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1 don’t fight the tape
Findon’t go against the direction of the market (slang) -
2 Literature
The earliest known examples of literary writing in the Portuguese language is a collection of songbooks ( cancioneiros) that date from the 12th century, written by anonymous court troubadours, aristocrats, and clerics with poetic and musical talent. In the 13th and 14th centuries, ballads ( romanceiros) became popular at court. One of these written after the battle of Aljubarrota is considered to be the Portuguese equivalent of the English Arthurian legend. Literary prose in Portuguese began in the 14th century, with the compilation of chronicles ( chrónicos) written by Fernão Lopes de Castenhada who was commissioned by King Duarte (1430-38) to write a history of the House of Aviz.During the 15th and 16th centuries, Portuguese chroniclers turned their attention to the discoveries and the Portuguese overseas empire. The Portuguese discoveries in India and Asia were chronicled by João de Barros, whose writing appeared posthumously under the pen name of Diogo Do Couto; Fernão Lopes de Castenhade wrote a 10-volume chronicle of the Portuguese in India. The most famous chronicle from this period was the Peregrinação (Pilgrimage), a largely true adventure story and history of Portugal that was as popular among 17th-century readers in Iberia as was Miguel de Cer-vantes's Don Quixote. Portugal's most celebrated work of national literature, The Lusiads ( Os Lusíadas), written by Luís de Camões chronicled Vasco da Gama's voyage to India (1497-99) within the context of the history of Portugal.During the period when Portugal was under Spanish domination (1580-1640), the preferred language of literary expression was Castilian Spanish. The greatest writer of this period was Francisco Manuel de Melo, who wrote in Castilian and Portuguese. His most famous work is an eyewitness account of the 1640 Catalan revolt against Castile, Historia de los Movimientos y Separación de Cata-luna (1645), which allowed the Portuguese monarchy to regain its independence that same year.Little of note was written during the 17th century with the exception of Letters of a Portuguese Nun, an enormously popular work in the French language thought to have been written by Sister Mariana Alcoforado to a French officer Noel Bouton, Marquise de Chamilly.Modern Portuguese writing began in the early 19th century with the appearance of the prose-fiction of João Baptista de Almeida Garrett and the historian-novelist Alexandre Herculano. The last half of the 19th century was dominated by the Generation of 1870, which believed that Portugal was, due to the monarchy and the Catholic Church, a European backwater. Writers such as José Maria Eça de Queirós dissected the social decadence of their day and called for reform and national renewal. The most famous Portuguese poet of the 20th century is, without doubt, Fernando Pessoa, who wrote poetry and essays in English and Portuguese under various names. António Ferro (1895-1956) published best-selling accounts of the right-wing dictatorships in Italy and Spain that endeared him to Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar, who made him the Estado Novo's secretary of national propaganda.The various responses of the Portuguese people to the colonial African wars (1961-75) were chronicled by António Lobo Antunes. In 1998, the noted Portuguese novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer, José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer in the Portuguese language of whatever nationality to be so honored. His most famous novels translated into English include: Baltazar and Blimunda (1987), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1991), and The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1996). -
3 Pinto, Fernão Mendes
(ca. 1510-1583)Soldier and adventurer in Asia and one of Portugal's greatest prose writers of the 16th century. He was the author of a classic, largely true adventure story and history of Portugal in Asia, the Peregrinação, which in popularity among 17th-century readers in Iberia and Europe rivaled Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quijote. Even less is known about Mendes Pinto's life than that of Luís de Camões. He left as a soldier on a fleet for India in 1537, and lived in Asia for about 17 years. In addition to Portuguese India, he saw many places in Southeast Asia, China, and Japan. His service for Portugal involved great personal suffering including wounds in battle, captivities, and near-starvation. In later years, he retired as a lay brother of the Jesuit Order in Goa and went to Japan in 1556.In 1558, he retired to Portugal, where he wrote his great work, the Peregrinação, which can be translated as 'Travels." The work was not published in his lifetime, but only in 1614, and it was long considered a work mainly of fiction, an apocryphal composition. It was apparently more popular in Spain, France, and England than in his homeland. Later critics and translators have concluded that much of the work is a partly true description of the Portuguese in Asia and of Asian events, coupled with a wry but honest look at the foibles of the Catholic Church of his day. -
4 Sebastião I, king
