Knowledge
Knowledge is a familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, such as facts, descriptions, or skills, acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning. Knowledge can refer to a practical understanding of a subject, it can be explicit. In philosophy, the study of knowledge is called epistemology. However, several definitions of knowledge and theories to explain it exist. Knowledge acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception and reasoning; the eventual demarcation of philosophy from science was made possible by the notion that philosophy's core was "theory of knowledge," a theory distinct from the sciences because it was their foundation... Without this idea of a "theory of knowledge," it is hard to imagine what "philosophy" could have been in the age of modern science; the definition of knowledge is a matter of ongoing debate among philosophers in the field of epistemology. The classical definition, described but not endorsed by Plato, specifies that a statement must meet three criteria in order to be considered knowledge: it must be justified and believed.
Some claim that these conditions are not sufficient, as Gettier case examples demonstrate. There are a number of alternatives proposed, including Robert Nozick's arguments for a requirement that knowledge'tracks the truth' and Simon Blackburn's additional requirement that we do not want to say that those who meet any of these conditions'through a defect, flaw, or failure' have knowledge. Richard Kirkham suggests that our definition of knowledge requires that the evidence for the belief necessitates its truth. In contrast to this approach, Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, following Moore's paradox, that one can say "He believes it, but it isn't so," but not "He knows it, but it isn't so." He goes on to argue that these do not correspond to distinct mental states, but rather to distinct ways of talking about conviction. What is different here is not the mental state of the speaker, but the activity in which they are engaged. For example, on this account, to know that the kettle is boiling is not to be in a particular state of mind, but to perform a particular task with the statement that the kettle is boiling.
Wittgenstein sought to bypass the difficulty of definition by looking to the way "knowledge" is used in natural languages. He saw knowledge as a case of a family resemblance. Following this idea, "knowledge" has been reconstructed as a cluster concept that points out relevant features but, not adequately captured by any definition. Symbolic representations can be thought of as a dynamic process. Hence the transfer of the symbolic representation can be viewed as one ascription process whereby knowledge can be transferred. Other forms of communication include observation and imitation, verbal exchange, audio and video recordings. Philosophers of language and semioticians construct and analyze theories of knowledge transfer or communication. While many would agree that one of the most universal and significant tools for the transfer of knowledge is writing and reading, argument over the usefulness of the written word exists nonetheless, with some scholars skeptical of its impact on societies. In his collection of essays Technopoly, Neil Postman demonstrates the argument against the use of writing through an excerpt from Plato's work Phaedrus.
In this excerpt, the scholar Socrates recounts the story of Thamus, the Egyptian king and Theuth the inventor of the written word. In this story, Theuth presents his new invention "writing" to King Thamus, telling Thamus that his new invention "will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians". King Thamus is skeptical of this new invention and rejects it as a tool of recollection rather than retained knowledge, he argues that the written word will infect the Egyptian people with fake knowledge as they will be able to attain facts and stories from an external source and will no longer be forced to mentally retain large quantities of knowledge themselves. Classical early modern theories of knowledge those advancing the influential empiricism of the philosopher John Locke, were based implicitly or explicitly on a model of the mind which likened ideas to words; this analogy between language and thought laid the foundation for a graphic conception of knowledge in which the mind was treated as a table, a container of content, that had to be stocked with facts reduced to letters, numbers or symbols.
This created a situation in which the spatial alignment of words on the page carried great cognitive weight, so much so that educators paid close attention to the visual structure of information on the page and in notebooks. Major libraries today can have millions of books of knowledge, it is only that audio and video technology for recording knowledge have become available and the use of these still requires replay equipment and electricity. Verbal teaching and handing down of knowledge is limited to those who would have contact with the transmitter or someone who could interpret wr
Logistics
Logistics is the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation. In a general business sense, logistics is the management of the flow of things between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet requirements of customers or corporations; the resources managed in logistics can include physical items such as food, animals and liquids. The logistics of physical items involves the integration of information flow, materials handling, packaging, transportation and security. In military science, logistics is concerned with maintaining army supply lines while disrupting those of the enemy, since an armed force without resources and transportation is defenseless. Military logistics was practiced in the ancient world and as modern military have a significant need for logistics solutions, advanced implementations have been developed. In military logistics, logistics officers manage how and when to move resources to the places they are needed. Logistics management is the part of supply chain management that plans and controls the efficient, effective forward, reverse flow and storage of goods and related information between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet customer's requirements.
