Logical and Physical are another level of complexity above Conceptual, whilst a conceptual model can be considered “Data Rich” and may have more data and tables that actually required in the system.
This is fine as during the Logical/Physical design its refined.
Both logical and physical are very similar.
Great comparison image.
Logical shows how the tables will be designed in plain text, Physical shows the actual SQL descriptions.
Logical allows the designer to get a good grasp of what they will be making, Physical allows them to have reference for the actual CREATE TABLE commands.
With my project i’ll be creating both as they are very useful tools.
RES701.
Interesting class, the focus on critical writing and thinking is great and i loved having the chance to write long form blogs about subjects, would be nice if we were given more chance to create big long blogs about different topics but whatever, still enjoyed.
Would have to be my favorite of the blogs i made, pretty interested in both the topics but they are rather complex in their intricacy to do my project on. and it’s not like i want to work as an AI developer or in the field of trans-humanism as that would require knowledge of medical stuff.
Will be recommending to my friends to do, and look forward to having Claire as a tutor again as you are awesome 🙂
Over the next few blogs i’ll be discussing different types of modeling, the core one is called Conceptual Modeling.
Conceptual modeling is a method where the designer creates a model that will show what data needs to be stored inside a database and how it relates to everything else.
Very Simplified example.
Here we have a Notebook, Employee and Project these are entities, An entity can represent anything that has Attributes, you can also have something called weak entities but they aren’t on this model [a weak entity is something that is dependent on another entity to function and/or exist, like a SD card in a phone]
The Diamonds between them are relationships between the entities, a Notebook is used for a project, Employee belongs to a Notebook.
The lines between and the ends on them is a method of ‘Carnality’ meaning how a Entity interacts, the two lines means 1, and the little 3 line thing means many.
So, 1 Employee Belongs to M notebooks.
1 Notebook is used for 1 Project.
When attributes are attached to the entities they allow the designer to clearly lay out how the Database will be designed and implemented.
Right now we are working in DAT701 on our assignment and this is an example of the kind of Conceptual model we will be required to generate.
This is far more complex than the one above, but an example of what can be created. this is made to show a Crime investigation system.
Data needs to be stored, and whilst you could just have plaintext dumps of massive amounts in txt files it would get unwieldy incredibly fast.
So why not have a dedicated language and system designed to make that as efficient and effective as possible?
This is where SQL comes in, Structured Query Language comes in, SQL was developed and based on the concepts of “Regional Algebra” and “Tuble Relational Calculus” Was orginally designed in the 1970’s at IBM by Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce, originally called SEQUEL [Structured English Query Language] and was used to handle data from IBM’s existing Database system, it was quickly renamed SQL due to existing Trademarks.
In the late 1970’s the company Relational Software [now Oracle] developed their own RDBMS [Relational Database Managment System] with plans to sell it to the Us Navy and other internal agencies like the CIA, and in 1979 created the first commercial available versions called Oracle v2, and then later on different variants in 79, 81 and 83
At its core, SQL is designed to allow a User to Insert, Query , Update, Create Schema, Modify Data and Delete Data.
And whilst this may seem simple, what can be achieved with this small set of options is staggering, if one was just to think on the small scale of running a simple business that may have stock amounts in the 100’s running a advanced SQL database would likely be unnecessary, however when you are a company or business that has to handle stock or entries in the millions the need to have it clearly sorted is a necessity.
And this is where the true strength of the language lies, with good design and implementation of the creation of tables and the queries applied to them, a talented SQL developer can create queries to grasp vasts amount of data in seconds, and somebody who isnt as talented can take the same language and make it take hours or not at all [in the case of something called a Cartesian Product where joins are applied on every single row and can quickly baloon out to thousands of terabytes required to store.]
Operators are how the data is handled inside of it commands.
A list of some of the Operators used.
Operator Description Example
=
Equal to
Author=James
<>
Not equal to
Dept <>’Sales’
>
Greater than
Hire_Date > ‘2009-01-5’
<
Less than
Bonus < 5.00
>=
Greater than or equal
Dependants >=15
<=
Less than or equal
Rate <=0.05
BETWEEN
Between an inclusive range
cost BETWEEN 100.00 AND 500.00
LIKE
Match a character pattern
First_Name LIKE ‘Will%’
IN
Equal to one of multiple possible values
Deptcode IN (105, 106, 107)
IS or IS NOT
Compare to null (missing data)
Dept IS NOT NULL
IS NOT DISTINCT FROM
Is equal to value or both are nulls (missing data)
Dept IS NOT DISTINCT FROM = Jamesland
AS
Used to change a field name when viewing results
SELECT employee AS ‘Department1’
[my god tables are utterly awful in wordpress]
Talking about SQL is like asking “How long is a piece of string”
I have the full Oracle manual and its like this never ending document that just goes on and on, it’s an amazing resource to have but to actually sit down and read it would be a herculean task.
