Tools, not laws

Scientific laws as tools for taxonomy

Many people hold that laws of empirical sciences are general hypotheses whose validity is tested by observations. According to them, these kind of tests are done as follows. Given a law, from a conjunction of this law with some other hypotheses several sentences are deduced. These deduced sentences make assertions about phenomena which should be observed at some specified times and places. Then...

Moral Principles Are Not Moral Laws

O on Not Designing Tools

The reader is no doubt well aware of HCI’s emphasis on the analysis of systems in which the computer plays the role of tool. The field encompasses positivist and pragmatic approaches in analyzing the products and the trajectories of use of technology (Coyne, 1995; Ihde, 2002; Preece et al., 1994), and many useful guidelines for the design of task-oriented tools have been produced as a result. H...

Smoke-free laws do not harm profits: new global report.

Smoke-free laws do not harm profits: new global report As increasing numbers of governments ban smoking in workplaces, including hospitality venues such as bars and restaurants, the protestations of the tobacco industry are heard louder and ever more desperate, trying to convince employers that it is bad for business. We should not be surprised that economic arguments are being used as if emplo...

Development of Analysis Tools for Certification of Flight Control Laws Fa9550-05-1-0266

In this report, we discuss our progress on nonlinear systems analysis. In the past year, we have refined the use of conventional simulation along with semidefinite and polynomial optimization to discover Lyapunov functions which provably certify region-of-attraction (ROA) estimation. Other system properties, such as induced-gain, can also be estimated, with guaranteed bounds, in this manner. Fo...