A cost estimation model to support automation decision in assembly systems design

Cost analysis is crucial in the design of assembly systems and the decision on their level of automation (LoA). This paper presents a cost estimation model of assembly system that is used to decide their LoA during the early phase of projects. Based on an extensive literature review, a complete cost model integrating multiple cost drivers is proposed. This model is then exploited to create the objective function of an integer linear programme model utilised to solve the LoA decision problem. The work provides a way to perform cost estimation of assembly systems alternatives and to decide the most appropriate LoA in assembly. The cost estimation model is built with a parametric approach allowing the definition of various optimisation objectives. The proposed integer programme, complement this approach by proposing the suitable constraints set, that describes the LoA decision problem.     

技术设计的哲学思想溯源

目的 设计是人类创造技术人工物的实践活动形式，技术设计概念的提出为设计研究奠定了重要的哲学根基，本文旨在探究技术设计的哲学思想之源，以期从技术哲学范畴启迪设计科学研究和设计实践创新。方法 研究溯源技术哲学的发端、经典理论及两次经验转向脉络，探究支撑技术设计研究的现象学技术哲学思想基础，并相应从实用主义和实证主义出发，分析和论证技术哲学思想对设计研究进路的影响。结论 阐明了技术设计的哲学思想基础和演进脉络，发展了技术设计理论的实践情境研究进路与理性逻辑哲学研究进路，并证明了两条技术设计研究进路在哲学思想和逻辑上存在一定的同源性与互应性。     

Human nature,the means-ends relationship,and alienation: Themes for potential East–West collaboration

This essay identifies two basic themes, human nature and the means-ends relationship, that can both advance philosophical reflection on technology and potentially serve as a basis for East–West collaboration in philosophy. What is central to the philosophy of technology and engineering are questions of how technical activity is related to human nature, both as founded in human nature and contributing to its realization. In the history of human thought, there have been a number of theses about human nature — the human being is a rational animal, a tool making and using animal, and a symbol making and using animal — that can have different implications for such questions. There are nevertheless possibilities for synthesis of different theories that point toward the importance of thinking about technology in terms of the means-ends relationship and the experience of a disharmony in the relationship that has been called alienation. From the perspective of the means-ends relationship, some suggestions are considered for dealing with different forms of alienation. A final suggestion is that some traditions of Chinese philosophy may contribute to advancing efforts to understand human nature and to deal with disharmonies in the means-ends relationship.     

Between specificity and openness: How architects deal with design-use complexities

Design-use relations are complex: architects influence social outcomes through design without having control over them. Making this complexity explicit during design is important, but difficult. Promising is work on human-technology relations in science and technology studies (STS) and philosophy of technology. With an eye to connecting this theoretical work to design practice, we study what architects already do: how design-use complexities figure during design processes and how architects deal with them. Based on a case study of the design competition for a new media building, we show two lines of reasoning in architects’ anticipation of use: specificity and openness. In doing so, we aim to provide insight into when, where and why they can benefit from STS and philosophical theory.     

Programs=data=first-class citizens in a computational world

From a programming perspective, Alan Turing's epochal 1936 paper on computable functions introduced several new concepts, including what is today known as self-interpreters and programs as data, and invented a great many now-common programming techniques. We begin by reviewing Turing's contribution from a programming perspective; and then systematize and mention some of the many ways that later developments in models of computation (MOCs) have interacted with computability theory and programming language research. Next, we describe the 'blob' MOC: a recent stored-program computational model without pointers. In the blob model, programs are truly first-class citizens, capable of being automatically compiled, or interpreted, or executed directly. Further, the blob model appears closer to being physically realizable than earlier computation models. In part, this is due to strong finiteness owing to early binding in the program; and a strong adjacency property: the active instruction is always adjacent to the piece of data on which it operates. The model is Turing complete in a strong sense: a universal interpretation algorithm exists that is able to run any program in a natural way and without arcane data encodings. Next, some of the best known among the numerous existing MOCs are described, and we develop a list of traits an 'ideal' MOC should possess from our perspective. We make no attempt to consider all models put forth since Turing's 1936 paper, and the selection of models covered concerns only models with discrete, atomic computation steps. The next step is to classify the selected models by qualitative rather than quantitative features. Finally, we describe how the blob model differs from an 'ideal' MOC, and identify some natural next steps to achieve such a model.     

