Engineering

Engineers vs. Re-engineering

Doc Searls — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 12:07:07 +0000

In an age when people are being re-engineered into farm animals for AI ranchers, it's the job of engineers to save humanity through true personal agency.

A few months ago, I was driving through Los Angeles when the Waze app on my phone told me to take the Stadium Way exit off the 110 freeway. About five other cars peeled off with me, and we became a caravan, snaking through side streets and back onto the freeway a few miles later. I knew Waze had to be in charge of us, since Waze is the navigation app of choice in Los Angeles, and it was beyond coincidence that all these cars took the same wild maze run through streets only locals knew well.

What was Waze up to here, besides offering its users (or a subset of them) a way around a jam? Was it optimizing traffic by taking some cars off the highway and leaving others on? Running an experiment only some AI understood? There was no way to tell. I doubt anyone at Waze could say exactly what was going on either. Algorithms are like that. So are the large and constantly changing data sets informing algorithms most of us with mobile devices depend on every day.

In Re-engineering Humanity, Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger have dug deeply into what's going on behind the "cheap bliss" in our fully connected world.

What they say is that we are all subjects of techno-social engineering. In other words, our algorithmic conveniences are re-making us, much as the technologies and techniques of agriculture re-makes farm animals. And, as with farming, there's an extraction business behind a lot of it.

They say "humanity's techno-social dilemma" is that "companies, institutions, and designers regularly treat us as programmable objects through personalized technologies that are attuned to our personal histories, present behavior and feelings, and predicted futures."

And we are not innocent of complicity in this. "We outsource memory, decision-making and even our interpersonal relations...we rely on the techno-social engineers' tools to train ourselves, and in doing so, let ourselves be trained."

There are obvious benefits to "delegating physical, cognitive, emotional and ethical labor to a third party", such as Waze, but there are downsides, which Brett and Evan number: 1) passivity, 2) decreased agency, 3) decreased responsibility, 4) increased ignorance, 5) detachment and 6) decreased independence. On the road to these diminished human states, we have "fetishised computers and idealized computation".

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StarNet Communications Corp's FastX

James Gray — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 13:55:50 +0000

by James Gray

WebAssembly browser technology is important for making the browser go beyond what JavaScript can do. StarNet Communications Corp says it is the first to plant a WebAssembly flag in the EDA space by integrating WebAssembly technology into its FastX remote Linux display solution.

The addition is part of StarNet's new FastX 2.4 release, which the company promises will provide EDA engineers with a significant browser client performance upgrade, particularly with video and graphics applications, such as Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools used in semiconductor design. The integration of WebAssembly improves in-browser client-side scripting by executing instructions natively rather than through an interpreter, such that Linux applications through a browser will run at near native speed.

Browsers with support for WebAssembly include Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Edge. Besides the performance upgrade, users also will enjoy an updated UI, optimizations for operating in cloud environments and additions to the admin toolset, namely several new RDP Protocol extensions to help reduce bandwidth consumption, simplified upgrades and installation and an Advanced Windows Management system.

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Smith Charts for All

Joey Bernard — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 12:47:39 +0000

by Joey Bernard

I've covered several different programs that are useful when doing electrical engineering in the past. In this article, I want to look at a program called linsmith that helps you do calculations or see how different parameters behave.

Linsmith allows you to generate Smith charts for problems in electrical engineering, especially RF (radio frequency) circuits. Smith charts are a graphical way of representing the rather complex interactions that can happen when dealing with multiple nonlinear electrical components. You can use them to see how they interact and what happens if you vary some of the parameters.

Now, let's look at how to use linsmith to try to make this task a little easier. Throughout this article, I am assuming that you know enough about electrical circuits that I won't need to explain too many of the terms I'm using. If you want to learn more, a good place to start is the Wikipedia page for Smith charts.

First, you will want to install it on your system. It should be in the package management system for your preferred distribution. For example, you can install it on Debian-based distributions with the command:


sudo apt-get install linsmith

Once it's installed, you can start it either by finding it within the menu system for your desktop environment or by running the linsmith command within a terminal window.

This program is strictly a graphical one, so you need to be running X11 in order to use it.

When it first starts, you will see a blank Smith chart, ready for use. On the right-hand side of the main window is a set of tabbed panels where you can enter the details of the electrical problem you are working on. This section is broken into loads that you can apply to the system, a circuit tab where you can define discrete circuit elements that are part of the problem, and a results tab where you can find a running log of the calculations being made.

Figure 1. When you first start linsmith, you will see a blank Smith chart, ready for you to use.

Now, let's look at what you can do in terms of applying loads to the system using the Loads tab. This section is actually broken down further into three more sub-tabs. The first one is labeled "R + jX". This tab allows you to enter a load characterized by a frequency, given in mega-Hertz, and an impedance, given as a complex-valued number of Ohms. For example, you could enter a load of 140MHz, with an impedance of (25+j40) Ohms, by entering these values in the appropriate boxes and then clicking the button labeled New directly below them. This will place a new load value in the table of load impedances, and it will display a new yellow dot representing this load on the Smith chart.

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