User:Marjan Tomki SI/Open problems

Open problems

Intended to contain material considered for incorporation and/or discussion. Much about what is currently below should be moved elsewhere (possible articles or discussion) and is here while I am working on it, and should probably be removed when finished and published.

Templates
To be moved where most other tech stuff already is.
 * Template index/User talk namespace

What was concurrent when WP started
Some of that I already mentioned (conservapedia, citizendium...) with links that show why some of WP rules had evolved as they are now.
 * Meatball Wiki: is another treasure of discussions not only how, but also why, and what else was tried, and how it came out in the end.Very well explained some technical aspects I didn't yet find at WP (mightn't need to search at WMedia).
 * Is Wikipedia educational @quora: useful (when I looked; what was shown was dynamic) thoughts from different points of view. Like Meatball, most of the answers show were by knowledgeable and well intentional people (even those that didn't think too well about WP).

Misuse of authority at hr W 2010-2020 or so dealt with
In 2010-2020 a group of hr admins waged a set of edit wars; WM had a hard job to clear that. Some sides (including technical) about that is not yet clear to me, I'll investigate part of it in wiktionary later, starting here, going through this to this, and which is somehow hidden if accessed from here; also an example of some of what they did (and who repaired it and how),  here

Malagassy bot (mis)translations
I encountered discussion on bot (malagasy and Jagwar) mass (x*10^6+)(mis)translations.

It seems Jagwar is not intentionally malicious. It also seems he is smart (hw, brain ability) and probably (IT) taught, but not educated (ethic, wisdom). In short, he seems seriously irresponsible and not (yet only, hopefully) wise.

Irresponsibitiy, no awareness of scale
He doesn't seem to have a feeling of scale (that a hundred thousand or more of people would be needed to continuously review and correct/amend output of his bots), because he hadn't experienced responsibility (to have to repair consequences of his actions) as a child in small scale.

Similar pattern at spam and malware
I have massively encountered same pattern of irresponsibility and unwisdom at creators of spam and malware (about 2010 I saw an USA estimate that then only in China there were 100 000 people doing that).

Similar general pattern
It seems to be general pattern, not IT only. It can be seen at entrepreneurship, politics, publishing (people who write good non-scientific books - stories, novels... - with accurate data - and often after heavy research - write excuses in their introductions, that their intention is not to teach, but to entertain only, even when their stories contain accurate info (known at the time).

Reading that excuses, part next generation of authors take it literary as licencia poetica and write - often convincingly - of things they don't understand, and don't care if they don't understand (and often write they are proud of not understanding it, but being convincing at it).

Unwanted side effects
That can be dangerous. If a comic strip (or cartoon's) author draws a kind and angry "face" of a dog correctly, every child that has seen that comic can be communicated dog's - or wolfs, or fox's - warning and back off in time so animal doesn't need to strike.

Same goes to rattlesnakes sound warning, etc.

If, instead of well thought out, someone presents dinosaurs (or lizards in general) as nice and kind - without knowing (or caring) if that is true - may seriously misinfluence common sense of next generation.

Miseducating common sense professionally and scientifically
The same stands for the whole commercials industry (they like dummies with "blind-spots" and shall gladly grow more of them).

If - or when, if I'm pessimistic - that happens, another jump in entropy acceleration shall be seen (as when incidence of new malware detected grew from tens to hundreds new per month to thousands and hundreds of thousands per month).

This irresponsibility/unwisdom seem to be the case (and here methods for it have been scientifically researched and developed) in and for public relations and commercials industry. It shows same pattern of unwisdom and irresponsibility as Jag, even where not consciously malicious.

That pattern is old
Best about this problem I saw yet, is Sokrates's (or Platon's) Gorgias (dialogue) (I saw it first excellently translated to sl and commented by Anton Sovrè).

Tom Shanly
He is (when I last looked, it seems he still was alive) an author of (IMO) excellent and extremely detailed books about computer, and more speciffically, PC computer hardware.

