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Bartz
editCarol Bartz (1992).
She became CEO of Autodesk and gave up further investment on the Project Xanadu.
Buckland
edit- Michael K. Buckland
- Emanuel Goldberg, Electronic Document Retrieval, and Vannevar Bush's Memex
- Journal of the American Society for Information Science, vol. 43, no. 4 (May 1992): 284-294. [1] (This text may vary slightly from the published version.)
- Postscript 19 February 2009: For a more detailed and more up-to-date account see the biography: M. Buckland. Emanuel Goldberg and his Knowledge Machine. Libraries Unlimited, 2006. ISBN 0-313-31332-6, esp. chaps 14 & 19.
- Abstract
- Vannevar Bush's famous paper "As We May Think" (1945) described an imaginary information retrieval machine, the Memex. The Memex is usually viewed, unhistorically, in relation to subsequent developments using digital computers. This paper attempts to reconstruct the little-known background of information retrieval in and before 1939 when "As We May Think" was originally written. The Memex was based on Bush's work during 1938-1940 developing an improved photoelectric microfilm selector, an electronic retrieval technology pioneered by Emanuel Goldberg of Zeiss Ikon, Dresden, in the 1920s. Visionary statements by Paul Otlet (1934) and Walter Schuermeyer (1935) and the development of electronic document retrieval technology before Bush are examined.
- Extracts
After World War II, Coombs, Howard, and Steinhardt worked together at Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in St Paul, Minnesota (Tomasch, 1980). Bush was approached by his former students, now at ERA, for support for further work on microfilm selectors. Eventually the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a contract to ERA to build a new microfilm selector. A librarian, Ralph Shaw, then Director of the National Agriculture Library, was funded to encode test material and to test the new ERA machine. Carroll Wilson, who had handled Bush's patents at MIT and was now at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), is said to have arranged for the AEC to provide funding to the Department of Commerce for microfilm selector development (Coile, 1990; Engineering Research Associates, 1949; Pike & Bagg, 1962). [emphasis not original]
Shaw told Goldberg that he had been unaware of Goldberg's work and subsequently mentioned Goldberg's patent (E. Goldberg, 1931) in his two principal papers on the ERA microfilm selector (Shaw, 1949a; 1949b). Later Robert Fairthorne (1958) discussed "As We May Think" in the Computer Journal. Fairthorne was critical of Bush's ideas, commented that "few of his suggestions were original," and also mentioned Goldberg's prior work. Fairthorne's paper was reprinted in his book Towards information retrieval (1961, 135-146). In 1960, Hawkins, writing in a book edited by Shaw, states:
- "Shaw credited Dr. E. Goldberg with the first practical application of electronics to the selection of data on film and Dr. Vannevar Bush with the basic principles of organization of knowledge and the basic electronic system used in the Rapid Selector." (Hawkins, 1960, 145). [my emphasis]
Vannevar Bush's contributions in this area were two-fold: (i) A significant engineering achievement by the team under his leadership in building a truly rapid prototype microfilm selector; and (ii) a speculative article, "As We May Think," which, through its skillful writing and the social prestige of the author, has had an immediate and lasting effect in stimulating others. As Fairthorne observed, Bush's paper was timely and "opened people's eyes and purses." [my emphasis]
- Berthold, A. (1938). "Selected biography on photographic methods of documentary reproduction." Journal of Documentary Reproduction, 1: 87-123.
- Bryce, J. W. (1938). "Statistical machine." U.S. Patent 2,124,906. July 26, 1938.
- Carruthers, R. H. (1938). "The place of microfilm in public library reference work." Journal of Documentary Reproduction, 1: 263-268.
- Schuermeyer, W. (1936). "Mitteilungen ueber einige technische Neuerungen und Anwendungsmethoden fotographischer Hilfegeraete fuer das Dokumentarische Arbeiten." I.I.D. Communicationes, 3, Fasc. 1: 1-10.
- Schuermeyer, W., & Loosjes, T. P. (1937). "Literatur ueber die Anwendung von photographischen Reproduktionsverfathren in der Dokumentation." I.I.D. Communicationes, 4, Fasc. 3: 23-29.
- Schwegmann, G. A. (1940). "Microfilming in business and industry." Journal of Documentary Reproduction 3: 147-152.
- Tate, V. D. (1938). "The present state of equipment and supplies for microphotography." Journal of Documentary Reproduction 2: 3-62.
- Townsend, L. G. (1938). Method of and Apparatus for the Indexing and Photo-Transcription of Records. U.S. Patent 2,121,061. June 21 1938.
- Wells, H. G. (1938). World Brain.
