Answering Questions of Engineering Identity and Topic Relevance Using the Work of Robert Rosen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some engineering students ask their instructors questions related to the nature of engineering and to the relevance of certain course topics or full courses. Responses to these questions are generally experiential, empirical, and lacking in theoretical rigour. This research paper explores how Robert Rosen’s Modelling Relation and his concept of Anticipatory Systems can be used to understand the nature of engineering in a way that is rigorous, theoretically grounded, and accessible to varied audiences. Abstract engineering and making practices are successfully mapped onto the Modelling Relation, and a concrete example from Civil Engineering is developed. Following from this mapping, engineering is reinterpreted as the actions of an anticipatory system informed by particular predictive models. This mapping and reinterpretation were trialed successfully in an undergraduate engineering design course, and in workshops with participants from a variety of engineering and non-engineering backgrounds. Areas for improvement and exploration include the fractal natural of design, and the challenges associated with complex systems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".