It was so well founded and so well laid up that it could be used to understand almost any hardware up to that time, and priciples (as far as I know) still apply. It was deeply technical, but laid out so I could understand everything without being formally schooled on that field at the time (and when I was, I could discuss things based on Shanly with my teachers at the same level at least).

He was also teaching that stuff, and people who developed HW in question (Intel etc.) and people who developed HW specific SW (drivers, HW abstraction layer etc. - developers of add-on cards and drivers for that etc.) were regular public there.

That also allowed him to be up-to-date with what was newest, because he could guess from reactions of people actually doing new things if he was correct at assuming what they did. He wrote that he never allowed to be shown any documentation that would require him to sign a non-disclosure-aggreement, and because of that he was that more valuable source of info.

Is he notable? For me, not only him, but anyone that coauthored a book with him (and vice versa)(Don Anderson, Karen Gettman) is notable in IT field.

Some of titles I remember
This are not exact titles - i write from memory and never intended to hold them in my mind, I had books on my bookshelf (which doesn't exist any more since I retired).
 * 1) x86 Instruction Set Architecture
 * 2) ISA System Architecture
 * 3) EISA System Architecture
 * 4) PCI System Architecture
 * 5) Protected Mode Software Architecture
 * Etc.

I see several of his books are up to fourth edition - which is unusual for books on computer tecnhnology, which chages and develops extremely fast.

Sources found
Joy - I might be able to write the article - found sources elsewhere; but WP still has problems that prevented me to write the article before. And I see he also wrote about other non computer things - I need to read it (if it is on the level of the books I read, and I expect them to be) it will be extremely well worth it.

Google search shown as useless
When I wrote: tom shanly bibliography I got info about what google so called ai thinks  most people want to see - it offered about 20 000 hits where on first 16 pages Tom Shanly was not mentioned (not found by firefox on page elsewhere on page but in search string), and those 160 pages were all results initially offered; I could get all ~20 000 but would want to make script for searching within page and turning pages till something found, but for that I can't - and at the moment don't want to - allocate time needed. Google's message: In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 160 already displayed. Google seems to have "thought" I mistyped Shanly instead of Shanley, doesn't understand operator .near. any more, etc. It also behaves far from intelligently - it behaves as a statistical technician that pulls averages and trends without understanding events and processes that base data of statistics is about, and also has terrible (mis)ability to communicate results of the search to the users. (More on that elsewhere, including link when established).

How I got to this
When recently I looked for articles about PCI and PCIe personal computer interfaces (and their history and references), I missed Tom Shanley of as a reference in wikipedia articles about that. When I searched for Tom Shanley as a person in wikipedia, I also got no hits. Some of WP articles that needed such attention: Interrupt request (PC architecture), Intel 8259, etc. I joined wikipedia primary to propose an article about him and his contributions to educating personal computer hardware and architecture designers, developers and general personal computers engineers, and service persons. When I was new to personal computer hardware (198x) his books were a revelation to me, even when I already was familiar with mainframes (I had Facom M180 II/AD mantainence manuals available, including CPU theory etc.) - concise, at the same time understandable to a newbie and never boring to any pro. He also did (and according to website probably still does) training for people who actually design and build computer hardware, including people at Intel and similar.

(More to be added, to be sourced and confirmed notability, and then submitted as a proposal for a stub article.)

Current Mindshare people uninterested in history
I asked current people at Mindshare (where Tom Shanly was founder and main contributor when I worked on that field) for pointers to where to find relevant data, and got answer that they were not interested. This doesn't seem like Mindshare (and Shanly) I knew. He either doesnt have any more relation to Mindshare, or is incapacitated (old or ill). It seems a great and good influence and resource could get forgotten (when also my generation dies). Sad. Otherwise, WP has pages about Mindshare, but a different one. Mindshare (firm) is a global media and marketing services company formed in 1997 Mindshare (Shanly's) I have in mind was around earlier, at least in earlay 1990ies. I intend to find and reread everything he published (including about Genghis and Legacy, that are out of IT mindspace).