(1554-1578)The king of Portugal whose disappearance and death in battle in Morocco in 1578 led to a succession crisis and to Spain's annexation of Portugal in 1580. He is the person after whom the cult and mythology of Sebastianism is named. Sebastião succeeded to the throne of Portugal at the tender age of three, upon the death of his father King João III in 1557. With his great-uncle Cardinal Henrique, he was the only other surviving legitimate male member of the Aviz dynasty. The Spanish menace loomed on Portugal's eastern horizons, as Phillip II of Spain gathered more reasons to make good his own strong claims to the Portuguese throne. A headstrong youth, Sebastião dreamed of glory in battle against the Muslims and was certainly influenced by the example of the feats of Phillip II's half-brother Don Juan of Austria and the naval victory against the Turks at Lepanto in 1571.Sebastião's great project was a victory in Africa, and he ordered a major effort to raise a fleet and army to attack Morocco. His forces landed at Tangier and Arzila and marched to meet the Muslim armies. In early August 1578, at the battle of Alcácer- Quivir, Portugal's army was destroyed by Muslim forces, and the king himself was lost. Although he was undoubtedly killed, his body was never found. The result of this foolhardy enterprise changed the course of Portugal's history and gave rise to the cult and myth that Sebastião survived and would return one foggy morning to make Portugal great once again. -
5 b-web
E-coma business web, a group of complementary businesses that come together over the Internet. While each company retains its autonomous identity, the businesses work in unison to generate more income than they could do individually. Characteristics of b-webs include extranets, viral marketing, online marketplaces, and affiliate schemes. The term was originally used by Don Tapscott, David Ticoll, and Alex Lowry in an article published by eCompany Now magazine. -
6 Web form
E-coma means of collecting information from a visitor to a Web site in a structured manner. Once the consumer has filled in the form, it is usually returned to the owner of the Web site via e-mail.There are several golden rules to follow when designing a Web form. It should be short or, if necessary, split into clear sections. Mandatory fields—such as e-mail addresses—should be clearly marked, conventionally with red type or red asterisks. Consumers should be given an alternative for information they cannot give—for example: “If you don’t have a ZIP code, please write ‘None.’” Errors should be isolated: if the consumer makes an error in the form, they should be asked to correct that specific error, not simply have the form returned to them. Fields should be of sufficient size for all the requested information. Alternative means of providing the information should be made available for people with disabilities. -
7 Rateau, Auguste Camille-Edmond
[br]b. 13 October 1863 Royan, Franced. 13 January 1930 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France[br]French constructor of turbines, inventor of the turbo compressor and a centrifugal fan for mine ventilation.[br]A don of the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Supérieure des Mines in Paris, Rateau joined the French Corps des Mines in 1887. Between 1888 and 1898 he taught applied mechanics and electro technics at the Ecole des Mines in St-Etienne. Trying to apply the results of his research to practise, he became into contact with commercial firms, before he was appointed Professor of Industrial Electricity at the Ecole Supérieure des Mines in Paris in 1902. He held this position until 1910, although he founded the Société Anonyme Rateau in Paris in 1903 which by the time of his death had subsidiaries in most of the industrial centres of Europe. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when the increasing problems of ventilation in coal mines had become evident and in many countries had led to several unsatisfactory mechanical constructions, Rateau concentrated on this problem soon after he began working in St-Etienne. The result of his research was the design of a centrifugal fan in 1887 with which he established the principles of mechanical ventilation on a general basis that led to future developments and helped, together with the ventilator invented by Capell in England, to pave the way for the use of electricity in mine ventilation.Rateau continued the study of fluid mechanics and the applications of rotating engines, and after he had published widely on this subject he began to construct many steam turbines, centrifugal compressors and centrifugal pumps. The multicellular Rateau turbine of 1901 became the prototype for many others constructors. During the First World War, when he was very active in the French armaments industry, he developed the invention of the automatic supercharger for aircraft engines and later diesel engines.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsAcadémie des Sciences, Prix Fourneyron 1899, Prix Poncelet 1911, Member 1918.Bibliography1892, Considérations sur les turbo-machines et en particulier sur les ventilateurs, St- Etienne.1900, Traité des turbo-machines, Paris.1907, Ventilateurs centrifuges à haute pression, Paris.1908. Développement des turbines à vapeur d'échappement, Paris. 1917, Notice sur les travaux scientifiques et techniques, Paris.Further ReadingH.H.Suplee, 1930, obituary, Mechanical Engineering 52:570–1.L.Leprince-Ringuet (ed.), 1951, Les inventeurs célèbres, Geneva: 151–2 (a comprehensive description of his life and the importance of his turbines).WKBiographical history of technology > Rateau, Auguste Camille-Edmond
