancing at Lughnasa’ was the changing role of women in society. Thatcher had just been Prime Minister and women’s rights were becoming much more accepted in the 1990’s, perhaps why Friel chose t o make this such a large part of the play. Set in 1936 the Mundy sisters would not have been at all accepted by society with Chris having Michael out of wedlock and then deciding to keep him.Changing attitudes within society would have influenced Friel’s interpretation of Chris and Gerry’s relationship. Friel depicted this family as an example of what is yet to come, the sisters supported Chris throughout and after her pregnancy even though it went against societies beliefs, thus inflicting Chris’s embarrassment upon themselves as well yet still sticking together as a family. Friel emphasizes that women should have the right to do as they please through the disruption of outside influences.At the beginning of the play the sisters are happy in their little bubble making jokes about the outside world ‘Maggie: steady on girl, today its lipstick; tomorrow it’s the gin bottle’ although never participating in it. It’s when they begin to allo w others into their circle that things begin to go down hill for them. Before Gerry’s arrival they were all dancing and laughing but his arrival marked a change for them all, Friel perhaps suggesting that women don’t need the influences of men and all they bring with them is destruction.Danny Bradley and Rose are another example of this, the death of Rose’s defenceless white rooster is symbolic of mans predatory nature and the violence of this act implies violence between Rose and Bradley. Therefore Friel is portraying women as stronger without the male interference, Chris and Gerry’s relationship is used to highlight this as it is obvious to the audience that Chris would have been better off without Gerry in the first place but it is this continued procrastinating relationship that truly destroys her.The audience views Chris and Gerry’s relationship with trepidation throughout the play due to Friel’s depiction of him as a stereotypical woma niser. Kate calls him a ‘Loafer! Wastrel! ’ but conveniently neglects to mention the obvious charisma he has. In a short few minutes of conversation he has turned Chris from cold and unwelcoming ‘Chris: Thirteen months. ’ To one who is warm and laughing and allows Gerry to ‘dance her lightly, elegantly across the garden. ’ The audience views this exchange with surprise having heard only very negative things about Gerry from the sisters; the easy acceptance from Chris confuses them.The audience’s mistrust of Gerry’s character increases after the small discussion of Agnes between the two. Having already seen Agnes’s rigid, almost forced disinterest in Gerry, and then to have Gerry asking specifically after her Friel creates a slight unease for the audience, suggesting that something may have between the two of them. This leads to the audience beginning to see the cracks in the family’s foundations with Gerry seemingly at the centre of this. Friel enforces this idea of him being a womaniser later in act 2 when he begins to flirt with Agnes ‘Gerry: Dance with me Agnes.’ and then kisses her forehead, all of this watched by Chris.The audience begins to really mistrust Gerry at this point as it is obvious that he is the cause of conflict between the family they have come to love. The audience is seeing men in a bad light which relates to the feelings at the time it was being performed when the term ‘glass ceiling’ was coming into existence, women in the workplace being oppressed by men and now, in the play, them to being oppressed in relationships. There is the feeling that men can get away with any sort of misdemeanour by just walking away, leaving, whereas women i.e.Chris, are always left with the result – a baby. Gerry’s carrying on represents this stereotypical male so that when the audience discovers that Gerry in fact has ‘a wife and three grown chil dren’ it comes as no surprise. In conclusion, Friel presents Gerry and Chris’s relationship as something parallel to that of a pre 1990’s relationship. He wants to suggest to the audience that women no need longer depend on men by showing how much better off the Mundy sisters were before the arrival of Gerry and the conflict he brought within the family.Although the influences on Friel were all about the empowerment of women, he presents Gerry and Chris’s relationship with Gerry as the dominant figure, putting the play in the context of its setting and to show how the male dominance was a cause of the family breaking down. Through his presentation of the relationship he is evoking the idea that there are more possibilities available to an empowered women rather than a dominated one.