Some sources found

 * dblp computer science bibliography

Problems I see with Wikipedia as a knowledge base
When I was prompted to add links (to explain what I meant while describing my experience and area of interest) I did so - and saw it also as a useful training. Doing so I saw several problems that wikipedia seem to have (and seem to share with previous incarnations of knowledge bases). So here are some experiences that triggered this - and conclusions are to follow.

Outdoor activities are outdoor recreation in wikipedia, but not necessarily in life
When I wrote I had experience with "outdoors activities", and tried to link it to explanation, I got the only possibilities 'outdoor recreation' and a wikipedia redirection from outdoor activities to outdoor recreation.

Outdoor activities that are not (only) recreational
In fact my experience was not only with recreational activities, but with both recreational and general life outdoor activities.

Back-country holidays and mountaineering
As a youngster and young teenager I used to be taking cows and sheep from stall to a creek to drink and back, bringing drinking water from creek, preparing and bringing hay to hayloft, bringing (by foot, not by car) things from store etc. etc.

I have a lot of relatives, including several living in mountainous country that used to be pretty wild and 'primitive', - and since I was encouraged and not forced to do it I enjoyed that kind of life a lot, all of it, and still do.

I was also mad with mountaineering when younger - and still would if I haven't got knee damage that limits that.., So as young teenager with no excessive funds I used to go to the mountains by bike (80 km in one direction, with heavy knapsack for a week of outdoors stay), hitch hiking (horse driven carriages took me sometimes...). I would often use public transportation, but when I got free (from school) and went to mountain late in the evening or early in the night, often no buses or trains were scheduled, so I walked hitch hiking through the nights a lot.

Often I was where I intended to start a climb - or if my goal was just an ascent - on the top of the mountain - at first light or even before.

Yes, part of it was always recreation, but it included living and 'transportation' as outdoors activities.

Me and use of cars
After a decade or two of intensive use of cars (I drove cars for living as teenager for a year or two - and then for several years used the car a lot to reach the foots of the mountains).

After I started living from informatics I found that in everyday life I no more needed the car, but at that time lot of (mostly older and teens who couldn't or were not licensed to drive) people found me and my car useful, so I kept using it.

When I got rid of my car
When about 2010 most of them either acquired licenses and cars or their close relatives did, I found out I didn't need the car. The actual experience was that - except for a couple of weeks in summer - whenever I wanted to start a car, it wouldn't start because accumulator got low on power.

For everyday activities (going to job and home and around) I used bikes, in-line skates, and collapsable kick scooter (this - and bikes too - often combined with public transportation). Traffic jams, search for parking place etc. mostly made use of car in my environment at best impractical and uneconomic, and when I became aware of that, I got rid of my car.

Then my everyday mobility became 'outdoor activity' without being recreation only.

Other outdoor activities
Same applied to several of my other activities. After damage to my knee made long trips (especially descents) painful (and damaging), I did a lot more of sailing, and also got licenses to teach. So, again, it was outdoor activity, but teaching (and a lot of related activities) were not recreation only.

Conclusions
For description of my outdoor activities, description in '' outdoor recreation only" just doesn't fit.

The wikipedia redirection from Outdoor activities to Outdoor recreation should be expanded to disambiguation page and include beside outdoor recreation also


 * 1) general life outdoors (might need to be explained to 'civilized' people) (I might need to expand what that is)
 * 2) professional (and possibly include a list, or point to an article with a list of such) activities. That could be 'non-industrial' fishing, non-robotic or pre-robotic agriculture and so on.

Seeing the redirection I mentioned (and my previous experience in informatics troubleshooting) I suppose sometimes before there was an article about 'general outdoors activities' but was later reduced to redirection to recreation only.

Urbane - "civilized" and non- users' point of view
Because ever increasing part of humanity live in urbane environment (might already be majority), outdoor recreation might be already prevalent topics for users to seek. But a lot of environment is still not so, and for people who live there (and maybe more outside of USA and EU) for a lot of them 'normal life' is probably much, and somewhere even mostly, outdoor activities.