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8 Riggenbach, Niklaus
[br]b. 21 May 1817 Gebweiler, Alsaced. 25 July 1899 Olten, Switzerland[br]Swiss locomotive engineer and pioneer of mountain rack railways.[br]Riggenbach came from a Basle family and was educated in Basle, Lyons and Paris, where he was so impressed by the new railway to Saint-Germain that he decided to devote himself to work in that field. He worked for Kessler's locomotive works in Karlsruhe, which built the first locomotives for the Zurich-Baden Railway. This was the first railway in Switzerland and when it was opened in 1847 Riggenbach drove the first train. He subsequently became Locomotive Superintendent of the Swiss Central Railway, and the problems of operating a steeply graded line solely by adhesion led him to develop a rack railway which incorporated a ladder rack similar to that of Sylvester Marsh. However, it was only after the Swiss Consul in Washington had reported enthusiastically on the Mount Washington Cog Railway that Riggenbach and associates were able to get a concession for their first line, which was laid up the Rigi mountain and was opened in 1871. That same year Riggenbach opened a quarry railway operated for the first time by a mixture of rack and adhesion. From this start, rack railways were built widely in Switzerland and to a lesser extent in many other parts of the world. His Rigi railway continues to operate.[br]BibliographyRiggenbach patented his rack railway in 1863.Further ReadingRiggenbach's type of counter-pressure brakes is described in Transactions of the Newcomen Society 55:13.M.Dietschy, 1971, "Le Chemin de fer du Rigi à 100 ans", Chemins defer régionaux eturbains 106.O.J.Morris, 1951, The Snow don Mountain Railway, Ian Allan.See also: Abt, RomanPJGR -
9 Vermuyden, Sir Cornelius
SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering[br]b. c. 1590 St Maartensdijk, Zeeland, the Netherlandsd. 4 February 1656 probably London, England[br]Dutch/British civil engineer responsible for many of the drainage and flood-protection schemes in low-lying areas of England in the seventeenth century.[br]At the beginning of the seventeenth century, several wealthy men in England joined forces as "adventurers" to put their money into land ventures. One such group was responsible for the draining of the Fens. The first need was to find engineers who were versed in the processes of land drainage, particularly when that land was at, or below, sea level. It was natural, therefore, to turn to the Netherlands to find these skilled men. Joachim Liens was one of the first of the Dutch engineers to go to England, and he started work on the Great Level; however, no real progress was made until 1621, when Cornelius Vermuyden was brought to England to assist in the work.Vermuyden had grown up in a district where he could see for himself the techniques of embanking and reclaiming land from the sea. He acquired a reputation of expertise in this field, and by 1621 his fame had spread to England. In that year the Thames had flooded and breached its banks near Havering and Dagenham in Essex. Vermuyden was commissioned to repair the breach and drain neighbouring marshland, with what he claimed as complete success. The Commissioners of Sewers for Essex disputed this claim and whthheld his fee, but King Charles I granted him a portion of the reclaimed land as compensation.In 1626 Vermuyden carried out his first scheme for drainage works as a consultant. This was the drainage of Hatfield Chase in South Yorkshire. Charles I was, in fact, Vermuyden's employer in the drainage of the Chase, and the work was undertaken as a means of raising additional rents for the Royal Exchequer. Vermuyden was himself an "adventurer" in the undertaking, putting capital into the venture and receiving the title to a considerable proportion of the drained lands. One of the important elements of his drainage designs was the principal of "washes", which were flat areas between the protective dykes and the rivers to carry flood waters, to prevent them spreading on to nearby land. Vermuyden faced bitter opposition from those whose livelihoods depended on the marshlands and who resorted to sabotage of the embankments and violence against his imported Dutch workmen to defend their rights. The work could not be completed until arbiters had ruled out on the respective rights of the parties involved. Disagreements and criticism of his engineering practices continued and he gave up his interest in Hatfield Chase. The Hatfield Chase undertaking was not a great success, although the land is now rich farmland around the river Don in Doncaster. However, the involved financial and land-ownership arrangements were the key to the granting of a knighthood to Cornelius Vermuyden in January 1628, and in 1630 he purchased 4,000 acres of low-lying land on Sedgemoor in Somerset.In 1629 Vermuyden embarked on his most important work, that of draining the Great Level in the fenlands of East Anglia. Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, was given charge of the work, with Vermuyden as Engineer; in this venture they were speculators and partners and were recompensed by a grant of land. The area which contains the Cambridgeshire tributaries of the Great Ouse were subject to severe and usually annual flooding. The works to contain the rivers in their flood period were important. Whilst the rivers were contained with the enclosed flood plain, the land beyond became highly sought-after because of the quality of the soil. The fourteen "adventurers" who eventually came into partnership with the Earl of Bedford and Vermuyden were the financiers of the scheme and also received land in accordance with their input into the scheme. In 1637 the work was claimed to be complete, but this was disputed, with Vermuyden defending himself against criticism in a pamphlet entitled Discourse Touching the Great Fennes (1638; 1642, London). In fact, much remained to be done, and after an interruption due to the Civil War the scheme was finished in 1652. Whilst the process of the Great Level works had closely involved the King, Oliver Cromwell was equally concerned over the success of the scheme. By 1655 Cornelius Vermuyden had ceased to have anything to do with the Great Level. At that stage he was asked to account for large sums granted to him to expedite the work but was unable to do so; most of his assets were seized to cover the deficiency, and from then on he subsided into obscurity and poverty.While Cornelius Vermuyden, as a Dutchman, was well versed in the drainage needs of his own country, he developed his skills as a hydraulic engineer in England and drained acres of derelict flooded land.[br]Principal Honours and DistinctionsKnighted 1628.Further ReadingL.E.Harris, 1953, Vermuyden and the Fens, London: Cleaver Hume Press. J.Korthals-Altes, 1977, Sir Cornelius Vermuyden: The Lifework of a Great Anglo-Dutchman in Land-Reclamation and Drainage, New York: Alto Press.KM / LRDBiographical history of technology > Vermuyden, Sir Cornelius
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10 Computers
The brain has been compared to a digital computer because the neuron, like a switch or valve, either does or does not complete a circuit. But at that point the similarity ends. The switch in the digital computer is constant in its effect, and its effect is large in proportion to the total output of the machine. The effect produced by the neuron varies with its recovery from [the] refractory phase and with its metabolic state. The number of neurons involved in any action runs into millions so that the influence of any one is negligible.... Any cell in the system can be dispensed with.... The brain is an analogical machine, not digital. Analysis of the integrative activities will probably have to be in statistical terms. (Lashley, quoted in Beach, Hebb, Morgan & Nissen, 1960, p. 539)It is essential to realize that a computer is not a mere "number cruncher," or supercalculating arithmetic machine, although this is how computers are commonly regarded by people having no familiarity with artificial intelligence. Computers do not crunch numbers; they manipulate symbols.... Digital computers originally developed with mathematical problems in mind, are in fact general purpose symbol manipulating machines....The terms "computer" and "computation" are themselves unfortunate, in view of their misleading arithmetical connotations. The definition of artificial intelligence previously cited-"the study of intelligence as computation"-does not imply that intelligence is really counting. Intelligence may be defined as the ability creatively to manipulate symbols, or process information, given the requirements of the task in hand. (Boden, 1981, pp. 15, 16-17)The task is to get computers to explain things to themselves, to ask questions about their experiences so as to cause those explanations to be forthcoming, and to be creative in coming up with explanations that have not been previously available. (Schank, 1986, p. 19)In What Computers Can't Do, written in 1969 (2nd edition, 1972), the main objection to AI was the impossibility of using rules to select only those facts about the real world that were relevant in a given situation. The "Introduction" to the paperback edition of the book, published by Harper & Row in 1979, pointed out further that no one had the slightest idea how to represent the common sense understanding possessed even by a four-year-old. (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, p. 102)A popular myth says that the invention of the computer diminishes our sense of ourselves, because it shows that rational thought is not special to human beings, but can be carried on by a mere machine. It is a short stop from there to the conclusion that intelligence is mechanical, which many people find to be an affront to all that is most precious and singular about their humanness.In fact, the computer, early in its career, was not an instrument of the philistines, but a humanizing influence. It helped to revive an idea that had fallen into disrepute: the idea that the mind is real, that it has an inner structure and a complex organization, and can be understood in scientific terms. For some three decades, until the 1940s, American psychology had lain in the grip of the ice age of behaviorism, which was antimental through and through. During these years, extreme behaviorists banished the study of thought from their agenda. Mind and consciousness, thinking, imagining, planning, solving problems, were dismissed as worthless for anything except speculation. Only the external aspects of behavior, the surface manifestations, were grist for the scientist's mill, because