Liu Zeyuan's philosophy of engineering and technology: An introduction to his Marxist socioeconomic theory

Liu Zeyuan (1940–2020) was a contributing founder to the Northeastern School in Chinese philosophy of technology. As such, he undertook to develop a theory that built on Marxism as the official ideology of the People's Republic of China. Following an overview of Liu's life and work, this article introduces the Marxist socioeconomic theory that served as a framework for his research. It then describes how he used this theory to reflect on the essential features and historical evolution of engineering and technology along with his analyses of issues related to innovation, ethics, and governance. It includes some reflections on how Liu's thought can be related to other philosophies of engineering and technology both inside and outside China.     

“Accoucheur of literature”: Joseph Banks and the Philosophical Transactions, 1778–1820

This paper explores the editorial influence of Joseph Banks on the Philosophical Transactions—still, at the time of his accession to the Presidency of the Royal Society in 1778, the most prestigious scientific periodical published in English. In particular, it examines how Banks forged, and wielded, personal influence over what went into the Transactions. Nominally, at least, the periodical was under the collective control of the Society's council, with significant statutory safeguards in place to prevent editorship by a presidential clique. Yet this was exactly what Banks was able to speedily create and maintain. In this essay I explore how Banks accomplished this and the pressures it produced, addressing two key questions. First, I examine the social dimension of Banks's management of the Transactions (and what contemporaries thought of it), including particularly the questions of how and to whom access to the periodical was afforded or denied by Banks and his associates; and second, I consider how Banks and the Society dealt with the emerging competitive pressure of new commercial and learned society periodicals. I outline a sphere of scientific sociability partly created by informal processes of communicating, circulating, and evaluating papers developed by Banks and his close associates, and its significance for the Transactions in its engagements with other sites, genres, and conventions of scientific publication.     

人工智能服装设计的哲学事理审度

聚智新科技范式、赋能新设计哲学。人工智能应用于艺术设计的技术浪潮引发重“术”轻“学”的现象,需要“技”“道”并行去审度人工智能设计研究应该从哪些论域展开,探其“事”究其“理”。以服装设计为论域媒介,融合哲学、经济、科学与艺术的跨学科研究方法,提出从论域本体及外延认识定位、技术方法定位的哲学高度去求解人工智能服装设计的深度依据。从“事理”内部打开认知人工智能服装设计的哲学规范性研究进路,提出人工智能服装设计研究的本体界定和认识进路。从哲学思考的相关维度解答了人工智能服装设计“是什么、如何是”的问题,提出建构人工智能设计的学理体系进路。为设计师和数据工程师合作开展人机融合设计提供方法论依据,从技术视角解答了人工智能服装设计“怎么是”的哲学问题和技术方法系统进路。     

《化学基础》与《包装材料》课程教学探讨

《化学基础》是学生必学的一门基础课程，《包装材料》是包装专业最重要的专业课之一。如何提高这两门课程的教学质量?文中就这一问题进行了探讨。     

The ideology of ergonomics

This paper examines the positivist and empiricist philosophical ideas that underpin mainstream ergonomics and argues that they undermine the discipline's ability to properly theorise the nature of the social world. Instead and as a consequence of these largely implicit philosophical beliefs ergonomics is an ideological discipline whose social use is largely shaped to reflect the interests of dominant social institutions, whether public or private, that tend to control the workplace. Arguing from the perspective of critical social science the paper says that questions of design are central to debates about the good society (how people should live) as indeed some ergonomic researchers have recently begun to argue. The task of the paper is to help encourage such debate within the discipline by clarifying what it sees as the ideological role that ergonomics plays in society and how this ideology is, in turn, reflected in its philosophical assumptions. The importance of the paper for ergonomic theory is that it highlights the need for the discipline to engage in a critical manner with its philosophical assumptions. It does this by exposing the problematic nature of its positivist philosophy, arguing that as a consequence of the latter ergonomics in practice is an ideological discipline.     