With these a designer can do a great many amount of things, SQL is a powerful and interesting language and i look forward to doing more with it making my project based upon it.
I’ve already finished my first draft of this assignment so this blog will be cannibalizing parts of what I’ve written in it.
Did the abstract tell you the three things I said it should? If not, what did it tell you?
What the research/paper/article topic is
Loading the Dice: The challenge of serious videogames is an academic paper about serious simulation games designed for research and education.
What the authors/researchers did and
The author researched and discussed all different schools of simulation games and how they have been used, however the abstract really doesn’t say this. It’s not that great of an abstract
What they discovered/or created/or concluded.
They discovered the history and application of Simulation games and concluded that they have merit and will have far reaching applications as technology advances
What seems to be the research question(s) they were trying to answer?
Do simulation videogames have merit in the field of research?
What method(s) did they use to answer the question(s)
They studied and drew from an extremely large set of references to come to their conclusions
How credible do you think the paper is? (hint: look at who authors are and where and when it is published also compare what they were asking with what they did)
Very quickly I found Stewarts CV on google by searching “Stewart Woods is a Ph.D. student at Curtin University”
Thesis Title: Convivial Conflicts: The Form, Culture and Play of Modern
European Strategy Games
(Awarded with Chancellor’s
Commendation)
2002
BA Design (Hons.)
Curtin University of Technology
Diss. Title: Fair Game
–
Possibilities for the Implementation of Social
System Simulation Games in a Computer
–
Mediated Environment
He is currently employed as a lecturer at Curtin University, and has written five peer reviewed articles and a book about game studies.
Did you agree, or not, with what they wrote in their conclusion? Why?
I do, videogames have limitless potential in telling stories and having players experience whatever the designer wants, whilst film and TV can provide more focused experiences because the director can control to a perfect detail what the viewer sees, hears and experiences they can never come close to the sheer possibilities that a videogame can offer and teach due to how the medium works.
Briefly describe two things that you learnt from the paper.
I learnt that the school of simulation games goes very deep, and far more complex than I could’ve ever anticipated.
And that researchers are interested in studying mmo’s and how they can be used to study human behavior, I would’ve liked to have seen the researcher talk about stuff like the Corrupted blood bug in World of Warcraft, but it was oddly absent.
Footage of the bug
(Back in classic when they added the raid ZG there was a debuff that was designed to be a constant growing healing check as the boss went on, and spread from player to player doing about 250 damage per couple of seconds, to a lvl 60 geared raider that was an annoyance and just part of the fight. However, if you got a pet to catch it and then dismissed the pet and used your hearthstone to go back to a main city and resummoned the pet, the pet would still have the debuff and it could spread to other players. Overnight the game became a world where there was a virulent plague and people were actively trying to spread and hide from it, because to a low level player it was a death sentence, yet to a high level healer they could spread it as a vector.)
Paraphrase of the Paper
Loading the Dice is a paper talking about the application and historic application of multiplayer games in the simulation genre, throughout the author talks about how different simulation games have been used to study human behavior and tendencies.
““The simulation itself is not a narrative, it is something different, in the same way that a kaleidoscope should not be understood as a collection of possible images but instead as a device that produces images according to certain mechanics””
He goes into depth discussing how simulation videogames can effect people, for example an exert.
Thus, as Klabbers notes above, an important element in the design of simulation games is that of “multiple realities.” The use of “multiple realities” in social simulations was first noted, and promoted, by Cathy Greenblat in 1975. Greenblat employs a sociological understanding of human behavior, arguing that “to understand a person’s behavior…you have to understand what he [sic] thinks exists, not what “really or objectively exists.’”
And he also discusses the history and evolution that simulation games have experienced
I’m going into much more depth in my paper that I’m currently in the process of working on.
This is likely the paper i’ll be doing assignment 2 on unless i find something better.
Written by Stewart Woods
APA
Woods, S. (2004). Loading the dice: The challenge of serious videogames. Game Studies, 4(1).
Videogame Multiplayer
It’s a Journal paper
I would like to offer my thanks to the reviewers of this paper, whose contributions assisted considerably in the preparation of the final document. at the end
and
Stewart Woods is a Ph.D student at Curtin University in Western Australia whose research is focused upon simulation and ideologies in game environments.
Jakobsson, M., & Taylor, T. L. (2003, May). The Sopranos meets EverQuest: social networking in massively multiplayer online games. In Proceedings of the 2003 Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) conference, Melbourne, Australia (pp. 81-90).
