David Mertz

David Mertz (born 1964) is an author and columnist for IBM's developerWorks, Intel Developer Services, O'Reilly's ONLamp, and other online publications. Formerly an academic philosopher who specialized in postmodernism, he is currently vice-president and chief technology officer of the Open Voting Consortium¹ and serves on the IEEE Voting Systems Electronic Data Interchange project². He maintains Gnosis Utilities, a widely used public domain Python package (see below). Image File history File links DavidMertz1. ... Image File history File links DavidMertz1. ... International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, or colloquially, Big Blue) NYSE: IBM (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since 1888) is headquartered in Armonk, NY, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software, and services. ... developerWorks is IBMs resource for software developers. ... Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) (founded 1968) is a U.S.-based multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. ... OReilly Media (formerly OReilly & Associates, IPA /É™raɪli/) is an American media company established by Tim OReilly, primarily focusing on books related to computer programming. ... Philosophy is a discipline or field of study involving the investigation, analysis, and development of ideas at a general, abstract, or fundamental level. ... Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. ... The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE (pronounced as eye-triple-ee) is an international non-profit, professional organization incorporated in the State of New York, United States. ... The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... Python is an interpreted, interactive programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990. ...

Mertz graduated in 1987 from the University of Colorado with a B.A. (Hons) in philosophy and mathematics. He completed his M.A. in philosophy in 1991 at the University of Massachusetts, and received his Ph.D. from the same university in 1999 for a philosophy thesis entitled The Speculum and The Scalpel: The Politics of Impotent Representation and Nonrepresentational Terrorism. [1] [2] (pdf) He has held teaching posts in philosophy at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Hartford. University of Colorado at Boulder The University of Colorado at Boulder (CU or CU–Boulder) is the flagship university of the University of Colorado system. ... Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Mathematics Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Mathematics Look up Mathematics on Wiktionary, the free dictionary Wikimedia Commons has more media related to: Mathematics Bogomolny, Alexander: Interactive Mathematics Miscellany and Puzzles. ... The University of Massachusetts (commonly referred to as UMass) is the five-campus public university system of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. ... The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts is a public state college located in North Adams, Massachusetts. ... The University of Massachusetts (commonly referred to as UMass) is the five-campus public university system of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. ... The University of Hartford was founded in 1877, and is a private, independent, and nonsectarian coeducational university located in West Hartford, Connecticut. ...

Philosophical journals that Mertz has written for include Social Epistemology^{3a 3b}, Bioethics⁵, Rethinking Marxism^{6a 6b}, and Radical Philosophy Review^{7a 7b}.

He is the author of Text Processing in Python, also published as an online book, as well as papers on metaclass programming in Python, multiple dispatch, cryptology, and a Haskell programming language tutorial. Columns he writes include Charming Python, [3] and XML Matters. [4] A metaclass is a class that manages all relationships to class instances (objects). ... Multiple dispatch or multimethods is the feature of some object-oriented programming languages in which a function or method can be specialized on the type of more than one of its arguments. ... Cryptography (from Greek kryptós, hidden, and gráphein, to write) is, traditionally, the study of means of converting information from its normal, comprehensible form into an incomprehensible format, rendering it unreadable without secret knowledge — the art of encryption. ... Haskell logo Haskell is a standardized pure functional programming language with non-strict semantics. ...

References

• Note 1: "About Us". Open Voting Consortium website. URL accessed on 10 October 2005. Mertz is listed under Current Board Members and further details appear lower on the page
• Note 2: "IEEE P1622 - Voting Systems Electronic Data Interchange". IEEE website. URL accessed on 10 October 2005. Mertz is listed as Technical Editor
• Note 3a: Hattiangadi's Langue-ing and Ours, Social Epistemology[5] 3(1), Winter 1989
• Note 3b: Peer Commentary on Eric Dietrich's "Computationalism", Social Epistemology 4(3), Fall 1990
• Note 5: Women and AIDS: The Ethics of Exaggerated Harm, Bioethics[6] 10(2), April, 1996. Primary Author. Coauthored with Mary Ann Sushinsky and Udo Schueklenk
• Note 6a: The Racial Other in Nationalist Subjectivations: A Lacanian Analysis, Rethinking Marxism[7] 8(2), Summer 1995
• Note 6b: Sex Wars: The New Left's AIDS-related Scientism, Rethinking Marxism 9(1), Spring 1996/1997
• Note 7a: The Net's New Enclosures: Review of Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Radical Philosophy Review[8]. 3(1), February 2000
• Note 7b: Review of Steve Martinot's "The Rule of Racialization", Radical Philosophy Review. 7(2), November 2004

October 10 is the 283rd day of the year (284th in Leap years). ... 2005 (Roman: MMV) is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... October 10 is the 283rd day of the year (284th in Leap years). ... 2005 (Roman: MMV) is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Social epistemology can be split into two broad camps: the radical and the non-radical. ... Bioethics is the ethics of biological science and medicine. ...

External links

• Gnosis Software, David Mertz's website
  • Mertz's curriculum vitae

Further reading

• Mertz, David. Text Processing in Python, Addison Wesley, ISBN 0321112547