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But within 50 years, everything around us will be some form of computer and the ways we will access this and use it to interact with each other will be through software. By the mid-twenty-first century, cars will be computers, buildings will be computers, entire cities will be computers, all wreaking profound changes on the form and functioning of our environment and the ways we will seek to understand and change it.
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But it is increasingly clear that computers are now changing the very systems that we are seeking to understand using the same computers, and this in itself is generating important consequences for how we use computers in planning, consequences which have barely been raised to date.
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Real time data from industrial concerns has been available for a while as has financial data but now data pertaining to functions relevant to physical and spatial problems is online. Satellite data is routinely available at the global level over the Internet as illustrated by the numerous online weather reports but the most significant types of data pertain to traffic and movement. Real time traffic volumes and speeds, levels of congestion and accident hot spots are available at an increasing number of sites if one has the technology to access this, thus making possible analysis which is close to real time.
Source: http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/Geo666/batty/melbourne.html
We have begun to animate the data in various ways first using the movie maker in Imagine. But to develop a full animation, we are working with the data in a Macintosh environment. In Figure 5, we show a typical animation in which we have the pattern of spatial development in one window and some characteristic of its growth in another, in this case, the total population of sites. We can run the movie back and forth and loop it around and this provides us with a picture of where and when Buffalo is growing. We can examine individual frames but more importantly, as the map and population windows are linked, we can click on any point in time using the slider in either window and then examine the development forwards or backwards from that point. Already, this animation has shown us that there are errors in coding where the age of certain data has been estimated to arbitrary points in time. Look at the abrupt change in development in 1900 in the population window in Figure 5. We are guessing that those estimating the age of many properties have generalized this to "around 1900" and it is this kind of structured visual analysis which enables such errors to be detected.
Source: http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/Geo666/batty/buffalo.html
5. Time lag between production and use is a determining factor in the availability of current, timely spatial data. Instrumentation of the environment will become a major source of real-time data. As the time lag between production and use approaches zero, the way data are managed, distributed, and used will be profoundly different.
6. Intelligent instrumentation can support real-time monitoring of the environment, with
associated feedback and response. Instrumentation will provide location information and
associated processing and analysis to aid vehicle navigation, traffic monitoring, weather and
pollution monitoring, farming practices, and a host of other new applications.
Source: http://www2.nas.edu/besr/22be.html
Until recently, computerization has been dominated by numerical and mathematical formats, which have been bulky conduits of information and analysis accessible only to those with mathematical training or proclivity. Now, computer users enjoy "friendly" interfaces consisting of windows and dialog boxes. Data are now processed with software that interprets data files and generates a multi-media information representations. In this sense McLuhan's implication that the medium is more important than the message becomes relevant.
However, the combination of graphics and sound not only represent "gee-whiz" effect, but
offer people the opportunity to perceive and analyze information in differently creative ways.
For example, business people and professors of business have recently been advocating the use of spatial representation of data. The spatial representation is ideally meant to increase and facilitate comprehension of a particular data set. On screen map making provides the user with an animated control of the information. The goal of this type of representation is to attain new perspective on the issue at hand, and to aid in the formulation of appropriate questions for meaningful analysis.
Sound is another useful multi-media tool. For example, an analyst could program his favorite
song to play as some function of a data set. By perceiving changes from the familiar rendition,
the analyst can focus the analysis. In this way the investigation of data is like the mechanic of yester-year who used to tune an automobile by listening to the humming and purring of the
engine.
Source:http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/Geo666/jkf/discuss1.html
Q: Why do you feel that an approach as revolutionary as The Venus Project is necessary?
A: Our current system is not capable of providing a high standard of living for everyone, nor
can it ensure the protection of the environment because the major motive is profit. Businesses aren't entirely to blame; they are forced to operate this way in order to retain the competitive edge. Additionally, with the advent of automation, cybernation, and artificial intelligence, there will be an ever-increasing replacement of people by automated systems. As a result, fewer people will be able to purchase goods and services even though our capability to produce an abundance will continue to exist. This is well-documented in Jeremy Rifkin's new book The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (Putnam, 1995).