Uncertainty in science and its role in climate policy

Policy-making is usually about risk management. Thus, the handling of uncertainty in science is central to its support of sound policy-making. There is value in scientists engaging in a deep conversation with policy-makers and others, not merely 'delivering' results or analyses and then playing no further role. Communicating the policy relevance of different varieties of uncertainty, including imprecision, ambiguity, intractability and indeterminism, is an important part of this conversation. Uncertainty is handled better when scientists engage with policy-makers. Climate policy aims both to alter future risks (particularly via mitigation) and to take account of and respond to relevant remaining risks (via adaptation) in the complex causal chain that begins and ends with individuals. Policy-making profits from learning how to shift the distribution of risks towards less dangerous impacts, even if the probability of events remains uncertain. Immediate value lies not only in communicating how risks may change with time and how those risks may be changed by action, but also in projecting how our understanding of those risks may improve with time (via science) and how our ability to influence them may advance (via technology and policy design). Guidance on the most urgent places to gather information and realistic estimates of when to expect more informative answers is of immediate value, as are plausible estimates of the risk of delaying action. Risk assessment requires grappling with probability and ambiguity (uncertainty in the Knightian sense) and assessing the ethical, logical, philosophical and economic underpinnings of whether a target of '50 per cent chance of remaining under +2(°)C' is either 'right' or 'safe'. How do we better stimulate advances in the difficult analytical and philosophical questions while maintaining foundational scientific work advancing our understanding of the phenomena? And provide immediate help with decisions that must be made now?     

设计思维的哲学探究

目的 以哲学为基础,从设计思维的本质深入研究,重新诠释设计思维,以期从哲学范畴加深对设计思维的理解,明确设计思维存在的意义,探索设计思维的发展趋势和方向。方法 以技术哲学、设计哲学、认知哲学、哲学人类学为基础,通过国内外相关文献的研究和案例搜索,在哲学上解读设计思维的本质,在思辨中加深对设计思维的认识,从而确定设计思维的发展方向。结论 阐明了设计思维和哲学之间的关系,加深了对设计思维在技术哲学、设计哲学、认知哲学和哲学人类学视角的本质理解,拓宽了设计思维的研究方向和思路,明确了设计思维的发展现状及存在的问题。设计思维是解决复杂问题和普及设计进入大众生活的重要途径,未来在诸如人工智能、协同创新等跨学科的领域仍存在很大发展空间。     

Giovan Battista Della Porta's construction of pneumatic phenomena and his use of recipes as heuristic tools

In this paper, I suggest that research results from the history and philosophy of modern science provide a valuable methodological contribution for investigating early modern experimental philosophy and employ them to reassess the contribution of Giovan Battista Della Porta to its development. In modern science, the production of experimental knowledge is dependent on a complex array of communication strategies involving verbal terminology, diagrams, standardized instruments, and measurement units. Historians and philosophers have investigated the constitutive connection between such strategies and the phenomena scientists study in laboratories, showing how the two often co-evolved during the 19th and 20th centuries. Della Porta took an important first step towards the development of such methods by transforming the traditional recipe format into a strategy for mutually connecting, conceptualizing, and sharing observations made in experiments involving similar, but not identical, instruments and procedures. I use as a case study the changing manner in which he used recipes for presenting and connecting a number of pneumatic experiences from the first edition of Natural Magic (1558) until his meteorology treatise On Transmutations of Air (1610). In modern terms, those experiences can be interpreted as demonstrating the air's expansion and contraction with heat or pressure. However, today's notions of air pressure, density, and volume did not exist around 1600 and the verbal, visual, and quantitative means of expressing them had yet to be created. Della Porta did not create the modern notions, but he contributed to their emergence in a substantial way with his discussions of those pneumatic experiences. Della Porta's innovation may be described as the creation of a new epistemic genre, but it was not of a purely literary character, since the recipes also shaped the instruments and procedures they described, transforming them into new means of knowledge production in experimental philosophy.     

Kant vs. Legendre on Symmetry: Mirror Images in Philosophy and Mathematics

Abstract.   In 1768, Kant published a short essay in which he inquired into the possibility of determining the directionality of space. Kant's central argument invokes the strategy that if one were to demonstrate directionality, then the relational view of space that Leibniz propounded would be refuted. This paper has been considered a major turning point in Kant's philosophical development towards his critical philosophy of transcendental idealism. I demonstrate that in this study, Kant came very close to the modern concept of symmetry . His novel construction of incongruent counterpart ( inkongruentes Gegenstück ) contains elements essential to the modern notion of symmetry . However, Kant does not consider the incongruent counterparts, which he designates as 'Right' and 'Left', symmetric; rather, he holds the French encyclopaedist view that symmetry is a kind of balance. This study convinced Kant that the solution to the problem of the nature of space lies not in mathematics but in metaphysics. He was wrong in this conclusion, at least with respect to symmetry. The solution was found within the framework of mathematics, that is, solid geometry. In 1794, Legendre recast the traditional encyclopaedist concept of symmetry by calling a certain property of polyhedra symmetrical. The view of Kant is contrasted with that of Legendre by comparing their usages of mirror image as an aid for understanding. While in both cases mirror images are not considered illusions—perhaps for the first time in the history of mirror reflections—the differences are substantial, highlighting the limitation of Kant's position and the great potential of Legendre's new concept of symmetry.     

