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Engineering

You think the SJW war on engineering is a joke…

And that is your mistake. A look at how social justice warriors have penetrated the soft underbelly of engineering: Engineering education has been infiltrated by a “phalanx of social justice warriors” who are steadily corrupting the field, according to a Michigan State University professor. “They have sought out the soft underbelly of engineering, where phrases such as ‘diversity’ and ‘different perspectives’ and ‘racial gaps’ and ‘unfairness’ and ‘unequal outcomes’ make up the daily vocabulary,” asserts Mechanical Engineering professor Indrek Wichman in an essay published Wednesday by the James G. Martin Center. “They have sought out the soft underbelly of engineering…” “Instead of calculating engine horsepower or microchip power/size ratios or aerodynamic lift and drag, the engineering educationists focus on group Read More ›

The war on math and science spreads to engineering

It’s a good thing that we don’t need bridges and buildings to be stable: Professional engineers are expressing befuddlement over unsubstantiated scholarly accusations that the field’s licensure exam is biased against women. Women are 11.6% less likely to pass. The agency that administers the exam—the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES)—also pushed back against the suggestion that the exam may be biased against women. NCEES Director of Exams Tim Miller told Campus Reform that it seems highly unlikely that the exam itself is biased against women, insofar as NCEES has been reviewing the test specifically for gender bias for nearly two decades. “Since the early 2000s, the exam items have been reviewed annually to make them gender-neutral Read More ›

Science buffs, take heed: “Rigor is in many ways the enemy of design.”

That’ll be dogma as post-modernism sinks in. Yesterday, we were discussing an extraordinary declaration of war on measurement from a dean of “engineering education”. Lawyer and impresario Edward Sisson offers some thoughts: Engineering is, of course, intelligent design grounded on accurate knowledge of the material world. First, for example, regarding the journal that published the paper, Riley states that “the Journal of Education Engineering [the Journal New Criterion said had published this] pre-emptively passed on publishing this work because it is not an empirical study.” As to the focus of her paper, “rigor,” she says “rigor in this context seems to refer to formal research questions, theoretical grounding, appropriate methodology (narrowly empirical and too often viewed as exclusively quantitative). In Read More ›

The rigor mortis of science: The war on measurement itself has commenced

From Notes and Comments at The New Criterion: If you are thinking of building a bridge, be careful if your engineer went to Purdue University. Donna Riley, the head of the engineering department at Purdue, has put the world on notice that “rigor” is a dirty word. In an article for Engineering Education called “Rigor/Us: Building Boundaries and Disciplining Diversity with Standards of Merit,” Professor Riley, who is also the author of Engineering and Social Justice, argues that academic “rigor” is merely a blind for “white male heterosexual privilege.” Yes, really. “The term,” she writes, “has a historical lineage of being about hardness, stiffness, and erectness; its sexual connotations—and links to masculinity in particular—are undeniable.” There follows a truly surreal Read More ›

Design Disquisitions: On Perry Marshall’s ‘Evolution 2.0’ & Confusions About Design

This week’s article at Design Disquisitions is about Perry Marshall’s ‘Evolution 2.0’ thesis and his criticisms of intelligent design. This article responds to some of his recent writings on his blog and his interaction with Stephen Meyer a few weeks back. Bottom line is, his philosophy of science has significant problems and he has some grave misconceptions about what ID is: A few days ago I was listening to an episode of Unbelieveable?, the fantastic radio debate show and podcast at Premier Christian Radio. The episode was a fairly recent one between Stephen Meyer and Perry Marshall. Marshall is the author of Evolution 2.0 and writes at his blog Cosmic Fingerprints. I’ve read some of his work and he makes some Read More ›

Programming by Accident – The Darwinian Paradigm

The last couple of days I have spent too much time trying to rescue a hard drive.  This drive was intended for a Windows 10 system, but it would not appear anywhere in utilities.  BIOS could recognize it was plugged in, but that was it.  Nothing in Explorer, nothing in Disk Management, not even in the command-line diskpart partitioning utility.  In fact, just plugging the drive in would cause all of these to hang until terminated. I went through the whole litany of troubleshooting procedures: BIOS check, memory diagnostics, different slots, direct plug, external connections, a special cloning hardware connection.  Nothing. Finally, after painstaking effort on multiple different machines I was able to get a Linux command-line terminal on one Read More ›

Doug Axe: The culture of engineering vs. the culture of biology, and what Hidden Figures can tell us about that

From Douglas Axe, author of Undeniable, at The Stream: Hidden Figures — the true story of three brilliant African-American women who proved themselves in a 1960s NASA culture dominated by white men — is sure to inspire. The film is filled with emotive lessons, most powerfully a vindication of the hope that those who persevere honorably for a just cause will not be disappointed. Another lesson, more pragmatic, occurred to me as the drama unfolded. Having migrated in my own career from the measurable-fact culture of engineering to the more descriptive culture of biology, I felt a tinge of nostalgia as I watched a roomful of nerds with their calculators and chalk boards working together to find the answer to Read More ›

Philosopher: No, do not “terraform” Mars. Appreciate beauty.