The Venus Project offers a fresh approach that reverses the negative aspects experienced in
our current applications of automation and artificial intelligence. This project eliminates the
disastrous consequences that such approaches can have on our society, i.e. the displacement of millions of workers, skilled and unskilled alike.
Source:http://www.nas.com/venus/txt01.shtml#intro
Prior to the first industrial revolution of the 18th century, manufacturing was carried out by independent craftsmen in each town and village. Now autofab, and what some people are calling the second industrial revolution, may return manufacturing to its decentralized roots. Let's look at some statistics in a related field to see how this might come about.
In 1970, there were 3,000 publishers of books in the United States. Twenty years later, this number had multiplied by almost a factor of ten. Why? What changed between 1970 and 1990 that caused the number of publishers to mushroom like that? The answer is that desktop publishing, which basically means the combination of cheap computers and cheap laser printers, made it possible for anyone with a little cash and a good idea to become a publisher.
Before personal computers, typesetting and laying out a book was a tedious, expensive process, almost as hard as actually writing the words of the book itself. But this is no longer true. With a good word processing program and a laser printer, it is now fairly easy to produce a professional layout for a book or any other kind of publication.
What might happen if we apply the same logic to manufacturing? Today, there are close to a half-million companies in the United States whose primary business is manufacturing hard
goods. This means furniture, automobiles, computers, car parts, airplanes: basically anything except food, clothing, and printed matter. What might happen in the world if the manufacturing analog of desktop publishing should come about? This is what some people have called "desktop manufacturing." If we take the experience of the book publishing industry as
a guide, we might expect the number of manufacturers to grow so that in 20 years there would be close to 4 million of them.
Now look at that number. With a total population of about 250 million people, 4 million means there would be a hard-goods manufacturer for every 60th man, woman, and child in the country. There is no way to reach these kinds of numbers without seeing little Mom-and-Pop operations sprouting up in every neighborhood of every town and village. And this makes perfect sense. As basic fabricators become less expensive, and 3-D CAD software becomes easier to use, we will see a growing movement of garage tinkerers who will buy them and use them to make little customized products for their neighbors, or for sale by mail order or over the Internet. These will be the pioneering entrepreneurs who exploit the new freedom to create given them by automated fabrication.
In fact, this movement has already started. In the world today, there are several hundred small businesses that offer contract services on additive fabricators. By combining this with some auxiliary equipment, these companies provide prototyping and prototype tooling services to manufacturing customers in their local areas and sometimes over much broader regions. In my view, these entrepreneurial businesses are the beginnings of the ground swell of small, community-based, agile manufacturing facilities of the 21st century.
Source: http://www.nanocentral.com/NanoWorld/Companies/Autofabrication/autofab.html
Continuous Process Auditing is an advanced audit process where a large percentage of the audit is automated and continuous. The key concepts involved in continuous process auditing were developed at AT&T Bell Laboratories for the AT&T Internal Audit organization where CPAS was actually implemented.
The objective of continuous process auditing is to provide an integrated diagnostic view of an on-line real-time system and to monitor the system in order to provide early warning of system problems (i.e. control weaknesses) and to insure the financial integrity of the system. A continuous process audit system then, is a system built to support this task that would allow the auditor to do this in as much detail as she/he wanted. Additionally, the system should provide access to traditional audit evaluation tools as well as more advanced ones.
In continuous process auditing, data flowing through the system are monitored and analyzed continuously (e.g., daily) using a set of auditor defined rules. Exceptions to these rules will trigger alarms which are intended to call the auditor's attention to any deterioration or anomalies in the system. Continuous process auditing amounts to an analytical review technique since constantly analyzing a system allows the auditor to improve the focus and scope of the audit. Furthermore, continuous process auditing can be considered as a meta form of control and can be used in monitoring control (compliance) either directly, by looking for
electronic signatures, or indirectly by scanning for the occurrence of certain patterns or specific events. Ultimately, if a system is monitored over time, using a set of auditor heuristics, the audit can rely mainly on exception reporting and the auditor is called in
only when exceptions arise. Many different types of auditor heuristics can be gathered to be "wired" into the CPAS system (e.g. via SQL queries to a database and further manipulation, if necessary).
Source: http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/miklos/cda3.htm