The complexity of logistics can be modeled, analyzed and optimized by dedicated simulation software. The minimization of the use of resources is a common motivation in all logistics fields. A professional working in the field of logistics management is called a logistician; the term logistics is attested in English from 1846, is from French: logistique, where it was either coined or popularized by military officer and writer Antoine-Henri Jomini, who defined it in his Summary of the Art of War. The term appears in the 1830 edition titled Analytic Table, Jomini explains that it is derived from French: logis, lit.'lodgings', in the terms French: maréchal des logis, lit.'marshall of lodgings' and French: major-général des logis, lit.'major-general of lodging': Autrefois les officiers de l’état-major se nommaient: maréchal des logis, major-général des logis. The officers of the general staff were named: marshall of lodgings, major-general of lodgings; the term is credited to Jomini, the term and its etymology criticized by Georges de Chambray in 1832, writing: Logistique: Ce mot me paraît être tout-à-fait nouveau, car je ne l'avais encore vu nulle part dans la littérature militaire.
… il paraît le faire dériver du mot logis, étymologie singulière … Logistic: This word appears to me to be new, as I have not yet see it anywhere in military literature. … he appears to derive it from the word lodgings, a peculiar etymology … Chambray notes that the term logistique was present in the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française as a synonym for algebra. The French word: logistique is a homonym of the existing mathematical term, from Ancient Greek: λογῐστῐκός, translit. Logistikós, a traditional division of Greek mathematics; some sources give this instead as the source of logistics, either ignorant of Jomini's statement that it was derived from logis, or dubious and instead believing it was in fact of Greek origin, or influenced by the existing term of Greek origin. Jomini defined logistics as:... L'art de bien ordonner les marches d'une armée, de bien combiner l'ordre des troupes dans les colonnes, les tems de leur départ, leur itinéraire, les moyens de communications nécessaires pour assurer leur arrivée à point nommé...... the art of well ordering the functionings of an army, of well combining the order of troops in columns, the times of their departure, their itinerary, the means of communication necessary to assure their arrival at a named point...
The Oxford English Dictionary defines logistics as "the branch of military science relating to procuring and transporting material and facilities". However, the New Oxford American Dictionary defines logistics as "the detailed coordination of a complex operation involving many people, facilities, or supplies", the Oxford Dictionary on-line defines it as "the detailed organization and implementation of a complex operation"; as such, logistics is seen as a branch of engineering that creates "people systems" rather than "machine systems". According to the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, logistics is the process of planning and controlling procedures for the efficient and effective transportation and storage of goods including services and related information from the point of origin to the point of consumption for the purpose of conforming to customer requirements and includes inbound, outbound and external movements. Academics and practitioners traditionally refer to the terms operations or production management when referring to physical transformations taking place in a single business location and reserve the term logistics for activities related to distribution, that is, moving products on the territory.
Managing a distribution center is seen, therefore, as pertaining to the realm of logistics since, while in theory the products made by a factory are ready
Sliding puzzle
A sliding puzzle, sliding block puzzle, or sliding tile puzzle is a combination puzzle that challenges a player to slide pieces along certain routes to establish a certain end-configuration. The pieces to be moved may consist of simple shapes, or they may be imprinted with colors, sections of a larger picture, numbers, or letters. Sliding puzzles are two-dimensional in nature if the sliding is facilitated by mechanically interlinked pieces or three-dimensional tokens; as this example shows, some sliding puzzles are mechanical puzzles. However, the mechanical fixtures are not essential to these puzzles. Unlike other tour puzzles, a sliding block puzzle prohibits lifting any piece off the board; this property separates sliding puzzles from rearrangement puzzles. Hence, finding moves and the paths opened up by each move within the two-dimensional confines of the board are important parts of solving sliding block puzzles; the oldest type of sliding puzzle is the fifteen puzzle, invented by Noyes Chapman in 1880.