Terraforming means trying to make Mars capable of supporting lots of life, like Earth. From Monash philosopher Robert Sparrow at Nautilus: Enthusiasts often advertise space exploration as an opportunity to be virtuous. “To boldly go”—as they say in Star Trek—is valuable mostly because courage is a virtue. But one can’t have the opportunity to develop virtues without the possibility of demonstrating vices, and terraforming Mars would exhibit two major vicious character traits. One is insensitivity to beauty. Mars has many features of extraordinary natural beauty. It’s is home to the tallest known volcano on any planet, Olympus Mons, whose cap reaches 13.6 miles high—two and a half times the height of Mount Everest. Mars also has arguably the most spectacular Read More ›

John Searle Talks to Google

John Searle gives a nice talk at Google about real intelligence vs. machine intelligence. The conversation is interesting for a number of reasons, including some historical background of Searle’s famous “Chinese Room Argument.”
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UD Guest Post: Dr Eugen S on “Biological memory vs. memory of materials”

UD has a broad and deep pool of readers and occasional contributors from across the world that have a lot to say, things that are well worth pondering. In this case, I am more than happy to host a guest post in which physicist and computer scientist ES (who hails from Russia) argues the thesis: No linguistic processing occurs in the case of memory of a material that is exclusively explainable in terms of physical interactions between particles of that material, whereas the basic architecture of life is inherently linguistic. Let us now ponder: >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Biological memory vs. memory of materials [Eugen S, UD November 7, 2016] Contemporary technology allows us to make self-deploying structures that can revert to their Read More ›

Gambler’s Epistemology

In this next installment from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism (AM-Nat) conference, Salvador Cordova gives us his perspective on epistemology, which he calls “Gambler’s Epistemology,” which intends to be a metaphysically neutral way of analyzing claims based on their costs and payoff possibilities. Cordova shows that naturalism does not have a history of high payoffs, and that the ENCODE and similar projects by the NIH are good gambling bets but have caused consternation for those metaphysically committed to naturalism, which has historically been shown to be impractical.

Imagination Sampling – Using Non-Naturalism to Improve Machine Learning

This video is from the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism 2016 conference held earlier this year. It deals with using non-naturalism in order to improve the quality of machine learning programs using a technique called “imagination sampling.” The results of a limited test run are given.

Evolutionary Theorists Discover How mp4 Videos Work

  Over on this thread we’ve had a lively discussion, primarily about common descent.  However, one of the key side discussions has focused on the information required to build an organism. Remarkably, some have argued that essentially nothing is required except a parts list on a digital storage medium.  Yes, you heard right.  Given the right sequence of digital characters (represented by nucleotides in the DNA molecule), each part will correctly self-assemble, the various parts will make their way automatically to the correct place within the cell, they will then automatically assemble into larger protein complexes and molecular machines to perform work, the various cells will automatically assemble themselves into larger structures, such as limbs and organs, and eventually everything will Read More ›

“Perfect Fidelity at Minimum Time”

For the delight of programmers here at UD, I include this post. Over at the “Reference Frame,” a blog by Lubos Motl, string theorist, and physicist extraordinaire, he has this post on a new game for “gamers” calledQuantum Moves. I don’t have time for any in-depth comment; however, for the programmers among us, here is a titillating quote from Motl’s blog: In the paper, the authors remarkably demonstrated that using their intuition and heuristic approaches, the human players were able to find solutions to tasks in which the well-known classical optimization algorithms don’t work well – but the quantum computers would. The well-known classical optimization algorithms fail especially near the “quantum speed limit”, when the shortest process duration is combined Read More ›

Quick Survey – Deletion of Single Email Messages

I know this may be a bit unusual for the typical fare, but since we have a number of engineers and other tech-savvy readers, I thought I would solicit your help with a quick tech-related survey. Recently I have been in discussion with a Google engineer about gmail. The discussion began when he asked me which email address (among several that I have) I preferred to use. I replied that I would use gmail more if the mobile Android app permitted deletion of single messages, rather than entire conversations. He seemed surprised that anyone would want to delete a single message and asked me for some “use cases” that would call for deletion of a single message, rather than an Read More ›