Galileo's Refutation of the Speed‐Distance Law of Fall Rehabilitated

Galileo's refutation of the speed‐distance law of fall in his Two New Sciences is routinely dismissed as a moment of confused argumentation. We urge that Galileo's argument correctly identified why the speed‐distance law is untenable, failing only in its very last step. Using an ingenious combination of scaling and self‐similarity arguments, Galileo found correctly that bodies, falling from rest according to this law, fall all distances in equal times. What he failed to recognize in the last step is that this time is infinite, the result of an exponential dependence of distance on time. Instead, Galileo conflated it with the other motion that satisfies this ‘equal time’ property, instantaneous motion.     

Throwing light on photonics: The genealogy of a technological paradigm

Photonic technologies are often advertised as capable of revolutionizing our lives in the near future. However, the exact meaning of the word “photonics” as well as the scope of the field remain unclear. The term was born in the 1970s in both France and the Netherlands where various scholarly communities began research into the phenomenon. Some resulting technologies started circulating in industry and academia and the concept of photonics became very successful in the late 1980s when photons were supposed to replace electrons in every‐day technologies. The failure of optical computing damaged the reputation of photonics in the 1990s but the term lived on as it merged with sister terms such as electro‐optics and optoelectronics. The key problem with photonics is the breadth of its scope. Some argue it is the science of light, others consider it an economic category. Generally, photonics covers lasers, optical fibers as well as solar energy and LEDs. It seems that the only conceptual tool capable of addressing this complexity is that of technological paradigms, which Ernest Sternberg applied to photonics in 1992. Sternberg's approach can help to clarify the epistemological boundaries of the name “photonics,” even when addressing this complex area from a 21st century stand point.     

LRB隔震桥梁空间变异性地震随机响应分析

对装有铅芯橡胶支座（Lead—Rubber—Bearing，LRB）的隔震大跨连续梁桥进行了考虑地震动空间变异性的随机响应分析。地面运动加速度功率谱模型为零均值的平稳高斯过程，描述为过滤白噪声施加于支撑各点。地震动空间变异性综合考虑空间不相干效应、行波效应和局部场地土效应。推导了LRB隔震结构多点激励运动方程，并运用随机等价线性化方法以计入铅芯橡胶支座（LRB）的滞回非线性性能。对一大跨LRB隔震梁桥进行了一致激励和综合考虑地震动空间变异性的三种工况计算，得到了各工况下响应的拟静力项、动力项和总响应项的各自最大值的均值，并进行了对比分析。结果表明，对于带有铅芯橡胶支座的减隔震大跨连续梁桥，多点激励效应不容忽视，一致激励会对结构产生不安全的估计。     

Gender, Science and Politics: Queen Frederika and Nuclear Research in Post-war Greece

Abstract.   In the 1950s a small group of scientists and politicians in Greece became determined to build a center for nuclear reactor research. With the exception of a handful of students trained in nuclear physics, no real expertise existed in the country. There were also no experienced administrators or managers ready to take the lead, and the existing national bureaucracy was labyrinthine. Thus a new scientific network had to be constituted largely from scratch in the Greek postwar sociopolitical order, a network that had to be extended to the international scientific community if it was to be efficient at all. Surprisingly, behind the construction of this scientific nuclear research project in Greece one can discern the female touch of a powerful and determined woman, Queen Frederika of Greece. I argue that she was the one who, by taking advantage of the United States' discourse on atomic energy for peace, was able to exploit the knots and nodes of her own political network, build new alliances and transform scattered resources into a grid that could underlay nuclear research in Greece and her own legitimacy in the country.     

Home Hemodialysis: A Patient's Perspective

This is a personal story of a member of a family with hereditary nephritis. My oldest brother died in 1946 before there was any dialysis or transplantation in the United States. My other brother died at the age of 22 in 1960 after unsuccessful kidney transplantation. I developed renal failure in 1980 and was lucky to survive due to the combination of several factors. The first, and most important, was the choice of home hemodialysis, which offers the longest patient survival of all dialysis modalities. The second was the help of my wife, who is my dialysis partner. The third was my conviction that it is not possible to get too much dialysis. I took control of my treatment and insisted on having the largest available dialyzers and performed long dialysis sessions. I was able to continue to work for the first 15 years on dialysis. As I look to the future, I am excited about the prospect of daily home hemodialysis, because I believe that this therapy will offer more efficient treatment and a nearly normal diet.     