only they could be observed and measured....It is one of the surprising gifts of the computer in the history of ideas that it played a part in giving back to psychology what it had lost, which was nothing less than the mind itself. In particular, there was a revival of interest in how the mind represents the world internally to itself, by means of knowledge structures such as ideas, symbols, images, and inner narratives, all of which had been consigned to the realm of mysticism. (Campbell, 1989, p. 10)[Our artifacts] only have meaning because we give it to them; their intentionality, like that of smoke signals and writing, is essentially borrowed, hence derivative. To put it bluntly: computers themselves don't mean anything by their tokens (any more than books do)-they only mean what we say they do. Genuine understanding, on the other hand, is intentional "in its own right" and not derivatively from something else. (Haugeland, 1981a, pp. 32-33)he debate over the possibility of computer thought will never be won or lost; it will simply cease to be of interest, like the previous debate over man as a clockwork mechanism. (Bolter, 1984, p. 190)t takes us a long time to emotionally digest a new idea. The computer is too big a step, and too recently made, for us to quickly recover our balance and gauge its potential. It's an enormous accelerator, perhaps the greatest one since the plow, twelve thousand years ago. As an intelligence amplifier, it speeds up everything-including itself-and it continually improves because its heart is information or, more plainly, ideas. We can no more calculate its consequences than Babbage could have foreseen antibiotics, the Pill, or space stations.Further, the effects of those ideas are rapidly compounding, because a computer design is itself just a set of ideas. As we get better at manipulating ideas by building ever better computers, we get better at building even better computers-it's an ever-escalating upward spiral. The early nineteenth century, when the computer's story began, is already so far back that it may as well be the Stone Age. (Rawlins, 1997, p. 19)According to weak AI, the principle value of the computer in the study of the mind is that it gives us a very powerful tool. For example, it enables us to formulate and test hypotheses in a more rigorous and precise fashion than before. But according to strong AI the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states. And according to strong AI, because the programmed computer has cognitive states, the programs are not mere tools that enable us to test psychological explanations; rather, the programs are themselves the explanations. (Searle, 1981b, p. 353)What makes people smarter than machines? They certainly are not quicker or more precise. Yet people are far better at perceiving objects in natural scenes and noting their relations, at understanding language and retrieving contextually appropriate information from memory, at making plans and carrying out contextually appropriate actions, and at a wide range of other natural cognitive tasks. People are also far better at learning to do these things more accurately and fluently through processing experience.What is the basis for these differences? One answer, perhaps the classic one we might expect from artificial intelligence, is "software." If we only had the right computer program, the argument goes, we might be able to capture the fluidity and adaptability of human information processing. Certainly this answer is partially correct. There have been great breakthroughs in our understanding of cognition as a result of the development of expressive high-level computer languages and powerful algorithms. However, we do not think that software is the whole story.In our view, people are smarter than today's computers because the brain employs a basic computational architecture that is more suited to deal with a central aspect of the natural information processing tasks that people are so good at.... hese tasks generally require the simultaneous consideration of many pieces of information or constraints. Each constraint may be imperfectly specified and ambiguous, yet each can play a potentially decisive role in determining the outcome of processing. (McClelland, Rumelhart & Hinton, 1986, pp. 3-4)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Computers
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11 Memory
To what extent can we lump together what goes on when you try to recall: (1) your name; (2) how you kick a football; and (3) the present location of your car keys? If we use introspective evidence as a guide, the first seems an immediate automatic response. The second may require constructive internal replay prior to our being able to produce a verbal description. The third... quite likely involves complex operational responses under the control of some general strategy system. Is any unitary search process, with a single set of characteristics and inputoutput relations, likely to cover all these cases? (Reitman, 1970, p. 485)[Semantic memory] Is a mental thesaurus, organized knowledge a person possesses about words and other verbal symbols, their meanings and referents, about relations among them, and about rules, formulas, and algorithms for the manipulation of these symbols, concepts, and relations. Semantic memory does not register perceptible properties of inputs, but rather cognitive referents