Chapman's invention initiated a puzzle craze in the early 1880s. From the 1950s through the 1980s sliding puzzles employing letters to form words were popular; these sorts of puzzles have several possible solutions, as may be seen from examples such as Ro-Let, Scribe-o, Lingo. The fifteen puzzle has been computerized and examples are available to play for free on-line from many Web pages, it is a descendant of the jigsaw puzzle. The last square of the puzzle is displayed automatically once the other pieces have been lined up. Fifteen puzzle Klotski Minus Cube Rush Hour Sokoban Puzzle Mechanical puzzle Combination puzzle Rubik's Cube Ro – A rotational variation Sliding Piece Puzzles is said to be the definitive volume on this type of puzzle. Winning Ways The 15 Puzzle US Patent 4872682 - sliding puzzle wrapped on Rubik's Cube
Riddle
A riddle is a statement or question or phrase having a double or veiled meaning, put forth as a puzzle to be solved. Riddles are of two types: enigmas, which are problems expressed in metaphorical or allegorical language that require ingenuity and careful thinking for their solution, conundra, which are questions relying for their effects on punning in either the question or the answer. Archer Taylor says that "we can say that riddling is a universal art" and cites riddles from hundreds of different cultures including Finnish, American Indian, Russian and Filipino sources amongst many others. Many riddles and riddle-themes are internationally widespread. However, at least in the West, if not more "riddles have in the past few decades ceased to be part of oral tradition", being replaced by other oral-literary forms, by other tests of wit such as quizzes. In the assessment of Elli Köngas Maranda, whereas myths serve to encode and establish social norms, "riddles make a point of playing with conceptual boundaries and crossing them for the intellectual pleasure of showing that things are not quite as stable as they seem" – though the point of doing so may still be to "play with boundaries, but to affirm them".
Defining riddles is hard and has attracted a fair amount of scholarly debate. The first major modern attempt to define the riddle was by Robert Petsch in 1899, with another seminal contribution, inspired by structuralism, by Robert A. Georges and Alan Dundes in 1963. Georges and Dundes suggested that "a riddle is a traditional verbal expression which contains one or more descriptive elements, a pair of which may be in opposition. There are many possible sub-sets of the riddle, including charades and some jokes. In some traditions and contexts, riddles may overlap with proverbs; the Russian phrase "Nothing hurts it, but it groans all the time" can be deployed as a proverb or as a riddle. Much academic research on riddles has focused on collecting, cataloguing and typologising riddles. Key work on cataloguing and typologising riddles was published by Antti Aarne in 1918–20, by Archer Taylor. In the case of ancient riddles recorded without solutions, considerable scholarly energy goes into proposing and debating solutions.
Whereas researchers had tended to take riddles out of their social performance contexts, the rise of anthropology in the post-War period encouraged more researchers to study the social role of riddles and riddling. However, wide-ranging studies of riddles have tended to be limited to Western countries, with Oriental and African riddles being neglected. Riddles have attracted linguists studying riddles from the point of view of semiotics. Many riddles appear in similar form across many countries, continents. Borrowing of riddles happens on a small, local scale, across great distances. Dorvlo gives an example of a riddle, borrowed from the Ewe language by speakers of the neighboring Logba language: "This woman has not been to the riverside for water, but there is water in her tank"; the answer is a coconut. On a much wider scale, the Riddle of the Sphinx has been documented in the Marshall Islands carried there by Western contacts in the last two centuries. Key examples of internationally widespread riddles, with a focus on European tradition, based on the classic study by Antti Aarne.
