Overview

form·Z is an award-winning general-purpose [1] solid and surface modeler with an extensive set of 2D/3D form manipulating and sculpting capabilities, many of which are unique. It is an effective design tool for architects, landscape architects, urban designers, engineers, animators, illustrators and movie makers, industrial and interior designers and all other design areas. It facilitates the development and execution of projects from conception to complete detailed structures, animated and automatically fabricated. form·Z can be used on Windows as well as on Macintosh computers and in addition to English it is also available in German, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Korean and Japanese.

Overview

Media transparency deals with the way the media is viewed to the public today and concerns why the media may portray something the way that it does. Media communication can be a very powerful tool in affecting change whether it is political or social. The various implications it has on the way issues are viewed within the government and to the public has a great affect on public policy change in the United States.Social media participation can be a key factor in whether or not something is accepted by the government. Transparency causes issues when there are many competing sources and they are possibly corrupt. The biased information can affect public policy if the government is tampering with the way the information is portrayed, in order to cast a positive or negative light on it. Depending on how transparent a news article is, one can determine its reliability and draw their own assumptions or draw their own conclusions from the findings.

The media’s pervasive influence can directly affect public opinion. It has been stated that “the only means of influencing what people think is precisely to control what they think about.” Agenda-setting relates to the process of policy change because “media content is pervasive and rife with explicit and implicit political meaning.” Beyond the role that agenda-setting can play in influencing public opinion, agenda building has to do with the mechanisms by which “social problems originate on the media agenda and how they are subsequently transformed into political issues.” The transparency with which information has been obtained alters our knowledge about the subject. The framing theory states that media influence issue agendas by portraying an issue as positive or negative; citizens will then be influenced by media to hold similar opinions. By discussing local issues in a positive manner, local media can garner support for issues. By blocking certain users, they defy transparency in media.

Overview

Collaborative software is a broad concept that greatly overlaps with Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Some authors argue they are equivalent. According to Carstensen and Schmidt (1999)^[2]groupware is part of CSCW. The authors claim that CSCW, and thereby groupware addresses "how collaborative activities and their coordination can be supported by means of computer systems". Software products such as email, calendaring, text chat, wiki, and bookmarking belong to this category, whenever used for group work, whereas the more general term social software applies to systems used outside the workplace, for example, online dating services and social networks like Friendster, Twitter and Facebook. It has been suggested that Metcalfe's law — the more people who use something, the more valuable it becomes — applies to these types of software.

The use of collaborative software in the workspace creates a collaborative working environment (CWE). A collaborative working environment supports people in both their individual and cooperative work thus giving birth to a new class of professionals, e-professionals, who can work together irrespective of their geographical location.

Finally collaborative software relates to the notion of collaborative work systems which are conceived as any form of human organization that emerges any time that collaboration takes place, whether it is formal or informal, intentional or unintentional.^[3] Whereas the groupware or collaborative software pertains to the technological elements of computer supported cooperative work, collaborative work systems become a useful analytical tool to understand the behavioral and organizational variables that are associated to the broader concept of CSCW.^[4]

Overview

The Culture is characterized by being a post-scarcity society (meaning that its advanced technologies provide practically limitless material wealth and comforts for everyone for free, having all but abolished the concept of possessions), by having overcome almost all physical constraints on life (including disease and death) and by being an almost totally egalitarian, stable society without the use of any form of force or compulsion, except where necessary to protect others.

Minds, powerful artificial intelligences, have an important role to play in this society. They administer this affluence for the benefit of all. As one commentator has said,

In vesting all power in his individualistic, sometime eccentric, but always benign, AI Minds, Banks knew what he was doing; this is the only way a liberal anarchy could be achieved, by taking what is best in humans and placing it beyond corruption, which means out of human control. The danger involved in this imaginative step, though, is clear; one of the problems with the Culture novels as novels is that the central characters, the Minds, are too powerful and, to put it bluntly, too good.^[3]

The novels of the Culture cycle, therefore, mostly deal with people at the fringes of the Culture: diplomats, spies, or mercenaries; those who interact with other civilizations, and who do the Culture's dirty work in moving those societies closer to the Culture ideal, sometimes by force.

Overview

Within software engineering, programming (the implementation) is regarded as one phase in a software development process.

There is an ongoing debate on the extent to which the writing of programs is an art, a craft or an engineering discipline.^[1] In general, good programming is considered to be the measured application of all three, with the goal of producing an efficient and evolvable software solution (the criteria for "efficient" and "evolvable" vary considerably). The discipline differs from many other technical professions in that programmers, in general, do not need to be licensed or pass any standardized (or governmentally regulated) certification tests in order to call themselves "programmers" or even "software engineers." Because the discipline covers many areas, which may or may not include critical applications, it is debatable whether licensing is required for the profession as a whole. In most cases, the discipline is self-governed by the entities which require the programming, and sometimes very strict environments are defined (e.g. United States Air Force use of AdaCore and security clearance). However, representing oneself as a "Professional Software Engineer" without a license from an accredited institution is illegal in many parts of the world.

Another ongoing debate is the extent to which the programming language used in writing computer programs affects the form that the final program takes. This debate is analogous to that surrounding the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis^[2] in linguistics and cognitive science, which postulates that a particular spoken language's nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers. Different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of representing the world perfectly with language, because it acknowledges that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community.

Overview

Within software engineering, programming (the implementation) is regarded as one phase in a software development process.

There is an ongoing debate on the extent to which the writing of programs is an art, a craft or an engineering discipline.^[1] In general, good programming is considered to be the measured application of all three, with the goal of producing an efficient and evolvable software solution (the criteria for "efficient" and "evolvable" vary considerably). The discipline differs from many other technical professions in that programmers, in general, do not need to be licensed or pass any standardized (or governmentally regulated) certification tests in order to call themselves "programmers" or even "software engineers." Because the discipline covers many areas, which may or may not include critical applications, it is debatable whether licensing is required for the profession as a whole. In most cases, the discipline is self-governed by the entities which require the programming, and sometimes very strict environments are defined (e.g. United States Air Force use of AdaCore and security clearance). However, representing oneself as a "Professional Software Engineer" without a license from an accredited institution is illegal in many parts of the world.

Another ongoing debate is the extent to which the programming language used in writing computer programs affects the form that the final program takes. This debate is analogous to that surrounding the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis^[2] in linguistics and cognitive science, which postulates that a particular spoken language's nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers. Different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of representing the world perfectly with language, because it acknowledges that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community.