Current structure of Wikipedia 'knowledge base' makes writing about their part of life (and reality) at least inconvenient, if you want to use links to Wikipedia Articles as a way to explain concepts you use, instead piling all info on a user in one heap. The effect is, probably, that description of that part of reality mostly doesn't get included in Wikipedia, and even when it is, it is often 'fit to the model' or paradigm of the civilized experience - thus encouraging contributors (and people who use it in general) to thinking "inside the box"....

As another example of the same, I wanted to link "inside the box" above to a related Article in Wikipedia (meaning being blinded by preconceptions). But this topic is not cowered by Wikipedia article, even the phenomenon is (by my experience - much too) common (to be discussed sometimes and somewhere, why it may be so).

A roughly opposed Article about thinking outside of the box exist, but it describes methods and ideas how to get people to stop thinking 'inside of the box', without finding out why they started to do so...

Or was he not?
Most people (who give it any thought) seem to think Newton was wrong in this or that way. I got to read a bit the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in Project Guttenberg and - in the part I read - got the impression, that he didn't intend to prove gravity and movement follow the laws he is supposed to state. My conclusion from incomplete insight was that he used "laws of motion" as an example and argument for his statement, that reality can be described - and often predicted - by using mathematics, which by my opinion he did prove.

In the part I read (I didn't have a dictionary of middle ages Latin at hand at the time so I didn't read it through) I didn't see he claimed his description of that part of reality (basic laws of motions) accurate or valid forever, just valid and accurate to the level that could be verified at the time, and useful.

What was the point of his book
And as far as I saw, he primarily described the method to proceed to mathematical description of (a part of) nature well enough to be usefull and for the abilities to be tested and verify the model at the time. In that I didn't find him wrong .

And the name of his book was not 'Law of motion'...

How our knowledge of his contribution got so skewed
How it came to be he is generally thought 'to be wrong' about laws of motion (because relativity is not included in his model)?

IMO people who cited him, and discussed it, and wrote about it in school texts and encyclopaedia e entries, called his description "Universal Law", and so that wrong idea of Universal Law spread to general public. Few people (living now) seem to have read it, but it gets downloaded anyway: Historiae naturalis principia mathematica at Project Gutenberg, downloads, as of 9:51 7.4.2020: 1968 downloads in the last 30 days.

The problem seem to have been communication of his idea to general public, not that he was wrong.

What has that to do with the problem I see with Wikipedia?
With what I searched for in Wikipedia last several days I got impression that Wikipedia (unintentionally) encourages contributors to the same simplification as those people did.

"Universal Law" in Wikipedia as an example
In previous paragraph I used the terminus "Universal Law", and tried to reference it to existing Article about it. Doing that I found out that Universal Law in Wikipedia refers to terminus from ethics, and that in it is a disambiguation link for scientific stuff to the article on models of scientific inquiry. I don't see - yet - a clear reference to Universal Law definition in it (it is mentioned and is part of the teme, but not at all usefull to express my meaning with less worlds precisely here). So I have to read and analyze it to find if I can make it usefull.

In models of scientific inquiry the discussion seem to stand on work on one author (Wesley Salmon). It is interesting that in the article there is an extremely limited discussion on three generations of scientific method - they are just mentioned:

And maybe it already has - Article logical empiricism also exists.
 * 1) clasical model topic includes one sentence   "The classical model of scientific inquiry derives from Aristotle, who distinguished the forms of approximate and exact reasoning, set out the threefold scheme of abductive, deductive, and inductive inference, and also treated the compound forms such as reasoning by analogy. [citation needed]"Lost is all wealth of other wise people from antique  who had other ideas then Aristotle - preceding him, contemporary or later. Lost is all information how and why the methods (called scheme-s in the statement above) were conceived, tested, used. And as far as I know in antiquity they were often (mostly?) used as methods to support each other to learn more about topic of interest, not always (and/or exclusively) excluding each other. The quoted sentence above effectively (but probably not intentionally) looks like the essence of catholic orthodoxy about science in middle ages.
 * 2) Pragmatic model topic only consists of a link "Main article: Pragmatic theory of truth"
 * 3) Logical empiricism is the topic, that is actually the only real contents of this Article. It seems evident that this is not an Article about scientific method, but an Artcle about Salmon's idea of 'Logical Empiricism'. Previous ideas are just mentioned as a context for his, and plurality of ideas is not even mentioned (who or what inspired Salmon to enter this field of activity, who did not agree with him and why...). Maybe that Article could be rewritten and moved to a new one about Logical empiricism (as seen or proposed by Wesley Salmon)and in this just set a reference to Main Article (as in Pragmatic model topic mentioned above.

