One last question: Do these sorts of errors ever happen to you?

Oh, no, I'm perfect. (Laughs.) Sure, I have trouble operating my VCR just like everybody else. So yes, they do happen to me — and I am probably as intolerant as most people in terms of experiencing frustrations with devices that should be, and could be, a lot easier to use.

Задание 6. Прочитайте биографии знаменитых ученых. Расскажите о том, в какой области они работали, об их исследованиях и открытиях, о той роли, которую их исследования сыграли в развитии науки и какую пользу они принесли своей стране и всему человечеству.

William Ross Ashby (September 6, 1903, London – November 15, 1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in the study of complex systems. Despite being widely influential within cybernetics, systems theory and, more recently, complex systems, he is not nearly as well known as many of the notable scientists his work has influenced including Herbert Simon, Norbert Wiener, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Stafford Beer and Stuart Kauffman.

In May 1928, Ashby was 24 and a medical student at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London when he started recording his theories in a series of
25 notebooks. He wrote on average half a page a day for 44 years until shortly before he died. In January 2003 the notebooks, and an electronic copy, were donated to The British Library, London.

In 1946, Alan Turing wrote to Ashby suggesting he uses his ACE for his experiments instead of building a special machine. In 1948 Ashby made the Homeostat. Ashby only made one reference to Turing in his notebooks in December 1954.

Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety (Ashby 1956), Variety absorbs Variety, defines the minimum number of states necessary for a controller to control a system of a given number of states. For example, the number of bits necessary in a digital computer to produce a required description or model. In 1970 with Conant he produced the theorem "Every Good Regulator of a System must be a model of that System" (Int. J. Systems Sci., 1970. vol 1, No. 2 pp89-97). Stafford Beer applied Variety to found management cybernetics and the Viable System Model. Working independently Gregory Chaitin followed this with Algorithmic information theory.

From 1947 to 1959, Ashby was director of research at Barnwood House Hospital in Gloucester. From 1959 to 1960 he was Director of the Burden Neurological Institute. From 1960 to 1970 in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ashby became a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatry in 1971.

Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (1933) Soviet physicist who was a corecipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978 for his research in magnetism and low-temperature physics. He discovered that helium II (the stable form of liquid helium below 2.174 K, or -270.976 C) has almost no viscosity (i.e., resistance to flow). This property is called superfluidity. (The award was shared by astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson for unrelated work.) Educated at the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute, Kapitsa remained there as a lecturer until 1921. After his first wife and their two small children died of illness during the chaos of the civil war that followed the Revolution, he went to England to study at the University of Cambridge. There he worked with Ernest Rutherford and became assistant director of magnetic research at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1924, designing apparatus that achieved a magnetic field of 500,000 gauss, which was not surpassed in strength until 1956. He was made a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1925 and elected to the Royal Society in 1929, one of only a small number of foreigners to become a fellow. The Royal Society Mond Laboratory was built at Cambridge especially for him in 1932.

In 1934, before he had published his paper on an expansion engine that liquefies helium, Kapitsa went to a professional meeting in the Soviet Union, where his passport was seized and he was detained there by Stalin's orders. In 1935 he was made director of the Institute of Physical Problems of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow and managed through the intercession of Rutherford to have the Mond Laboratory apparatus shipped to Moscow. He continued his research in low-temperature physics and discovered superfluidity in helium II while investigating its heat-conduction properties. His findings were first published in 1938, with further research on the subject described in The Heat Transfer and Superfluidity of Helium II (1941) and Research into the Mechanism of Heat Transfer in Helium II (1941). In 1939 he built apparatus for producing large quantities of liquid oxygen for the Soviet steel industry during World War II. For his achievements in science during the 1930s and 1940s, Kapitsa was given many honors by the Soviet government, including the title Hero of Socialist Labor (1945), the Soviet Union's highest civilian award.

In 1946 Kapitsa apparently refused to work on nuclear weapons development and as a result fell out of favor with Stalin. He was dismissed from his post as head of the Institute for Physical Problems and resided at his country house, or dacha, until after Stalin's death in 1953. He conducted original researches on ball lightning during his seclusion. Kapitsa was then restored (1955) as director of the institute, a position he kept until his death.

