Chapter 5 Continued:

Scientific Visualization:
-Scientific visualization software uses shapes, location in space, color, brightness, and motion to help us visualize data.
-Visualization helps researches see relationships that might have been obscure or even impossible to grasp without computer-aided visualization tools.
-Computer modeling: uses computers to create abstract models of objects, organisms, organizations, and processes.

-Examples of popular computer models:

• Games
• models of organisms, objects and organizations.
• Flight simulators and simulations of science lab activities.
• Business, city, or nation management simulations.
• Computer simulations are widely used

There are many reasons:

• Safety
• Economy
• Projection
• Visulization
• Replication

-GIGO Revisited:

-the accuracy of a simulation depends on how closely its mathematical model corresponds to the system being simulated.

- Some models suffer from faulty assumptions.

- Some models contain hidden assumptions that may not even be obvious to their creators.

-Some models go astry simply becasue of clerical or human errors.

-Still, garbage in, garbage out is a basic rule simulation.

Making reality Fit the machine

-Some simulations are so comlex that researchers need to simplify models and streamline calculations to get them to run on the best hardware available.

-Sometimes this simplification of reality is deliberate; more often its unconscious.

- Either way, information can be lost, and the loss may comprmoise the integrity of the simulation and call the results into question.

The illusion of Infallibility:

• A computer simulation, whether generated by a PC spreadsheet or churned out by a supercomputer, can be an invaluable decisionmaking aid.
• The is that the people who make decisions with computers will turn over too much of their decision-making power to the computer.
• Risks can be magnifies because peoeple take computers seriously.

-Future user interfaces will be based on agents rather than on tools.

-Agents are software programs designed to be managed rather than munipulated.

-An intelligent software agent can:

• Ask questions as well as respond to commands.
• Pay attention to its user's work patterns.
• Serve as a guide and a coach.
• Take on its owner's goals.
• Use reasoning to fabricate goals of its own.

Tomorrow's agents will be better able to complete with human assistants.

Future agents may possess a degree of sensitivity.

A well trained software agent in the future might accomplish these tasks:

-Remind you that its time to get the trues rotated on your car and make an appointement for the rotation.

-Distribute notes to the other members of your study group or work group and tell you which members opened those notes.

-Keep you poted on new articles on subjects that interest you and know enough about those subjects to be selective without being rigid.

-Manage your appointments and keep track of your communications.

-Teach you new applications and answer reference questions.

-Defend your system and your home from viruses, intruders, and other security breaches.

-Help protect your privacy on and off the net.