London Jets

Questions for the London Jets Case Download the file LondonJets. xls, available on the course website. I. Perform RFM Analysis: (recency, frequency, monetary (total sales) analysis) as indicated on page 3 of the case; steps for RFM are given on page 8 of the case (I have provided one approach on page 3 of this document). Use pivot table with Frequency and Monetary value for rows and Recency for column. Data field should be Count of CustID. Important Note — The format for this table is shown on the next page; use this format for your RFM table. Please provide a brief interpretation for the RFM analysis – assume you are the consultant to London Jets; how would you explain what the numbers in the pivot table mean (keep the discussion brief; each and every entry need not be explained). II. Additional Analysis: Do two additional sets of analysis beyond RFM. As an example, you may want to analyze attendance patterns for Fan Club Members versus non-members to see if there is any merit in increasing the size of this club (this would count as one analysis). There are several different variables in the database, and as such there are lots of ways in which the data can be analyzed. Think about the issue London Jets is facing – how to increase attendance – and let this objective drive your analysis. For each additional analysis undertaken by your team, provide a rationale as to why should London Jets consider the customer segment you are analyzing. Please also be sure to briefly explain the outcome of your analysis (what did you learn for your analysis, and how London Jets can benefit from this analysis). What to submit? Please submit one hard copy of the report per team. List the last names of team members on the cover page in alphabetical order. Prepare your report in power point such that it could be presented to London Jets’ management (although your team will not be asked to present the report). Your report should end with a Conclusions page where you draw conclusions from all the analyses you have done, and recommended actions London Jets can take to increase attendance to its games based on your work. Please make sure that the report is contained within a maximum of 12 pages (slides) including the title and conclusions pages. Team work models I have seen two models of team work. The first and more commonly used model is where the team divides the workload and each member is responsible for completing their share of work. These disparate pieces are put together as a report. The obvious advantage of this approach is that the work is divided evenly among members. The drawback of this approach is that sloppy work by one or more team members adversely impacts the score of those who put in good work. Additionally, if someone in the team does not take the trouble to integrate the disparate pieces, the end result can be a report that appears disjoint (i. . made up of pieces that do not flow well together). The second, less common approach is where each member provides input on every aspect (question) of the case. Compared to the approach described above, the second approach certainly requires more time from each member. The advantage however is that often the best ideas (i. e. responses to case questions) make it into the report, resulting in a higher quality of sub mitted work. Important Note — This note applies for all cases done in this class. I cannot entertain questions such as â€Å"Professor, please take a look at what we have so far and let us know if we are on the right track†. Teams are expected to work on each case independently. Taking necessary decisions in situations where there is no clear consensus is a part of team learning process. [pic] Learn more about RFM here: http://searchcrm. techtarget. com/sDefinition/0,,sid11_gci751219,00. html Steps for creating RFM table for London Jets Step 0 — Start by creating a column with 3000 entries such that the first 600 entries are 5s, followed by 600 4s, 600 3s, 600 2s and 600 1s. With copy and paste, this takes  less than  2 minutes and I can gladly show you how. Here are the remaining steps for assigning RFM codes to the London Jets. Step 1 — Sort the entire data on recency of attendance so that customers that attended the games most recently will be on the top of the list. Add a new column to the data labeled R, where you copy and paste the column created in step 0. Step 2 — Sort the entire data, including recency codes assigned in step 1, on the basis of frequency of attendance such that customers with the highest frequency of attendance are at the top of the list. Add a new column to the data labeled F, where you copy and paste the column created in step 0. Step 3 — Sort the entire data, including recency codes assigned in step 1 and frequency codes assigned in step 2, on the basis of  monetary spending such that customers spending the most are at the top of the list. Add a new column to the data labeled M, where you assign first 1000 hundred customers a  M code of 5, the next 1000 a code of 4, and the last 1000 a code of 3. You are done assigning codes at the end of step 3, and are ready to create the RFM table.

An Analysis of Hermann Ebbinghaus’s Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

