Bad Monkey Love Blog

tau⋅tol⋅o⋅gy  /tɔˈtɒlədʒi/ [taw-tol-uh-jee]
–noun, plural -gies.
1. needless repetition of an idea, esp. in words other than those of the immediate context, without imparting additional force or clearness, as in “widow woman.”
2. an instance of such repetition.
3. Logic. a. a compound propositional form all of whose instances are true, as “A or not A.”
b. an instance of such a form, as “This candidate will win or will not win.”

NOTE: XKCD: Honor Societies

pe⋅nul⋅ti⋅mate  /pɪˈnʌltəmɪt/ [pi-nuhl-tuh-mit]
–adjective
1. next to the last: the penultimate scene of the play.
2. of or pertaining to a penult.

–noun
3. a penult.

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The first time I encountered this word was in Philip K Dick’s, “The Penultimate Truth”. Which, by the way, is a pretty good dystopia book.

fruc⋅ti⋅fy  /ˈfrʌktəˌfaɪ, ˈfrʊk-, ˈfruk-/ [fruhk-tuh-fahy, frook-, frook-] , -fied, -fy⋅ing.

–verb (used without object) 1. to bear fruit; become fruitful: With careful tending the plant will fructify.

–verb (used with object) 2. to make fruitful or productive; fertilize: warm spring rains fructifying the earth.

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Origin:
1275–1325; ME fructifien < OF fructifier < L frūctificāre. See fructi-, -fy

cas⋅ti⋅gate  /ˈkæstɪˌgeɪt/ [kas-ti-geyt]

–verb (used with object), -gat⋅ed, -gat⋅ing.
1. to criticize or reprimand severely.
2. to punish in order to correct.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than relatively more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999.

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (as Charles Darwin put it). They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

• Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
• Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
• If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

The authors draw an analogy with anosognosia – a condition in which a person who suffers a physical disability due to brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of the disability. This may include unawareness of quite dramatic impairments, such as blindness or paralysis.

ef⋅fron⋅ter⋅y  /ɪˈfrʌntəri/ [i-fruhn-tuh-ree]

–noun, plural -ter⋅ies. 1. shameless or impudent boldness; barefaced audacity: She had the effrontery to ask for two free samples.
2. an act or instance of this.

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Origin:
1705–15; < F effronterie, equiv. to OF esfront shameless (es- ex- 1 + front brow; see front ) + -erie -ery

In object-oriented programming, the Liskov substitution principle (LSP) is a particular definition of a subtyping relation, called (strong) behavioral subtyping, that was initially introduced by Barbara Liskov in a 1987 conference keynote address entitled Data abstraction and hierarchy. It is a semantic rather than merely syntactic relation because it intends to guarantee semantic interoperability of types in a hierarchy, object types in particular. Liskov and Jeannette Wing formulated the principle succinctly in a 1994 paper as follows:

Let q(x) be a property provable about objects x of type T. Then q(y) should be true for objects y of type S where S is a subtype of T.

In the same paper, Liskov and Wing detailed their notion of behavioral subtyping in an extension of Hoare logic, which bears a certain resemblance with Bertrand Meyer’s Design by Contract in that it considers the interaction of subtyping with and pre- and postconditions.