6.4(c) Using energy more efficiently
Access to safe, clean and sustainable energy supplies is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity during the twenty-first century. This unit will survey the world’s present energy systems and their sustainability problems, together with some of the possible solutions to those problems and how these might emerge in practice.
5.1 Energy services
Access to safe, clean and sustainable energy supplies is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity during the twenty-first century. This unit will survey the world’s present energy systems and their sustainability problems, together with some of the possible solutions to those problems and how these might emerge in practice.
5 Interrelationships
What is ecology and why is it important to our understanding of the world around us? This unit looks at how we can study ecosystems to explore the effect that humans are having on the environment.
2.6 Mathematical communication When you looked at the title of this reading, did you experience unease? Most people shudder at the thought of dealing with anything mathematical, remembering the torturous lessons at school trying to grapple with calculus, statistics and logic. Yet most of us use Author(s):
2.4 Oral and written communication Humans use language to communicate. This is an obvious statement, but what is language and how do we use it? Language is basically a set of symbols with associated meanings. These symbols are delivered using a set of rules for stringing the symbols together to generate additional meaning. Humans use mostly sounds to represent these symbols, although as an Italian I can communicate common meanings by only using a range of hand gestures! We string together phonetic sounds to make words, and we
1.6 Increasing complication, complexity and risk: mystery and mechanics The winter of 1665/66 must have been exceptionally harrowing for the inhabitants of England. Along with the winter weather, the country suffered an outbreak of the plague. A minor effect of this was a decision by Trinity College Cambridge to close its doors. One of those affected by this decision was a young Fellow, Isaac Newton, who returned home to spend the winter in the Lincolnshire rectory in which he had been brought up. Isolated in the bleak fens and without college high table an
2.1 Learning and culture As discussed in Reading 1.6, the behaviour of all living organisms that determines their resource use is mostly controlled by a set of models encoded in their genetic material. Most significant changes in the behaviour of a particular species of Author(s):
4.3 The use of systems engineering in organisations The development of systems engineering was contemporaneous with that of systems analysis in public policy. Though its origins can be traced back to the 1930s and 1940s (Hall, 1962, p. 7), its more widespread application can be dated from the early 1950s. The earliest formal teaching of systems engineering was a course presented in 1950 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by G.W. Gilman, who was then Director of Systems Engineering at Bell Laboratories. Gilman was a strong promoter of
4.1 Beginnings Systems engineering has its roots in three linked strands of thinking: the concepts of systems science, engineering and public policy problem resolution. The first of these can be traced back to the work of von Bertalanffy (1968, pp. 8–15, 96–98) and others during the 1920s and 1930s but received a significant impetus when, in 1954, the Society for General Systems Theory was established at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The society later cha
5 Conclusion Knowledge technologies, as software systems, embody formal models of how the world works: for example, networks between people, what their roles are, how information should flow, rules about interdependences between variables, and how to index and categorise information. If well designed, such models relieve people of mundane activities, allowing them to focus on what they do best: communication, negotiation, creative problem solving: that is, the construction of new shared meaning. At their
4.16.1 Ontologies + the Web = the Semantic Web Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has defined a vision of the Web's evolution into the Semantic Web:
The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. 4.15.1 Ontologies We noted earlier that, in philosophy, an ontology refers fundamentally to ‘being’, or ‘what can be’. In the field of artificial intelligence the term ‘ontology’ has been appropriated to mean a ‘reusable terminological scheme’ or, if you prefer, a ‘conceptualisation’: a scheme for providing a rigorous description of the concepts, attributes and interrelationships deemed relevant to describe a particular aspect of the world. Its precision means that 4.13.2 Example: an ‘intelligent’ email system Let us work through an email example of making a system ‘smarter’. We are all familiar with the standardised fields in an email system: From, To, Subject. The computer needs the To/From information, expressed in a standard format, to direct the message to its addressees and allow them to reply. It has no concept of who the sender and recipient are, or what the Subject field means. We can imagine simple knowledge-level email categories which add status information 4.13 Technologies and explicit knowledge Knowledge-based systems have the ability to analyse specific kinds of information in order to take action. Since we have earlier defined knowledge as arising out of the interpretation of information as mediated by representations, we can claim that in a limited sense such systems can ‘know’ things: they have a representation of part of the world, and they have some rules that allow them to analyse that representation, from which they can decide on a course of action. In that sense, t 4.7 Technologies and the tacit dimension continued The emergence of the internet and private, higher-capacity corporate intranets makes it possible to ‘broadcast’ over digital networks, saving time and money since staff do not have to physically gather in one location. The term webcastin 4.5 Technologies and the tacit dimension In this unit we have discussed the intriguing notion of tacit knowledge, or perhaps better, knowing as a situated process. What might it mean to provide technological support which exploits the tacit dimension? If ‘tacit’ can mean ‘not yet codified, but could be’ in Nonaka and Takeuchi's (1995) sense, then we can devise computer systems that assist in formalising information and ‘transforming’ it into explicit, shared knowledge to feed the knowledge spiral. 3.3.1 Metaphors for organisational memory systems
Section 2 argued for a model of knowledge deriving from the situated interpretation of abstract representations. There is an active process by which different interpretations may result from a given information source. This is in contrast to the popular notion that knowledge can be unproblematically encoded and digitally stored and accessed. Bannon and Kuutti (1996) argue that the term ‘organizational memory’ is widely used to mean a repository based on an implicit ‘mem 2.5 Design implications The difficulties just described have very practical implications when it comes to designing technologies. Consider the following quotations: in selecting any representation we are in the very same act unavoidably making a set of decisions about how and what to see in the world … a knowledge representation is a set of ontological commitments. It is unavoidably so because of the inevitable imperfectio 2.3.1 From tacit pre-understanding to symbolic representation This section reflects many of the critiques that have been made of efforts to apply technology to knowledge work without taking seriously the differences between human and artificial knowledge representations. Stahl (1993a,b) has presented an informative analysis of the transformation of knowledge from tacit to explicit to formally codified representations in computer-interpretable form, emphasising the centrality of interpretation situated in the workplace (Figure 2). Stahl also seeks 2.1 Representation, interpretation and communities of practice Let us start with a thought experiment. Where is the music? The music is in the musical notation. No, the music is in the mind
Box 4.5 Technology briefing: audiovisual Webcasting
Activity 2.1
