CU student explores faith, God and ‘World of Warcraft’

Fans take their love to extremes — but divine love? That’s the thesis of Theo Zijderveld, who’s doing postgraduate work on the intersection of faith and “World of Warcraft” at University of Colorado’s Center for Media, Religion and Culture.

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E-Marketing’s challenges

According to one study (Manisto, 1999) participants in an e-marketing questionaire indicated privacy concerns and censorship as the two top issues that were hindering the growth of e-commerce.  In developing countries, respondents painted a much different picture.  Respondents in emerging countries listed the following as major obstacles:

• insufficient local content
• costs associated with domestic plans
• ISP-associated performance and costs
• lack of content in native language

Strauss, El-Ansary, and Frost correctly implicate the additional cost of insecure online transactions as well as fradulent and/or malicious credit card users.

philosophy vs. information technology – printing requirements

I’m not a fan of discussing something in the context of that thing’s nature.  Thus I dislike saying things like: “well the nature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is such that…”  Use of the expression imitates that conception of natural and/or logical necessity that Wittgenstein’s later developments (language games, the concept of grammar) nicely opposed, if not the necessity per se, its ill philosophical effects.

This is going to seem irrelevant but and it sort of is, but we could introduce another sort of language game where I’m apt to use or convey that sense of necessity I just got through justifying a disagreement with.  This has more practical relevance – printing requirements.  I figured my undergraduate stint with philosophy would, naturally, of necessity (yes I’m stretching it) – represent more in terms of printing costs vs. my graduate studies information technology.  After all, those old philosophy research papers from the 1940s, they’re available in PDF, but nobody would think (I hope not) to try to read them on a monitor where resolutions are roughly (something like) 40% that of the resolution of the real deal (i.e., reading a real book).  And since IT itself is a new discipline, it stands to reason that documentation ought to be primarily available on screen, right?

None of this turns out, with me, to be true.  I’m beginning to mooch off the network printers and/or printers of my family/peers.  So yeah, this is all leading up to my find for the week.  Practical knowledge is the new metaphysical necessity, it helps to not purchase your printing equipment at oversized vendors with terrible prices.  So yeah, this is definitely a practical post.

Printing needs

IT security surveys typically run anywhere from 20-50+ pages with lots of images and/or non-text/colored content.  Lexmark printers – especially the inkjets -  are pretty good for undergraduate/mid-level printing requirements.  I bought the Z1300 a year or so ago and while basic, its completely fine for low to mid-level use.  My gripe has to do with the software, and an aspect of it that’s quite irrelevant to its functionality.  There’s this annoying voice that activates whenever you use the thing, so I recommend NOT wearing headphones if you’re about to print something.  Of course you could shut it off in the options but who remembers that?  I’ll have to dig up an article on CNET which – I recall – named the z1300 a definite grab for the price.  If I buy online I tend to gravitate towards vendors who’ve been around for awhile and that sport high customer ratings.

Anyway, for printer toners and ink/other printer supplies its probably easiest to buy the stuff online. Make sure to review CNET or Tom’s Hardware Guide or something to make sure the stuff you purchase is legitimate and/or corresponds with your printer.  Might pay a few extra bucks for shipping but from what I can tell the price is initially reduced at the best online vendors.  If the vendor’s been around for several years chances are you should feel confident buying printing supplies from them.

Scanners

Scanners probably aren’t too necessary for most undergraduates unless they’re into photo editing and/or really wanna share old pictures on social networking sites.  Color depth is important to watch out for, although honestly I dont’ know much about scanners other than a few good shopping places online.

Although, scanners would be extremely useful if you’re considering going into digital/online publishing for instance.  Especially if you were an editor or content producer for an academic publication, since physical documents are still digitally scanned as part of the update process for large academic databases such as EBSCO.

The Duty of Genius

“We say that someone has the eye of a painter or the ear of a musician but anyone lacking these qualities hardly suffers from a kind of blindness or deafness.”