To be continued; this also probably has to be moved to a separate page of user pages (or if somebody would discuss it, of talk pages). --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 07:23, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Influence on (and of) children's education
Just filling scholarly facts is boring, even when facts are correct. I got interested in knowledge neither through scholarly works, through any specialistic curricula, but through stories about problems, people that spotted them, and their way to tackling and solving them. (Jules Verne, Aleš Strojnik, Nečajev, Paul de Kruif, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Jim al-Khalili, Marcus du Sutoy...)

I'll probably die before forgetting the following experience.

Excursion from Ljubljana to Science museum in Muenchen
A (quite smart and when younger interested in everything) boy and his father asked me (about y. 2000) to go with a bus of children interested in science and technology (form several grades from about 9 to 14 years of age).

The accompanying teacher also asked if I could be able to try to answer any questions they might ask. I tried to get acquainted with all what that museum held (It would be my first visit also) and found I could answer general questions on all fields I could expect, and more detailed in several also (chemistry, mining, flight atmospheric and exatmo, traffic including rail and marine, IT, general level physics including ability to explain math in a simple, but not simplistic way...).

We came there - and children ran through museum practically without stopping.  No one  - even the smart boy that asked me if I could acompany him -  asked one question .

The one place where they stopped was at the animated miniaturized brick factory where things moved, but even there no one asked what it was, what it was doing or how it was doing it.

I was totally unprepared for totally uninterested "children with interest in science and technology". When I was their age, we wringed out anything our escort (Aleš Strojnik) could and would tell in similar situation. We got - at age of about 13 - about half a year university quality information on 1965 electronics in (most of) a day. I expected something similar and was slow to recover - so we were out of the museum before I had any idea how to try to recover.

I later tried to find out how that happened. I found out several of parents already took their children to that museum and went through it running - and telling their children they will go through it later with their school excursion. When we came, the children "in the know" did what were taught to do by doing it, and the rest followed the example. What children evidently learned form their experience (both with parents and on that excursion) was that you should run through a museum without stopping. Another thing was that in Slovenia at the time you needed to have enough points from lower grades to be eligible to enter particular education curricula. Seeing such places seem to have counted for those points, and parents that could got kids there, without doing anything on quality of experience. So that possibly was a bus of kids their parents set to spend a day running through museum to get some additional such points. Quality of experience was not graded (probably no one had any idea how to do it) and the result at least in that case was almost exactly opposite what education should strive to achieve (grow interest for perpetual acquiring knowledge, skills and abilities and using all that ethically?).

Net effect was probably an anti-epiphany for far too many of those children. The smart kid I was with then got to law school (recently married and I think working on his PhD, but with not much interest in science). I feel possibly others of that group too would need some extraordinary experience to get them anti-anti-epiphanied to science and technology again.

And my feeling of failing those kids then and there still hurts.

Examples of bad

 * Ann Druyan - how a bad teacher repulsed her from science, and she returned later against odds on her own
 * Carl Sagan - his drive to scientific curiosity was home grown (mom and pop); standard High school found out he is at level for gifted children, but there were no funds for it, and regular school was booooooring for him (how much was that general aspect of all, or most, such schools? where to look for that?)

Examples of good

 * Carl Sagan later - but not all was well. US academics system wanted specialists, Sagan was broad spread, cross fields excellent guy.