of input signals. (Tulving, 1972, p. 386)The mnemonic code, far from being fixed and unchangeable, is structured and restructured along with general development. Such a restructuring of the code takes place in close dependence on the schemes of intelligence. The clearest indication of this is the observation of different types of memory organisation in accordance with the age level of a child so that a longer interval of retention without any new presentation, far from causing a deterioration of memory, may actually improve it. (Piaget & Inhelder, 1973, p. 36)4) The Logic of Some Memory Theorization Is of Dubious Worth in the History of PsychologyIf a cue was effective in memory retrieval, then one could infer it was encoded; if a cue was not effective, then it was not encoded. The logic of this theorization is "heads I win, tails you lose" and is of dubious worth in the history of psychology. We might ask how long scientists will puzzle over questions with no answers. (Solso, 1974, p. 28)We have iconic, echoic, active, working, acoustic, articulatory, primary, secondary, episodic, semantic, short-term, intermediate-term, and longterm memories, and these memories contain tags, traces, images, attributes, markers, concepts, cognitive maps, natural-language mediators, kernel sentences, relational rules, nodes, associations, propositions, higher-order memory units, and features. (Eysenck, 1977, p. 4)The problem with the memory metaphor is that storage and retrieval of traces only deals [ sic] with old, previously articulated information. Memory traces can perhaps provide a basis for dealing with the "sameness" of the present experience with previous experiences, but the memory metaphor has no mechanisms for dealing with novel information. (Bransford, McCarrell, Franks & Nitsch, 1977, p. 434)7) The Results of a Hundred Years of the Psychological Study of Memory Are Somewhat DiscouragingThe results of a hundred years of the psychological study of memory are somewhat discouraging. We have established firm empirical generalisations, but most of them are so obvious that every ten-year-old knows them anyway. We have made discoveries, but they are only marginally about memory; in many cases we don't know what to do with them, and wear them out with endless experimental variations. We have an intellectually impressive group of theories, but history offers little confidence that they will provide any meaningful insight into natural behavior. (Neisser, 1978, pp. 12-13)A schema, then is a data structure for representing the generic concepts stored in memory. There are schemata representing our knowledge about all concepts; those underlying objects, situations, events, sequences of events, actions and sequences of actions. A schema contains, as part of its specification, the network of interrelations that is believed to normally hold among the constituents of the concept in question. A schema theory embodies a prototype theory of meaning. That is, inasmuch as a schema underlying a concept stored in memory corresponds to the mean ing of that concept, meanings are encoded in terms of the typical or normal situations or events that instantiate that concept. (Rumelhart, 1980, p. 34)Memory appears to be constrained by a structure, a "syntax," perhaps at quite a low level, but it is free to be variable, deviant, even erratic at a higher level....Like the information system of language, memory can be explained in part by the abstract rules which underlie it, but only in part. The rules provide a basic competence, but they do not fully determine performance. (Campbell, 1982, pp. 228, 229)When people think about the mind, they often liken it to a physical space, with memories and ideas as objects contained within that space. Thus, we speak of ideas being in the dark corners or dim recesses of our minds, and of holding ideas in mind. Ideas may be in the front or back of our minds, or they may be difficult to grasp. With respect to the processes involved in memory, we talk about storing memories, of searching or looking for lost memories, and sometimes of finding them. An examination of common parlance, therefore, suggests that there is general adherence to what might be called the spatial metaphor. The basic assumptions of this metaphor are that memories are treated as objects stored in specific locations within the mind, and the retrieval process involves a search through the mind in order to find specific memories....However, while the spatial metaphor has shown extraordinary longevity, there have been some interesting changes over time in the precise form of analogy used. In particular, technological advances have influenced theoretical conceptualisations.... The original Greek analogies were based on wax tablets and aviaries; these were superseded by analogies involving switchboards, gramophones, tape recorders, libraries, conveyor belts, and underground maps. Most recently, the workings of human memory have been compared to computer functioning... and it has been suggested that the various memory stores found in computers have their counterparts in the human memory system. (Eysenck, 1984, pp. 79-80)Primary memory [as proposed by William James] relates to information that remains in consciousness after it has been perceived, and thus forms part of the psychological present, whereas secondary memory contains information about events that have left consciousness, and