“We say that someone doesn’t have a musical ear, and aspect-blindness is (in a way) comparable to this inability to hear.”

These are quoted from Ray Monk’s great biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius. Apparently Wittgenstein uttered them in conversation with his friend, Drury, a psychologist.

a new appreciation for modal logic

As I venture deeper into my studies, I’m beginning to reaffirm my confidence in modal logic.  This is primarily a function of seeing how it can be used at an applied/industrial level.  I’m only beginning to understand, or in some cases, conjure, ways in which a logical model of a database, for instance, might be describable in modal propositional logic.  Since I haven’t been able to achieve this at a sufficient level, I’ll hold off on sharing my exact thoughts.  Needless to say, even this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on modal logic characterizes some of its commercial and/or industrial application.

The applications of modal logic to mathematics and computer science have become increasingly important. Provability logic is only one example of this trend. The term “advanced modal logic” refers to a tradition in modal logic research that is particularly well represented in departments of mathematics and computer science. This tradition has been woven into the history of modal logic right from its beginnings (Goldblatt, 2006). Research into relationships with topology and algebras represents some of the very first technical work on modal logic. However the term ‘advanced modal logic’ generally refers to a second wave of work done since the mid 1970s. Some example of the many interesting topics dealt with include results on decidability (whether it is possible to compute whether a formula of a given modal logic is a theorem) and complexity (the costs in time and memory needed to compute such facts about modal logics).

My recent attempt involved attempting to translate simple E-R logical data flows into modal propositions, though without quantification it was difficult and/or probably impossible.

Yahoo, Now Offering Search as a Web Service

Yahoo News Search, Image Search and Yahoo Spell Checker services will all be offered as part of this effort. Combine this with Yahoo
’s recently introduced SearchMonkey tool, and you could build a search engine that is entirely your own

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Lively: Google Launches Its Own Second Life

Google launched Lively today, a 3D virtual world that can best be described as the search and advertising giant’s take on Second Life. Currently, the service is for Windows users only and requires Internet Explorer or Firefox, as well as a Google account, to take part in.

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Old habits: maybe they don’t die hard

As an undergraduate, I certainly acted on that impulse to procrastinate. In my limited experience, philosophers or aspiring philosophers are not different in this regard, and in some ways, seem to procrastinate to an even greater degree.

Is this part of the philosopher in me slowly dying? If picture below is any indication, then either (p) I’m growing up or (q) I’m slowly divorcing myself from philosopher-type habits. As it turns out, if p or q, then r: D tracks his assignments.

The emergence of an old problem: if there’s a problem with a reductio, what do you call it?

I’ve been attempting to finish a midterm in one of my classes before July 4th rolls around.  I was delighted tonight to realize that my opinion of one of the arguments I was to assess was to argue against the effectiveness of what I took to be a reductio ad absurdum.

I remember first learning what a reductio was while reading one of Plato’s dialogues.  I can’t remember exactly which one, probably The Theaetetus.  In any event, I came to the familiar question of how exactly to name my opposition to this particualr reductio.  Since a reductio ad absurdum is deductively invalid by definition, I could say “and this is inconsistent because…” The function of the argument WAS to be invalid and thus not sound.

I can’t discuss the specifics, but needless to say, it was entertaining to see a familiar problem arise in a quite distinct context or discourse.

Here are a few legitimate sources of information on reductio ad absurdum’s:

• Standard Encyclopedia article on Democritus

A reductio ad absurdum argument reported by Aristotle suggests that the atomists argued from the assumption that, if a magnitude is infinitely divisible, nothing prevents it actually having been divided at every point. The atomist then asks what would remain: if the answer is some extended particles, such as dust, then the hypothesized division has not yet been completed. If the answer is nothing or points, then the question is how an extended magnitude could be composed from what does not have extension

Ignorant America: Just How Stupid Are We?

Millions of Americans are embarrassingly ill-informed and they do not care that they are. Are you one of those people?

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