The development of a knowledge-based design support system is a lengthy and costly process because various computational techniques necessary for intelligent design support are not readily available in a knowledge-based environment. The systematisation of design knowledge needs combined e€orts from designers and knowledge engineers. Existing knowledge-based system development tools o€er limited...

A uthors of two recent books, Kenneth Miller (Finding Darwin’s God)1 and Michael Ruse (Can a Darwinian be a Christian?),2 have been very critical of Intelligent Design, and especially of Michael Behe’s arguments for design in Darwin’s Black Box.3 Many of their criticisms dealt with biochemical aspects of design, where I believe my many years of training and experience qualify me to evaluate the...

The debate between intelligent design and evolution in education may still rage in school boards and classrooms, but intelligent design is making headway in the laboratory. In this case, though, the designer turned out to be just some clever scientist. A recent paper in Nature (Yoshikuni et al, 2006) presented the iterative evolution of highly specific catalysts from a promiscuous wild-type enz...

This paper describes design criteria for creating highly embedded, interactive spaces that we call Intelligent Environments. The motivation for building these systems is to bring computation into the real, physical world to support what is traditionally considered non-computational activity. We describe an existing prototype space, known as the Intelligent Room, which was created to experiment ...

Two years after the first low-cost radio-frequency audience response system using clickers was introduced for college classrooms, at least six different systems are on the market. Their features and user-friendliness are evolving rapidly, driven by competition and improving technology. The proliferation of different systems is putting pressure on universities to standardize or otherwise limit t...

Two common and plausible claims in the philosophy of science are that (i) a theory that makes no predictions is not testable and (ii) one cannot confirm a theory by criticizing a competing one absent further assumptions about their relation. Elliott Sober has developed these claims within likelihoodism, which defines the testability and confirmation of a theory only in contrast to another, and ...