Kapitsa's research on high-power microwave generators in the late 1950s turned his interests to controlled thermonuclear fusion, upon which he published a series of papers beginning in 1969. An outspoken advocate of free scientific thought, in the 1960s he was one of the Soviet scientists who campaigned to preserve Lake Baikal from industrial pollution. He was also active in the Pugwash movement, a series of international conferences aimed at channeling scientific research into constructive rather than destructive purposes.

Tony Buzan (born 1942) is the originator of mind mapping and coined the term mental literacy. He was born in London, in an alumnus of Kitsilano Secondary School, and received double Honours in psychology, English, mathematics and the General Sciences from the University of British Columbia in 1964. He is probably best known for his book, Use Your Head, his promotion of mnemonic systems and his mind-mapping techniques. He launched his official mind mapping software Mind Map in December 2006.

Following his 1970s series for the BBC, many of his ideas have been set into his series of five books: Use Your Memory, Master Your Memory, Use Your Head, The Speed Reading Book and The Mind Map Book.

In essence, Buzan teaches 'Learn how your brain learns rapidly and naturally'.

His work is partly based on the explosion of brain research that has taken place since the late 1950s, and the work on the left and right brain by Robert Ornstein and Roger Wolcott Sperry.

Most of his teaching generally divides up into: general awareness of the extensive capabilities and capacities of the brain and its functions, memory skills, reading skills, mind map note-taking, creativity, and how brain function can be improved over time into old age.

Buzan developed Mind Mapping whilst at University, out of the frustration that traditional notes took up so much time to create and review. Research indicated that the brain responds best to key words, images, colours, and direct association. Buzan refined these ideas into a simple set of rules that can be followed to create Mind Maps, which are an efficient way to take notes from lectures or books. Brother Barry Buzan, who co-wrote The Mind Map Book, suggested the technique could also be used to capture notes from one's own creative ideas. Many sources, including the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Winston Churchill have been found to contain notes or drawings that are similar to, or follow a sub-set of the Mind Mapping rules.

As a popular psychology author, Tony Buzan has written on subjects relating to the brain, genius quotient (GQ), spiritual intelligence, memory, creativity and speed reading. He is the (self-appointed) President of the Brain Foundation, the founder of the Brain Trust Charity, the World Memory Championships and the World Championships of the Brain. He is also a co-founder of the Mind Sports Olympiad and London's Mind body spirit festival.

Buzan and his followers claim that his techniques can dramatically improve study performance and results.

Tony's brother Barry Buzan is currently Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics.

William Daniel Phillips (1948) American physicist whose experiments using laser light to cool and trap atoms earned him the Nobel Prize for Phy­sics in 1997. He shared the award with Steven Chu and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, who also developed methods of laser cooling and atom trapping.Phillips received his doctorate in physics (1976) and completed his postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1978 he joined the staff of the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg, Md., and it was there that he conducted his award-winning research. Building on Chu's work, Phillips developed new and improved methods for measuring the temperature of laser-cooled atoms. In 1988 he discovered that the atoms reached a temperature six times lower than the predicted theoretical limit. Cohen-Tannoudji refined the theory to explain the new results, and he and Phillips further investigated methods of trapping atoms cooled to even lower temperatures.

One result of the development of laser-cooling techniques was the first observation, in 1995, of the Bose-Einstein condensate, a new state of matter originally predicted 70 years earlier by Albert Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. In this state atoms are so chilled and so slow that they, in effect, merge and behave as one single quantum entity that is much larger than any individual atom.

 

Английский язык

Высшее образование в России и за рубежом

Методические указания

 

Часть 1

Редактор И.Л. Кескевич

Технический редактор Н.В. Гаврилова

Компьютерная верстка Н.М. Шуваева

 

Подписано в печать 17.07.2007. Формат 60 х 84 1/16. Бумага офсетная

Тираж 1000 экз. Уч.-изд. л. 3,72. Печ. л. 4,0. Изд. № 160. Заказ №

Цена договорная

Отпечатано в типографии

Новосибирского государственного технического университета

630092, г. Новосибирск, пр. К. Маркса, 20