The Analogy between Light and Sound in the History of Optics from the Ancient Greeks to Isaac Newton. Part 1

Analogies between hearing and seeing already existed in ancient Greek theories of perception. The present paper follows the evolution of such analogies until the rise of 17th century optics, with due regard to the diversity of their origins and nature but with particular emphasis on their bearing on the physical concepts of light and sound. Whereas the old Greek analogies were only side effects of the unifying concepts of perception, the analogies of the 17th century played an important role in constructing optical theories by imitation of acoustic theories, or vice versa. This transition depended on several factors including the changing relations between optics, music, mathematics, and physics, the diversity of early modern concepts of sound, and the rise of a new physics based on experimentation and mechanical explanation.     

The Analogy between Light and Sound in the History of Optics from the ancient Greeks to Isaac Newton. Part 2†

Analogies between hearing and seeing already existed in ancient Greek theories of perception. The present paper follows the evolution of such analogies until the rise of 17th century optics, with due regard to the diversity of their origins and nature but with particular emphasis on their bearing on the physical concepts of light and sound. Whereas the old Greek analogies were only side effects of the unifying concepts of perception, the analogies of the 17th century played an important role in constructing optical theories by imitation of acoustic theories, or vice versa. This transition depended on several factors including the changing relations between optics, music, mathematics, and physics, the diversity of early modern concepts of sound, and the rise of a new physics based on experimentation and mechanical explanation.     

回顾与期望

回顾了半个多世纪来,同济大学声学研究所的建筑声学工作历程,并对未来的发展提出几点期望。     

From the History of Science to the History of Knowledge – and Back

The history of science can be better understood against the background of a history of knowledge comprising not only theoretical but also intuitive and practical knowledge. This widening of scope necessitates a more concise definition of the concept of knowledge, relating its cognitive to its material and social dimensions. The history of knowledge comprises the history of institutions in which knowledge is produced and transmitted. This is an essential but hitherto neglected aspect of cultural evolution. Taking this aspect into account one is led to the concept of extended evolution, which integrates the perspectives of niche construction and complex regulative networks. The paper illustrates this concept using four examples: the emergence of language, the Neolithic revolution, the invention of writing and the origin of mechanics.     

Deep horizons: Canada's underwater habitat program and vertical dimensions of marine sovereignty

In the 1960s and 1970s, scuba technology, underwater cameras, and documentarians revealed a long-hidden underwater world to the public. At this time oceanographic science was growing exponentially. Historians of the marine sciences have focused their studies of the period on institutional and military partnerships, and on the scientist-administrators who shaped oceanographic research institutions (such as the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the British National Institute of Oceanography). Underwater habitat development during the 1960s and 1970s, however, deserves greater attention than it has yet received, as it highlights a peculiar confluence of military, scientific, and popular interest, characteristic of the period, in the colonization of the seafloor. Existing accounts have focused on American habitats, notably Sealab and Tektite, since these were the largest and best funded. But this approach overemphasizes a Cold War narrative in which the sole protagonists of the habitat programs were the United States and the Soviet Union. At least 65 habitats were built between 1962 and 1991. Some were state-sponsored, with significant programs run by French, German, Japanese, and Canadian teams. This essay takes as a case study the Canadian Sublimnos habitat as well as the underwater exploration programs it helped launch in Newfoundland (Lora-I) and in the Arctic (Sub-Igloo). The Canadian case demonstrates that technological expertise and public enthusiasm for underwater exploration should not be solely understood with reference to Cold War interests of the two superpowers. Rather, the international range of habitat programs of the 1960s and 1970s reveals an expanding interest in the vertical underwater dimension that was fueled by numerous national scientific aims and territorial claims.     

Pragmatic Collaborations in Practice: A Response to Herrigel and Whitford and Zeitlin

Pragmatic collaborations are indeed less stable than some formulations in the original Helper, MacDuffie, and Sabel paper suggest ("Pragmatic collaborations: advancing knowledge while controlling opportunism", Industrial and Corporate Change, 9(3): 443-488 2000). This reply argues that the instability derives at least as much from constitutive features of iterative cooperative design properly understood as from power imbalances. Because of the inherent instability of iterated co-design as exasperated by power imbalances, governance mechanisms are indeed required to stabilize emergent forms of collaboration. But these governance mechanisms can themselves be interpreted as embodying many of the features of the iterative co-design process itself.     