An Analysis of Hermann Ebbinghaus’s Introduction to Cognitive Psychology Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was the pioneer of Cognitive Psychology, which has a long past with a very short history. The part of human thinking has always been an elemental focus of interest. An Even ancient philosopher such as Aristotle was interested in understanding the mechanics of how our minds work. Psychology can be generally defined as the study of mental processing as well as behavior. Cognitive Psychology is defined the same, just without the behavior. This is why behaviorism is a study set apart on its own, which can be compared and contrasted with Cognitive Psychology. Although Cognitive Psychology will observe some behavior, it is only as a segway to understanding the mental processing that goes on â€Å"under the hood†. These intricate processes include attention, remembering, understanding language, and even solving problems. Even though these processes require a complex amount of thinking, we rarely stop to â€Å"think† about us actually thinking. P sychologist John B. Watson suggested that we separate psychology from consciousness to be able to focus solely on the behavioral perspective. Many experimental methods researching measurements, observations, and repeatability, which Cognitive Psychology is unable to use. These methods are some of the most instrumental in developing research conclusions that have led to some of the most important breakthroughs in history. Watsons approach was later termed, Behaviorism, this dismissed the scientific aspects of psychology while emphasizing the study of observable stimuli with observable responses. This has led to Behaviorism also being called S-R Psychology. In many instances, you cannot observe the same experimental methods and arrive at the same conclusions as you could with Cognitive Psychology, even though Cognitive Psychology does observe little behavior explain why the brain processes the way it does. Behaviorist does not discard the need for consciousness, they do however reject the idea that it is meaningfully studied. In both psychologists, their intent is to fully understand the mind and all it inhabits. Cognitive Psychologist just believes that studying the actual processing of the mind is how you can arrive at the answer. Behaviorist believes that human behavior is the key element in fully understand the way our brains work and function. They both do agree, however, that without either the c onsciousness or the behaviors they would come to a â€Å"standstill† in their research. Most of our research that has been conducted in regards to attention is characterized by the terms of pre-attentive and post-attentive processing. Pre-attentive processing is generally characterized as happening quite quickly, mainly before the attention has been focused on the stimuli. One could say that it refers to arriving at the conclusion before one starts thinking. Thoughts that occur pre-attentively are also considered as synesthetic experiences. Pre-attentive and post-attentive processes contrast in the way that we think about objects. With post-attentive processing, we may actually count objects if there are more than a small amount, or focus on something longer than if we thought about it pre-attentively. In the example of counting sheep pre-attentively, if you see two, chances are that you did not count in your head, one and two. You automatically just saw the two sheep and you r brain processed them as the number two. Post-attentively you would most likely have this occur if there were seven sheep, counting each until you reached the number seven. These processes of counting are referred to as Subitizing, which means quick and effortless. You can see this example when you are counting the two sheep, which seemed quite easy compared to counting numerous sheep. Subitizing is actually faster than counting and if the items are less than three, it is virtually unaffected over time. (Schwartze) The process where we strategically direct our attention in response to situational demands is executive attention. Many describe the nature of executive attention as becoming an object in direct focus recently with many researchers struggling to specify what we might call â€Å"cognitive control†. For example, when you are simply doing homework you may be reading research while typing, along with having music playing in the background. We are able to direct our attention to many different things depending on the relevance or the importance of the subject. The Stroop effect is present when we see a colors word printed out in a differen t color than the word printed. For example, the word blue printed out in pink ink, this would make it very hard for us to say the word pink when we look at it since we tend to read the word. We must slow down and pronounce the word as the color of the ink instead of the word printed, this is relevant to executive attention because we must focus on the color instead of mindlessly reading the word. In regards to the measure of our control on where we focus this attention, this is referred to as the operation span. The operation span can assess a person’s ability to keep track of multiple forms of information. This can go hand in hand with the inhibition effect that inhibits you from processing certain information. The inability to control your attention or to focus it on our homework instead of listening to the background music that was previously stated. (Fernandez-Duque) One original example of a perception of agency is when people visit a hypnotist. They believe their action s are not from their own choice but rather from being hypnotized to do so. This has actually been proven to be a hoax, so the person unknowingly decides to do those actions. People have this feeling that they are not in control and in the case of a hypnotist telling you to do something your metacognition of agency is quite poor. Your metacognition of agency might be quite high if you are doing an activity such as painting. You know you are making strokes with the paintbrush and what colors you are painting with. Knowingly you choose where to paint and even the subject you are going to paint. This is an example of being in complete control of what you are doing while consciously knowing that you are the one doing it. (Carr)

Cybercrime - reading critique Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Cybercrime - reading critique - Essay Example Cyber criminals and terrorist groups are formed a nexus to destroy the US interests. US military is currently depending partly on the civilian technology services which can be misused/ exploited by the cyber attackers. Kinetic weapons, power of electromagnetic energy, malicious computer code etc are some of the most common methods of cyber attacks employed by cyber terrorists. Botnets (vast numbers of compromised computers that have been infected with malicious code, and can be remotely-controlled through commands sent via the Internet) are another major tool for cybercrime, because of its effectiveness and the easy use by even a non-skilled malicious user. The cyber attacks faced by Estonia in April 2007 revealed that political protestors may have rented the services of cybercriminals in order to destabilize the government. Cyber criminals have already established alliances with drug traffickers in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and elsewhere where profitable illegal activities are used to support terrorist groups. A coordinated attack on civilian and military computers by the cyber attackers may adversely affect the interests of US economy and the US military. â€Å"Every action has equal but opposite reaction† which is Newton’s third law. It is true in the case of computers and internet as well. It is a fact that computers and internet have revolutionized the human life immensely. At the same time like most of the other great discoveries, internet can also be used for destructive purposes. When nuclear energy was discovered, people thought that it can be used for constructive purposes. But nowadays the world is undergoing the immense threat of nuclear weapons and a possible nuclear war. Same way it is quite possible that prominent countries may engage in cyber wars in order to destabilize other countries. Instead of utilizing the contributions of science and technology for constructive purposes and collective growths, most of the prominent