are therefore part of the psychological past. (Eysenck, 1984, p. 86)Once psychologists began to study long-term memory per se, they realized it may be divided into two main categories.... Semantic memories have to do with our general knowledge about the working of the world. We know what cars do, what stoves do, what the laws of gravity are, and so on. Episodic memories are largely events that took place at a time and place in our personal history. Remembering specific events about our own actions, about our family, and about our individual past falls into this category. With amnesia or in aging, what dims... is our personal episodic memories, save for those that are especially dear or painful to us. Our knowledge of how the world works remains pretty much intact. (Gazzaniga, 1988, p. 42)The nature of memory... provides a natural starting point for an analysis of thinking. Memory is the repository of many of the beliefs and representations that enter into thinking, and the retrievability of these representations can limit the quality of our thought. (Smith, 1990, p. 1)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Memory
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12 Thinking
But what then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels. (Descartes, 1951, p. 153)I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation to think that there "must be" a mental process of thinking, hoping, wishing, believing, etc., independent of the process of expressing a thought, a hope, a wish, etc.... If we scrutinize the usages which we make of "thinking," "meaning," "wishing," etc., going through this process rids us of the temptation to look for a peculiar act of thinking, independent of the act of expressing our thoughts, and stowed away in some particular medium. (Wittgenstein, 1958, pp. 41-43)Analyse the proofs employed by the subject. If they do not go beyond observation of empirical correspondences, they can be fully explained in terms of concrete operations, and nothing would warrant our assuming that more complex thought mechanisms are operating. If, on the other hand, the subject interprets a given correspondence as the result of any one of several possible combinations, and this leads him to verify his hypotheses by observing their consequences, we know that propositional operations are involved. (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958, p. 279)In every age, philosophical thinking exploits some dominant concepts and makes its greatest headway in solving problems conceived in terms of them. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers construed knowledge, knower, and known in terms of sense data and their association. Descartes' self-examination gave classical psychology the mind and its contents as a starting point. Locke set up sensory immediacy as the new criterion of the real... Hobbes provided the genetic method of building up complex ideas from simple ones... and, in another quarter, still true to the Hobbesian method, Pavlov built intellect out of conditioned reflexes and Loeb built life out of tropisms. (S. Langer, 1962, p. 54)Experiments on deductive reasoning show that subjects are influenced sufficiently by their experience for their reasoning to differ from that described by a purely deductive system, whilst experiments on inductive reasoning lead to the view that an understanding of the strategies used by adult subjects in attaining concepts involves reference to higher-order concepts of a logical and deductive nature. (Bolton, 1972, p. 154)There are now machines in the world that think, that learn and create. Moreover, their ability to do these things is going to increase rapidly until-in the visible future-the range of problems they can handle will be coextensive with the range to which the human mind has been applied. (Newell & Simon, quoted in Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 138)But how does it happen that thinking is sometimes accompanied by action and sometimes not, sometimes by motion, and sometimes not? It looks as if almost the same thing happens as in the case of reasoning and making inferences about unchanging objects. But in that case the end is a speculative proposition... whereas here the conclusion which results from the two premises is an action.... I need covering; a cloak is a covering. I need a cloak. What I need, I have to make; I need a cloak. I have to make a cloak. And the conclusion, the "I have to make a cloak," is an action. (Nussbaum, 1978, p. 40)It is well to remember that when philosophy emerged in Greece in the sixth century, B.C., it did not burst suddenly out of the Mediterranean blue. The development of societies of reasoning creatures-what we call civilization-had been a process to be measured not in thousands but in millions of years. Human beings became civilized as they became reasonable, and for an animal to begin to reason and to learn how to improve its reasoning is a long, slow process. So thinking had been going on for ages before Greece-slowly improving itself, uncovering the pitfalls to be avoided by forethought, endeavoring to weigh alternative sets of consequences intellectually. What happened in the sixth century, B.C., is that thinking turned round on itself; people began to think about thinking, and the momentous event, the culmination of the long process to that point, was in fact the birth of