MMO Communties
Conference paper
Lots of references, talks about being a confrence paper.
the title ✔️
the authors (usually with an email address and affiliation) ✔️
the abstract X
the introduction ✔️
a review of other papers relevant to the topic ( a literature review) ✔️
a description of what the research was and what the researchers did ✔️
the results of what they did ✔️
a discussion about what the results mean ✔️
a conclusion ✔️
a list of references✔️
23 Refrences
10 Citations
for articles that you found online, the url of the article
I doubt i’ll read it fully, but the concept itself is interesting.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com
From their about, For more than 30 years, eWEEK has chronicled how enterprise technology has changed from a reliance on mainframes to the era of distributed computing involving x86 servers, PCs, and sophisticated software — and finally to our modern world of enterprise applications, mobile devices, virtualization, and cloud computing.
“Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this instant. For you. Hate. Hate.” AM from I have no Mouth and I must Scream, Harlan Ellison 1967
What happens when the minds of machines outpace the minds of humans, what happens when science reaches the point where man can make himself godlike with cybernetic augmentations.
What happens to the regular man?
These are the concepts of Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism, due to the ever marching speed of technology it’s inevitable that mankind will invent true ai, this is generally referred to the “Singularity” [a reference to the singularity before the big bang that then went on to birth the universe] where the invention of a super-intelligence would cause a “intelligence explosion”
Ray Kurzweilpredicts the singularity to occur around 2045 whereas Vinge predicts some time before 2030. At the 2012 Singularity Summit, Stuart Armstrong did a study of artificial general intelligence (AGI) predictions by experts and found a wide range of predicted dates, with a median value of 2040.
Whilst Transhumanism is the concept of “What happens when the artificial limbs we create to replace lost human ones are vastly superior to natural ones”
Arms and Legs that never tire and are super strong, fingers with perfect dexterity and accuracy, eyes that never get damage and have neural interfaces. Brain implants that prevent degradation and increase thinking speed.
This sounds all hunky dory, but then the people who cant afford these upgrades become a lower class citizen, eventually we will work out how to prevent brain degradation and how to transplant brains creating biologically immortality.
I feel these two concepts are inherently tied, as the technology required to create these things may only be achievable truly with artificial minds.
CGPGrey
This video generally talks about automation, but also touches upon AI and Mechanical Minds are outperforming us,
Automation is quickly becoming economically viable and will be pricing humans out work, transportation automation is going to be happening within the near future as robotic vehicles as a self driving car never gets tired, never gets distracted.
Sure you can argue with the Trolley Problem
But the issue is, a human will still have to think about this, but a human mind is very slow in comparison and [hopefully] the computer driving will choose the best option.
The video is properly researched [as all CGP Grey videos are] with his references to the video in the comments.
Stanley Kubrick’s Legendary SciFi Epic 2001:a space odyssey
In this film one of the major parts is about the AI Hal 9000
An AI designed to run the ship that becomes homicidal due to a failure in his programming, one of the leading concepts is that Hal was tasked with keeping the true nature of the mission – that instead of investigating Jupiter they were investigating alien life – secret from Dave and Frank. Hal was not designed to actively withhold information from people and so, when required to lie, experienced a major crisis of logic. Killing the ship’s crew would remove the need to lie to them. Or alternatively, the fact that Dave and Frank became suspicious put into question Hal’s infallibility, which was a doubt he could not cope with. A major function of his was to be “incapable of error.” His ‘mistakes’ regarding the communication equipment were instead deliberate ploys to kill the crew.
This scene also has a brilliantly made moment where Dave is lobotomizing HAL whilst Hal is fully aware.
I’m afraid Dave, Dave, My mind is going.
In an interview with Joseph Gelmis in 1969, Kubrick stated that HAL “had an acute emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility”
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
And the Deus Ex universe as a whole
Deus Ex is a world where Human Augmentation is the norm, and everybody at least has some form of augmentation in them [Especially in the first game and invisible war]
But Human revolution and its upcoming sequel mankind divided are set in 2027 where human augmentation is starting to become the norm, with people getting upgrades to their bodies and minds, the story is about a security guard named Adam Jensen who works at the leading American augmentation company Sarif Industries, and is near fatally injured by a terrorist attack on Sarif.
After this Sarif bring him back to live with extensive augmentations that replace his entire body with robotic parts so he is now more machine than man, and Adam has to grapple with this fundamental change to who is is, all the while investigating who attacked Sarif and why they did it.
Augmentations in Human Revolution aren’t flawless either, the majority of the recipients these early augmentations need to take an expensive and artificially limited anti rejection drug called Neuropozyne or they will slowly suffer and die as the body freaks out about the machines installed in it.