The basic form of this riddle is'White field, black seeds', where the field is a page and the seeds are letters. An example is the eighth- or ninth-century Veronese Riddle: Here, the oxen are the scribe's finger and thumb, the plough is the pen. Among literary riddles, riddles on the pen and other writing equipment are widespread; this type is found across Eurasia. For example, a riddle in the Sanskrit Rig Veda describes a'twelve-spoked wheel, upon which stand 720 sons of one birth'; the most famous example of this type is the Riddle of the Sphinx. This Estonian example shows the pattern: The riddle describes a crawling baby, a standing person, an old person with a walking stick; this type includes riddles along the lines of this German example: The conceit here is that Two-legs is a person, Three-legs is a three-legged stool, Four-legs is a dog, One-leg is a walking stick. An example of this type is given here in thirteenth-century Icelandic form: The cow has four udders, four legs, two horns, two back legs, one tail.
This is a French version of the type. An English version is: Here, a snowflake falls from the sky, is blown off by the wind; the riddle was at times a prominent literary form in the ancient and medieval world, so riddles are extensively, if patchily, attested in our written records from these periods. According to Archer Taylor, "the oldest recorded riddles are Babylonian school texts which show no literary polish"; the answers to the riddles are not preserved. "It is clear that we have here riddles from oral tradition that a teacher has put into a schoolbook." It is thought. "The Sanskrit term that most close
Thinking outside the box
Thinking outside the box is a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. This phrase refers to novel or creative thinking; the term is thought to derive from management consultants in the 1970s and 1980s challenging their clients to solve the "nine dots" puzzle, whose solution requires some lateral thinking. This phrase can be found in dance, as encouragement to move creatively, beyond simple, geometric box steps and their basic variations, to step outside the box into more complex patterns of expression; the catchphrase, or cliché, has become used in business environments by management consultants and executive coaches, has been referenced in a number of advertising slogans. To think outside the box is to look further and to try not thinking of the obvious things, but to try thinking of the things beyond them. A simplified definition for paradigm is a habit of a conceptual framework. A simplified analogy is "the box" in the used phrase "thinking outside the box".
What is encompassed by the words "inside the box" is analogous with the current, unnoticed, assumptions about a situation. Creative thinking rejects the accepted paradigm to come up with new ideas; the notion of something outside a perceived "box" is related to a traditional topographical puzzle called the nine dots puzzle. The origins of the phrase "thinking outside the box" are obscure. Management consultant Mike Vance has claimed that the use of the nine-dot puzzle in consultancy circles stems from the corporate culture of the Walt Disney Company, where the puzzle was used in-house; the nine dots puzzle is much older than the slogan. It appears in Sam Loyd's 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles. In the 1951 compilation The Puzzle-Mine: Puzzles Collected from the Works of the Late Henry Ernest Dudeney, the puzzle is attributed to Dudeney himself. Sam Loyd's original formulation of the puzzle entitled it as "Christopher Columbus's egg puzzle." This was an allusion to the story of Egg of Columbus. The puzzle proposed an intellectual challenge—to connect the dots by drawing four straight, continuous lines that pass through each of the nine dots, never lifting the pencil from the paper.
The conundrum is resolved, but only by drawing the lines outside the confines of the square area defined by the nine dots themselves. The phrase "thinking outside the box" is a restatement of the solution strategy; the puzzle only seems difficult because people imagine a boundary around the edge of the dot array. The heart of the matter is the unspecified barrier that people perceive. Telling people to "think outside the box" does not help them think outside the box, at least not with the 9-dot problem; this is due to the distinction between procedural declarative knowledge. For example, a non-verbal cue such as drawing a square outside the 9 dots does allow people to solve the 9-dot problem better than average; the nine-dot problem is a well-defined problem. It has a stated goal, all necessary information to solve the problem is included. Furthermore, well-defined problems have a clear ending. Although the solution is "outside the box" and not easy to see at first, once it has been found, it seems obvious.