Using instruments in the study of animate beings: Della Porta's and Bacon's experiments with plants

In this paper, I explain Francis Bacon's use of plants as philosophical instruments in the context of his Historia vitae et mortis. My main claim is that Bacon experimented with plants in order to obtain knowledge about the hidden processes of nature, knowledge that could be transferred to the human case and used for the prolongation of life. Bacon's experiments were based on Giambattista della Porta's reports from the Magia naturalis, but I show how a different metaphysics and research method made Bacon systematically rework, reconceptualise, and put to divergent uses the results of the same experimental reports.     

„Philosophie als eigene Antwort auf die Frage Welt“

The important and influential mathematician Felix Hausdorff was also the author of several remarkable philosophical books and essays. About his unusual biography between philosophy and topology we have only little knowledge. We know only few personal documents and letters. Among Hausdorff’s letters that have been preserved (about 130), the letters and postcards to the librarian, translator and artist Franz Meyer in Jena (10) give an important insight into Hausdorff’s biography and his philosophical development. They also inform about his way from a philosopher, who liked to play with Nietzsche’s thoughts, to a pure mathematician.     

Intelligent machines in the twenty-first century: foundations of inference and inquiry

The last century saw the application of Boolean algebra to the construction of computing machines, which work by applying logical transformations to information contained in their memory. The development of information theory and the generalization of Boolean algebra to Bayesian inference have enabled these computing machines, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, to be endowed with the ability to learn by making inferences from data. This revolution is just beginning as new computational techniques continue to make difficult problems more accessible. Recent advances in our understanding of the foundations of probability theory have revealed implications for areas other than logic. Of relevance to intelligent machines, we recently identified the algebra of questions as the free distributive algebra, which will now allow us to work with questions in a way analogous to that which Boolean algebra enables us to work with logical statements. In this paper, we examine the foundations of inference and inquiry. We begin with a history of inferential reasoning, highlighting key concepts that have led to the automation of inference in modern machine-learning systems. We then discuss the foundations of inference in more detail using a modern viewpoint that relies on the mathematics of partially ordered sets and the scaffolding of lattice theory. This new viewpoint allows us to develop the logic of inquiry and introduce a measure describing the relevance of a proposed question to an unresolved issue. Last, we will demonstrate the automation of inference, and discuss how this new logic of inquiry will enable intelligent machines to ask questions. Automation of both inference and inquiry promises to allow robots to perform science in the far reaches of our solar system and in other star systems by enabling them not only to make inferences from data, but also to decide which question to ask, which experiment to perform, or which measurement to take given what they have learned and what they are designed to understand.     

‘s Gravesande's Appropriation of Newton's Natural Philosophy,Part I: Epistemological and Theological Issues

In this essay I reassess Willem Jacob ‘s Gravesande's Newtonianism. I draw attention to ‘s Gravesande's a‐causal rendering of physics which went against Newton's causal understanding of natural philosophy and to his attempt to establish a solid foundation for the certainty of Newton's natural philosophy, which he considered as a powerful antidote against the theological aberrations of Descartes and especially Spinoza. I argue that, although ‘s Gravesande clearly took inspiration from Newton's natural philosophy, he was running his own scientific and intellectual agenda and that he was combining Newtonian and non‐Newtonian elements.     

The periodic table as an icon: A perspective from the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce

The aim of this essay is to examine the iconic nature of Mendeleev's periodic table in light of the philosophy of the American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce. Mendeleev and Peirce lived at approximately the same time during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They both trained as chemists and, in 1869, the year of Mendeleev's first arrangement of the chemical elements, Peirce published his own arrangement, also based on atomic weights. Peirce developed a theory of iconicity as part of his wider semiotics, an important characteristic of an icon being its epistemic fruitfulness. The periodic table proved to be epistemically fruitful in predicting new relations—new knowledge—such as revised atomic weights and novel elements. By viewing the periodic table through the lens of Peirce's iconicity, I will show how Mendeleev was able both to reveal and to make perspicuous the relations between the chemical elements.