philosophy. (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 1980, p. xi)The way to look at thought is not to assume that there is a parallel thread of correlated affects or internal experiences that go with it in some regular way. It's not of course that people don't have internal experiences, of course they do; but that when you ask what is the state of mind of someone, say while he or she is performing a ritual, it's hard to believe that such experiences are the same for all people involved.... The thinking, and indeed the feeling in an odd sort of way, is really going on in public. They are really saying what they're saying, doing what they're doing, meaning what they're meaning. Thought is, in great part anyway, a public activity. (Geertz, quoted in J. Miller, 1983, pp. 202-203)Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. (Einstein, quoted in Minsky, 1986, p. 17)What, in effect, are the conditions for the construction of formal thought? The child must not only apply operations to objects-in other words, mentally execute possible actions on them-he must also "reflect" those operations in the absence of the objects which are replaced by pure propositions. Thus, "reflection" is thought raised to the second power. Concrete thinking is the representation of a possible action, and formal thinking is the representation of a representation of possible action.... It is not surprising, therefore, that the system of concrete operations must be completed during the last years of childhood before it can be "reflected" by formal operations. In terms of their function, formal operations do not differ from concrete operations except that they are applied to hypotheses or propositions [whose logic is] an abstract translation of the system of "inference" that governs concrete operations. (Piaget, quoted in Minsky, 1986, p. 237)[E]ven a human being today (hence, a fortiori, a remote ancestor of contemporary human beings) cannot easily or ordinarily maintain uninterrupted attention on a single problem for more than a few tens of seconds. Yet we work on problems that require vastly more time. The way we do that (as we can observe by watching ourselves) requires periods of mulling to be followed by periods of recapitulation, describing to ourselves what seems to have gone on during the mulling, leading to whatever intermediate results we have reached. This has an obvious function: namely, by rehearsing these interim results... we commit them to memory, for the immediate contents of the stream of consciousness are very quickly lost unless rehearsed.... Given language, we can describe to ourselves what seemed to occur during the mulling that led to a judgment, produce a rehearsable version of the reaching-a-judgment process, and commit that to long-term memory by in fact rehearsing it. (Margolis, 1987, p. 60)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Thinking
См. также в других словарях:
DON — Donner est une opération des plus familières qui ne semble pas appeler de définition sociologique particulièrement précise: un bien change d’attributaire par la décision de son propriétaire qui manifeste à un tiers une disposition bienveillante… … Encyclopédie Universelle
don — 1. (don) s. m. 1° Action d accorder gratuitement à quelqu un la propriété ou la jouissance de quelque chose ; la chose ainsi accordée. Faire un don à quelqu un, lui faire don de quelque chose. De riches dons. Il lui fit don d une terre. • Tu… … Dictionnaire de la Langue Française d'Émile Littré
DON — bezeichnet als geografischer Begriff einen Fluss in Russland, siehe Don (Russland) einen Fluss in England/Lancashire, siehe River Don (Lancashire) einen Fluss in England/South Yorkshire, siehe Don (England) einen Fluss in England/Tyne and Wear,… … Deutsch Wikipedia
Don — bezeichnet als geographischer Begriff Don (Asowsches Meer), Strom zum Asowschen Meer in Russland Don (Orne), einen Fluss in Frankreich, Nebenfluss der Orne Don (Vilaine),Nebenfluss der Vilaine in Frankreich Don River (Kanada), einen Fluss in… … Deutsch Wikipedia
Don — or DON may refer to Contents 1 People 2 Chemistry 3 Geography 4 … Wikipedia
don — DON. s. m. Present, gratification qu on fait à quelqu un de quelque chose. Faire un don à quelqu un, luy faire don de quelque chose. donner en pur don. je n ay pas acheté ce livre, c est un don de l autheur. don irrevocable. On appelle, Don de… … Dictionnaire de l'Académie française
Don Li — (Chinese singer) Chinese name 李逸朗 Pinyin li3 yi4 lang3 (Mandarin) Jyutping lei5 jat6 long5 (Cantonese) Birth name Douglas Li (李威樂) … Wikipedia
Don't! — Single by Shania Twain from the album Greatest Hits Released … Wikipedia
Don't Go — may refer to: Don t Go (En Vogue song) Don t Go (Hothouse Flowers song) Don t Go (Judas Priest song) Don t Go (Wretch 32 song) Don t Go (Yazoo song) Don t Go (Girls and Boys) , a song by Fefe Dobson Don t Go , a song by Bring Me the Horizon from… … Wikipedia
Don Li — (* 7. April 1971 in Bern als Don Pfäffli) ist ein Schweizer Komponist, Musiker (Klarinette, Saxophon) und Musikproduzent im Bereich reduktiver Musik. Inhaltsverzeichnis 1 Leben und Wirken 2 Preise und Auszeichnungen 3 Diskographische H … Deutsch Wikipedia
Don — Saltar a navegación, búsqueda El término Don puede referirse a: George Don (1798 1856), botánico escocés. Don, río de Rusia Don, tratamiento deferencial Don o carisma que el Espíritu Santo da a una persona. Don, canción del grupo Miranda! de su… … Wikipedia Español