Other examples of well-defined problems are the Rubik's Cube. In contrast, characteristics of ill-defined problems are: not clear what the question is not clear how to arrive at a solution no idea what the solution looks likeAn example of an ill-defined problem is "what is the essence of happiness?" The skills needed to solve this type of problem are the ability to reason and draw inferences and epistemic monitoring. Another well-defined problem for the nine dots starting point is to connect the dots with a single straight line; the solution involves looking outside the two-dimensional sheet of paper on which the nine dots are drawn and coning the paper three-dimensionally aligning the dots along a spiral, thus a single line can be drawn connecting all nine dots - which would appear as three lines in parallel on the paper, when flattened out. If solving the four line solution is called lateral thinking solving the one line solution could well be called orthogonal thinking, as it requires two distinct phases: drawing the line and assembling the line.
The Nine Dots Prize is a competition-based prize for "creative thinking that tackles contemporary societal issues." It is sponsored by the Kadas Prize Foundation and supported by the Cambridge University Press and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. It was named in reference to the nine-dot problem; this flexible English phrase is a rhetorical trope with a range of variant applications. The metaphorical "box" in the phrase "outside the box" may be married with something real and measurable — for example, perceived budgetary or organizational constraints in a Hollywood development project. Speculating beyond its restrictive confines the box can be both: positive— fostering creative leaps as in generating wild ideas. James Bandrowski states that this could result in a frank and insightful re-appraisal of a situation, the organization, etc. On the other hand, Bandrowski argues that the process of thinking "ins
Dissection puzzle
A dissection puzzle called a transformation puzzle or Richter Puzzle, is a tiling puzzle where a set of pieces can be assembled in different ways to produce two or more distinct geometric shapes. The creation of new dissection puzzles is considered to be a type of dissection puzzle. Puzzles may include various restraints, such as hinged pieces, pieces that can fold, or pieces that can twist. Creators of new dissection puzzles emphasize using a minimum number of pieces, or creating novel situations, such as ensuring that every piece connects to another with a hinge. Dissection puzzles are an early form of geometric puzzle; the earliest known descriptions of dissection puzzles are from the time of Plato in Ancient Greece, involve the challenge of turning two equal squares into one larger square using four pieces. Other ancient dissection puzzles were used as graphic depictions of the Pythagorean theorem. A famous ancient Greek dissection puzzle is the Ostomachion, a mathematical treatise attributed to Archimedes.
In the 10th century, Arabic mathematicians used geometric dissections in their commentaries on Euclid's Elements. In the 18th century, Chinese scholar Tai Chen described an elegant dissection for approximating the value of π; the puzzles saw a major increase in general popularity in the late 19th century when newspapers and magazines began running dissection puzzles. Puzzle creators Sam Loyd in the United States and Henry Dudeney in the United Kingdom were among the most published. Since dissection puzzles have been used for entertainment and maths education, creation of complex dissection puzzles is considered an exercise of geometric principles by mathematicians and math students; the dissections of regular polygons and other simple geometric shapes into another such shape was the subject of Martin Gardner's November 1961 "Mathematical Games column" in Scientific American. The haberdasher's problem shown in the figure below shows how to divide up a square and rearrange the pieces to make an equilateral triangle.
The column included a table of such best known dissections involving the square, hexagon, greek cross, so on. Some types of dissection puzzle are intended to create a large number of different geometric shapes; the tangram is a popular dissection puzzle of this type. The seven pieces can be configured into one of a few home shapes, such as the large square and rectangle that the pieces are stored in, to any number of smaller squares, parallelograms, or esoteric shapes and figures; some geometric forms are easy to create. This variability has ensured the puzzle's popularity. Other dissections are intended to move between a pair of geometric shapes, such as a triangle to a square, or a square to a five-pointed star. A dissection puzzle of this description is the haberdasher's problem, proposed in 1907 by Henry Dudeney; the puzzle is a dissection of a triangle to a square, in only four pieces. It is one of the simplest regular polygon to square dissections known, is now a classic example, it is not known whether a dissection of an equilateral triangle to a square is possible with three pieces.