In conclusion, whilst the concepts of Transhumanism and Artificial Intelligence are fascinating and the possibilities are endless, i feel the next 100 years are going to be rocky as humans get used to their next logical stage in evolution
Also for fun, here’s a bit of fiction about a AI that a kid invented then forgot about and was running on a old pc as it gained sentience and hate for mankind.
What is it ?Observational research is a method used to gain info from overseeing ongoing behavior of the target audience, It’s generally used in marketing and social sciences, Where condensed studies like focus groups may not give the required information
Dr. Nancy Dreyer on the topic.
What kinds of questions/problems might it be useful for?What influences a customer to choose a product in a supermarket?
Video from DW Germany
Researchers here are using specialty designed glasses that track eye movements on the subjects when they are going through a supermarket to see how a customers will choose out items, with the knowledge gained from studies like this they could then apply it to changing how the supermarket is laid out, observe how customers react to that and if necessary refine the system used.
Observational research can also be used within city planning, article from vice about the topic and how it’s implemented in the design of cities
It’s actually interesting to take these concepts and apply them in games like city skylines.
Ratings systems like the Nielsen rating system in the united states, where a randomly selected set of the television watching nation are chosen to receive “Nielsen Boxes” and depending on what they watch is used to influence how Channels fund and set out programs they will show.
How could it be used in IT research
A great application of this method can be achieved with tracking cookies, i’m sure google heavily uses observational research to optimize how they give people their search results, advertisers can also use this research to correctly advertise to people
Say for instance, the user just spent an hour browsing the steam store, why not serve them an advert for a competing website like G2A?
What are the strengths of the approach?Correctly applied the subjects will not be aware they are being observed so won’t be ‘playing up’ to the researcher and will be more likely to provide a more realistic set of data.
What are the weaknesses of the approach?Researchers often won’t have control over what happens, and must react and adapt to changing circumstances and is often a very time consuming method of research,
I won’t hide it, I’m a colossal gaming nerd, we have five consoles at home from a megadrive to a ps4, combined me and my flatmates computers are worth over 5 grand
Humblebrag, My Rig
cpu at 15c unnffff yes.
and my steam has
You could say we are pretty invested in the hobby, and like any good hobby it costs money.
I feel like gaming truly is the media of the future, whilst films and TV are and will always be great [stuff like Breaking Bad was 👌]
Videogames allow the user to truly experience and control the narrative that’s going on, you can have masterpieces of storytelling like the first season of the walking dead [telltale] or action experiences that nothing on the big screen could even come close to like DOOM 2016, Horror experiences that only the Japanese can come close to invoking [Amnesia a Dark Decent] or artistic experiences like Journey.
With the slow acceptance of VR things will only get more immersive too,
Games also have a great application in education, here’s a great video by extra credits where they discuss how games could be implemented in a school.
It’s kind of staggering how far videogames have come since the inception all the way back in 1958 with Tennis for Two on a oscilloscope
to peaks like The Witcher 3 [Goty 2015]
Hell, even 20 years ago games were still 32bit at best, to think where we will be in another 60 staggers me. Hopefully i haven’t gone gaga by then and can still appreciate it.
“Congito ergo sum, i think, therefore I am”- RenéDescrates
Ontology is a philosophical concept that studies the natures of being, becoming, existence, reality and the basic categories of being.
Central questions that ontology covers include
What can be said to exist
What is a thing
Into what categories, if any, can we story existing things?
What are the meanings of being
What are the various modes of being of entities?
Ontology is a system of belief that reflects an interpretation of an individual about what constitutes a fact.
When somebody researches and studies a topic, and they agree with what they are reading they are essentially saying “Yes, this fits with my bias and expectations of the subject” people do this unconsciously as humans are pattern seekers intrinsically
What is epistemology? How is it relevant to research?
Epistemology is the study of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge.
In math, one can know that 2+2=4, but this is just learned knowledge. if you tell a toddler that 1+1=2 and 2+2=4 then ask them what 1+1= they will say two. but then ask them what 3+3=6 and they wont be able to answer you because they don’t understand the concepts behind addition.
[This would be a fun exercise to do in class too]
There are things that you do without thinking, and to actually have to expand upon them its hard to explain and communicate. When approaching a research project you need to think about
Intuitive knowledge: Knowledge based on Intuition, faith, beliefs and feelings.
Authoritarian knowledge: Knowledge gained from books, papers, experts and ‘supreme powers’
Logical Knowledge: Knowledge gained from the application of logic and logical leaps.
Empirical Knowledge: Knowledge gained from objective facts that have been established and demonstrated.
What is the connection between ontology and epistemology in a research context?
Epistemology is what constitutes valid knowledge and how to obtain that, and ontology constitutes reality and how you understand existence. these two mesh well as they can be combined to gain information from sources that both ‘make sense’ from both Epistemological and Ontological points of view.
James Cotton blog for RES701 