- Zeiss Ikon AG. (1937). 75 Jahre Photo- und Kinotechnik; Festschrift herausgegeben anlaesslich der Feier des 75-jaehrigen Bestehens der Zeiss Ikon AG. und ihrer Vorgaengerfirmen 1862 - 1937. [?Dresden: Zeiss Ikon].
- Zeiss Ikon AG. & Goldberg, E. (1938). Vorrichtung zum Aussuchen statistischer und Buchhalterischer Angaben. [German] Patentschrift 670 190. Dec. 22, 1938.
- Other sources
In 1922, Bush, his college roommate, Laurence Marshall, and a colleague of Bush from the company Amrad (a small company for radio devices, where Vannevar served as a consultant), Charles G. Smith, set up the Metals and Controls Corporation, for producing thermostats and thermionic tubes. Later the company managed to market successfully a device, called the S-tube. This was a gaseous rectifier, invented by Charles Smith (the patent was purchased by Amrad), that greatly improved the efficiency of radios, eliminating the need for radio batteries. Bush made much money from the venture. The company, renamed Raytheon in 1925, became a large electronics company and defense contractor, and still exist now as a major American defense contractor and industrial corporation. [my emphasis]
Bush also worked on developing machines that would automate human thinking. Specialization in just about every field of science was creating a glut of information. Something was needed to help sort through the growing store of accumulated knowledge. In the 1930s microfilm, which had been around for some decades, was growing in popularity as a storage device, especially among librarians. Bush, who was a photography enthusiast, was quite interested in this resurgent technology. He proposed to build a machine for the FBI that could review 1000 fingerprints a minute. They however turned him down. In 1938 Bush and John Howard built and patented the rapid selector, a machine designed for high-speed referencing of information, stored on microfilm. In 1945 Bush wrote an article, describing a device (called memex), the prototype of the modern hypertext systems. [my emphasis]
In 1919, Vannevar Bush joined the electrical engineering department at MIT. In 1923, he was made Professor of Electric Power Transmission. Throughout the late 20s and early 30s, Bush and his students developed the differential analyser, a mechanical device that used a variety of complex gears and other analog tools to solve differential equations with as many as 18 variables. This was inspired by Charles Babbage's difference engine, and was an obvious precursor to the modern-day digital computer.
By 1932, Vannevar Bush was appointed Vice President of MIT and Dean of the School of Engineering. Throughout the 1930s, he focused on the information-storage capacity of microfilm, and in 1938, developed and patented a device called the rapid selector, another precursor to computers and the Internet. This device quickly shuffled between microfilm cartridges, displaying their contents on a screen. He referred to this as a "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." This device became commonly known as a Memex. [my emphasis]
Vannevar Bush was elected President of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., in 1938, one of the greatest scientific establishments in the world at the time. He influenced President Roosevelt to focus more attention on science, forging a relationship between science and the government that persists to this day. In 1940 he was appointed Chairman of the President's National Defense Research Committee, which oversaw the Manhattan Project and many other important research projects during WWII. As WWII ended, Vannevar Bush proposed the creation of a fundamental alliance between the government, business, and academia, eventually resulting in the creation of the National Science Foundation.
Related topics : Day The Universe Changed
Vannevar Bush is credited by many as the best engineer of the 20th century, and the greatest champion of science since Einstein.
Clarke
editArthur Clarke (1992).
How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, history and survey of the communications revolution
- ``The title includes an intentional pun; in English How the World Was Won would sound exactly the same.``
- Cf. How the West Was Won (disambiguation)
Davies
editPaul Davies (1992).
The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World, Simon & Schuster
- ``There is every reason to think that famous Einsteinisms like 'God is subtle but he is not malicious' or 'He does not play dice' or 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' are pantheistic, not deistic, and certainly not theistic. 'God does not play dice' should be translated as 'Randomness does not lie at the heart of all things.' 'Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?' means 'Could the universe have begun in any other way?' Einstein was using 'God' in a purely metaphorical, poetic sense. So is Stephen Hawking, and so are most of those physicists who occasionally slip into the language of religious metaphor. Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism - for which he was rewarded with the Templeton Prize (a very large sum of money given annually by the Templeton Foundation, usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion). . . .`` -- from Chapter One of Richard Dawkins (2006) The God Delusion
Dreyfus
editHubert Dreyfus (1992).