Ostomachion Pizza theorem Puzzle Coffin, Stewart T.. The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-853207-5. Frederickson, Greg N.. Dissections: Plane and Fancy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-57197-9. Frederickson, Greg N.. Hinged Dissections: Swinging and Twisting. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-81192-9. Frederickson, Greg N.. Piano-hinged Dissections: Time to Fold!. A K Peters. ISBN 1-56881-299-X. Weisstein, Eric W.. "Haberdasher's Problem". MathWorld. Wolfram Web Resources. Retrieved 2006-08-08
Disentanglement puzzle
Disentanglement puzzles are a type of mechanical puzzle that involves disentangling one piece or set of pieces from another piece or set of pieces. The reverse problem of reassembling the puzzle can be as hard as—or harder than—disentanglement. There are several different kinds of disentanglement puzzles, though a single puzzle may incorporate several of these features. Wire-and-string puzzles consist of: one piece of string, ribbon or similar, which may form a closed loop or which may have other pieces like balls fixed to its end. One or several pieces of stiff wire sometimes additional pieces like wooden ball through which the string is threaded. One can distinguish three subgroups of wire-and-string puzzles: Closed string subgroup: The pieces of string consist of one closed loop, as in the Baguenaudier puzzle; the string has to be disentangled from the wire. Unclosed loose string subgroup: The pieces of string are not closed, are not attached to the wire. In this case the ends of the string are fitted with a ball, cube or similar which stops the string from slipping out too easily.
The string has to be disentangled from the wire. Sometimes other tasks have to be completed instead, such as shifting a ring or ball from one end of the string to another end. Unclosed fixed string subgroup: The pieces of string are not closed, but are somewhere on its length attached to the wire. In these puzzles the string is not to be disentangled from the wire. One possible task may be to shift a ball from one end of the string to another end. One difficult puzzle was designed by R. Boomhower in 1966 and has been modified into different designs. Different versions include a paddle-shaped design, a vertical beam on a wood support, two vertical beams on a wood support. Variations have the string passing through the slot once or two times. Names have included the Boomhower puzzle, T-Bar puzzle, Wit's End puzzle, the Mini Rope Bridge puzzle; some sources identify a topologically-equivalent puzzle called the Mystery Key issued by the Peter Pan company in the 1950s. Wire puzzles consist of more entangled pieces of more or less stiff wire.
The pieces may not be closed loops. The closed pieces might have more complex shapes; the puzzle must be solved by disentangling the two pieces without bending or cutting the wires. Early wire puzzles were made from similar material. A plate-and-ring puzzle consists of three pieces: one plate or similar displaying many holes and/or indentations a closed or nearly closed ring or a similar item; the plate as well as the ring are made from metal. The ring has to be disentangled from the plate; some puzzles have been created which may appear deceptively simple, but are impossible to solve. One such puzzle is the "Notorious Figure Eight Puzzle", it is sometimes sold with instructions giving hints as to its level of difficulty, a "solution" is provided but is vague and impossible to follow, but the puzzle is impossible to solve. Most puzzle solvers try to solve such puzzles by mechanical manipulation, but some branches of mathematics can be used to create a model of disentanglement puzzles. Applying a configuration space with a topological framework is an analytical method to gain insight into the properties and solution of some disentanglement puzzles.
However, some mathematicians have stated that capturing the important aspects of many such puzzles can be difficult, there is no universal algorithm that will provide the solution to such puzzles. Borromean rings, a method of linking three closed loops, found in some disentanglement puzzles Human knot Unknotting problem Unlink
