Open book examination to be completed and returned by 3:00 p.m. on Monday, December 14, 1992. You may use any available references or your notes, but do not consult with other students or staff regarding questions or answers.
1. Do the four exercises on the first page of the sheets of class problems on graphical methode that were distributed on Tuesday, December 1.
You may find the second set of problems challenging but we have not had time in class to develop the associated statistical techniques, so these are for information only.
2. We have discussed at length the very important, but little emphasized, code-message duality concept that applies to all kinds of communication and information storage, mental, verbal, written or telecommunicated, where there must always be a symbolism or “Figure of Thought” before communication or recording can occur. Developing clear, compact, unambiguous figures of thought is very important to any scientific, medical or social, even philosophical thought.
Take one “Figure of Thought” that you have found especially useful, best of all, one that you have developed or invented, and illustrate its special applicability and merits.
3. We have examined intensively several national goals that, if reached, would be highly beneficial societally, at the individual, the affinity group, and the community levels. These may require technological, scientific and ideological development, marketing, and political management. Using the matrix inversion approach, describe in some detail, the end status of utilization that you idealize, and then describe rather specifically the strategies by which this could be made real, and estimate the time frame in which this could be achieved with minimal trauma and cost, with protection from disastrous failure.
4. We have discussed extensively the “Taxonomy” of the Biophysical Sciences and Technologies and the “magic” of 7 or 8 in categorization. Try to find about 7 or 8 categories that more or less neatly contain the major ideology of our subject and give each an attractive name with brief description of its content.
5. You have been given access to a very large and widely diversified literature relating historically, recently or peripherally to our Biophysical Sciences subject.
Choose some particular publication that you found appealing, quote the reference or references, and give us, in compact form, the benefit of your study.