What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason
- The End of History and the Last Man
- a book expanding on his 1989 essay "The End of History?" The National Interest
- ``What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.`` (1989)
- Cf. Samuel P. Huntington (1996) The Clash of Civilizations
- Literate Programming
- CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 27, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, California
- Cf. Literate programming, WEB, CWEB, TeX
- Beyond the Limits
- with Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers
- Introduction
- in: Mind Matters Symposium, May 26, 1992
"...I am by imprinting a physical scientist. That's what my undergraduate days as a physics major at Stanford did to me. That, plus a father who was a Professor of Radiology at Stanford Medical School and who idolized the physical sciences. With the hubris common to physicists, I have always felt that I have known what good science is -- it is theory cast in terms of mechanisms that describe how parts of the universe behave. With sometimes immense historical delay, these mechanisms always move towards being grounded in the larger mechanistic view of the universe. Theories always propose a view of how the universe is. They can never be effectively argued to be true, but only be brought before the bar of empirical evidence. All the modern concern for contextualism, hermeneutics and the social determination of meaning has its point, but is a mere footnote to the massive evidence for this view of science. The overwhelming success within this framework of modern biology over the last half century has provided another major confirmation, if one is needed. Someday we will get another striking confirmation from cognitive science. Though it can be argued that we are well on our way, we still have an immense distance to go. Arguments are no match for the evidence that cognitive science does not control its subject the way physics, chemistry and now biology do.
It follows for me that a theory of mind is embodied in our theory of matter. Matter matters to mind. To put it yet another way, the great scientific question about mind is how it can occur in our physical universe as understood by the all enveloping scientific view. This is not reductionism -- I'll take in any way it comes. Indeed, the modern computational view of mind, with its solutions to representation and intention, is distinctly not a simple reduction.
But it also true of me that mind matters. What is the nature of mind is the great scientific question....
I have pursued these matters since the fifties, in concert and colleagueship with many scientific friends along the way. From my own personal viewpoint this has been an immensely cumulative trip, in which the pieces of the scientific puzzle gradually, though hardly completely, have revealed themselves. Many in psychology, never having experienced cumulative predictive science, see it somewhat otherwise, with new paradigms and new questions moving to centerstage simply shifting the focus without cumulation. It has never seemed that way to me, though I have on occasion criticized cognitive psychology for the manner in which it fails to progress theoretically.
About ten years ago, in concert with John Laird and Paul Rosenbloom, matters seemed to come together."
- Quote
- died July 19, 1992 (aged 65)
- Mind Matters: A Tribute to Allen Newell (1996)
http://books.google.com/books?id=3D-KX8vZNccC - Unified Theories of Cognition (1990)
http://books.google.com/books?id=1lbY14DmV2cC - The ZOG Approach to Man-Machine Communication (1979)
- ZOG was an early hypertext system developed at Carnegie Mellon University during the 1970s by Donald L. McCracken and Robert M. Akscyn. ZOG was first developed by Allen Newell and George G. Robertson to serve as the front end for AI and Cognitive Science programs brought together at CMU for a summer workshop. The ZOG project was as an outgrowth of long-term artificial intelligence research led by Allen Newell and funded by the Office of Naval Research.
- KMS (hypertext), a 1981 spinoff from ZOG
- Knowledge management system
Rossman
editParker Rossman (1992).
The Emerging Worldwide Electronic University: Information Age Global Higher Education, Greenwood Press.
Higher education is changing dramatically as a result of global telecommunications. This book surveys and synthesizes the material currently available on this important topic. Much of the volume provides detailed and fascinating information on experiments, organizations, and ideas related to computer networks and higher education. Other sections examine the electronic organization of knowledge, electronic textbooks, and the many ways in which students may use computer connections to enhance their educational experience. At the heart of the study is the notion of a worldwide electronic university in which students, faculty, and research libraries will be connected electronically across continents. The author begins by describing the early signs and origins of the emerging worldwide electronic university, such as the growth of courses made available through computer networks and television. He then considers some of the administrative issues involved and the responses of some corporations and organizations to those issues. The next few chapters describe and assess the value of educational exchange and the technology that makes that exchange possible. Other chapters discuss the linking of research libraries, the facilitation of international research, and emerging instructional issues. The result is an important guide to a topic of growing interest to educators and students alike.
- Truth and Objectivity
- Waynflete Lectures, given at Oxford
- In general metaphysics, this is his most important work. He argues that there need be no single, discourse-invariant context in which truth consists, making an analogy with identity. There need only be some principles regarding which the truth predicate can be applied to a sentence, some 'platitudes' about true sentences. Wright also argues that in some contexts, probably including moral contexts, superassertibility will effectively function as a truth predicate. He defines a predicate as superassertible if it is assertible in some state of information and then remains so no matter how that state of information is enlarged upon or improved. Assertibility is warrant by whatever standards inform the discourse in question.
References
edit
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