Alternative Paths to Competitive Advantage: A Fuzzy-Set Analysis of the Origins of Large Firms

Scholars have documented the importance of national-level factors for the competitive success of firms on a global scale. These studies typically identify multiple factors that are behind the emergence of large and successful firms in particular national clusters. However, there has been relatively little research identifying whether such factors are all collectively necessary to produce the outcome, or whether only a few of the factors in different combinations might be sufficient to generate the shift in competitive advantage manifested in the market power of large “flagship” firms. In this paper, we study the evolution of one industry across six countries in which the competitive position of national firms changed considerably during our 100-year analysis period. The results of our combined historical and fuzzy-set analyses show that an unequal distribution of resources may lead to alternative causal pathways to competitive advantage of the largest firms.     

Scaling and comparison of fluid limits of queues applied to call centers with time-varying parameters

Temporary overload situations in queues can be approximated by fluid queues. We strengthen earlier results on the comparison of multi-server tandem systems with their fluid limits. At the same time we give conditions under which economies of scale hold. We apply the results to call centers.Correspondence to: Ger Koole. We are grateful to the anonymous referees for their useful remarks that helped us improve the paper.     

ASRSM: A Sequential Experimental Design for Response Surface Optimization

Most preset response surface methodology (RSM) designs offer ease of implementation and good performance over a wide range of process and design optimization applications. These designs often lack the ability to adapt the design on the basis of the characteristics of application and experimental space so as to reduce the number of experiments necessary. Hence, they are not cost‐effective for applications where the cost of experimentation is high or when the experimentation resources are limited. In this paper, we present an adaptive sequential response surface methodology (ASRSM) for industrial experiments with high experimentation cost, limited experimental resources, and high design optimization performance requirement. The proposed approach is a sequential adaptive experimentation approach that combines concepts from nonlinear optimization, design of experiments, and response surface optimization. The ASRSM uses the information gained from the previous experiments to design the subsequent experiment by simultaneously reducing the region of interest and identifying factor combinations for new experiments. Its major advantage is the experimentation efficiency such that for a given response target, it identifies the input factor combination (or containing region) in less number of experiments than the classical single‐shot RSM designs. Through extensive simulated experiments and real‐world case studies, we show that the proposed ASRSM method outperforms the popular central composite design method and compares favorably with optimal designs. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

分别在运动和静止镜面上反射的电磁波包干涉现象的基础理论分析

本文讨论了分别在运动和静止镜面上反射的相干电磁波包的干涉现象,运动镜面反射所导致的多普勒效应会出现在这种干涉现象之中。本文按照经典电动力学边值问题,特别是运动界面边值问题的观念和方法,为这种干涉现象提供了一个理论描述,分析和讨论了这种干涉现象的特点,并给出了一个确定运动镜面速度的解析表达式.文章最后指出,还有许多与本文内容紧密相联的重要而有趣的问题有待进一步研究和讨论.     

Dark,Beyond Deep: A Paradigm Shift to Cognitive AI with Humanlike Common Sense

Recent progress in deep learning is essentially based on a “big data for small tasks” paradigm, under which massive amounts of data are used to train a classifier for a single narrow task. In this paper, we call for a shift that flips this paradigm upside down. Specifically, we propose a “small data for big tasks” paradigm, wherein a single artificial intelligence (AI) system is challenged to develop “common sense,” enabling it to solve a wide range of tasks with little training data. We illustrate the potential power of this new paradigm by reviewing models of common sense that synthesize recent breakthroughs in both machine and human vision. We identify functionality, physics, intent, causality, and utility (FPICU) as the five core domains of cognitive AI with humanlike common sense. When taken as a unified concept, FPICU is concerned with the questions of “why” and “how,” beyond the dominant “what” and “where” framework for understanding vision. They are invisible in terms of pixels but nevertheless drive the creation, maintenance, and development of visual scenes. We therefore coin them the “dark matter” of vision. Just as our universe cannot be understood by merely studying observable matter, we argue that vision cannot be understood without studying FPICU. We demonstrate the power of this perspective to develop cognitive AI systems with humanlike common sense by showing how to observe and apply FPICU with little training data to solve a wide range of challenging tasks, including tool use, planning, utility inference, and social learning. In summary, we argue that the next generation of AI must embrace “dark” humanlike common sense for solving novel tasks.