Publications

Amazon Book Reviews
From April 2009 onward
My page

Einstein Domes
An iconic symbol of our planet is ripe for prime time
November 2023
PDF, 2 pages, 116 KB

A Lifetime in Logic and Philosophy
Pages 51−64 in:
Pomiędzy folklorem a folkloryzmem
Publikacja z okazji jubileuszu 55-lecia pracy naukowej prof. dr hab. Violetty Krawczyk-Wasilewskiej
Uniwersytet Łódzki 2023
PDF, 14 pages, 262 KB

ALBION
Folly and Fate in Brexit Britain
August 2022
Paperback, 6" × 9", 445 pages
ISBN 979-8-8274-8750-0

Omniscience
The new science of the Cosmos
July 2019
PDF, 22 pages, 532 KB

The Great Reboot
Science and the new case for sustainable governance
June 2019
PDF, 12 pages, 7500 words, 346 KB

Resilience
The UK should resile from its decision to leave the EU
May 2019
PDF, 10 pages, 330 KB

Brexit and Democracy
March 2019
PDF: 2 pages, 185 KB

Ringlord
The story of how President Putin builds on Brexit to rule the world
December 2018
PDF: 7 pages, 392 KB

New York at its showy best
Review of The Vanity Fair Diaries by Tina Brown
December 2018
PDF: 1 page, 209 KB

Earthmind Explosion
How artificial intelligence will transform the future of life on Earth
December 2018
PDF: 7 pages, 314 KB

Victory
How Vladimir Putin defeated U.S. democracy
October 2018
PDF: 10 pages, 130 KB

Fortress Europe
Are immigration and Islam killing Europe?
August 2018
PDF: 10 pages, 144 KB

What Would Winston Do?
A review of Boris Johnson on Winston Churchill
July 2018
PDF: 9 pages, 142 KB

Britizen Jon
A Tragedy in Three Parts
Rover, 2017
Paperback, 12.8 cm x 19.6 cm, 160 pages
ISBN 978-1-9761-7588-6

The Prophet of Posthumanism
Review of two books by Yuval Harari
2016-10-12 (corr. 2016-11-22)
PDF: 10 pages, 139 KB

Folklore in the Digital Age
Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska
Foreword by Andy Ross
Lodz University Press / Jagiellonian University Press
150 pages, 2016

UK Sovereignty
Note rebutting a poor argument for Brexit
2016-10-24
PDF: 2 pages, 57 KB

The Messenger of Monotheism
Review of two books by Kader Abdolah
2016-09-21
PDF: 8 pages, 98 KB

European Union: I Love EU
Speech delivered during an EU referendum debate held in Poole on 19 May 2016
2016-05-21
PDF: 2 pages, 75 KB

European Union: A Better View
Opinion piece presenting a new argument to keep the UK in the EU
2016-02-01
PDF: 2 pages, 82 KB

Teen romance as fairy tale? We have a winner!
Review of "The Changeling" by Helen Falconer
2015-06-29
PDF: 1 page, 57 KB

The Great Recession
Review of "The Shifts and the Shocks" by Martin Wolf
2015-05-28
PDF: 4 pages, 40 KB

Houseboats
We should encourage more houseboats in Poole Harbour
Harbour Times, Issue 7, 52-53, February 2015
PDF: 1 page, 911 KB

Sapiens
Review of "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Harari
2014-09-29
PDF: 1 page, 61 KB

On Genocide
Review of "The Zone of Interest" by Martin Amis
2014-09-07
PDF: 2 pages, 69 KB

Rising Star
Review of "Rising Tides"
2014-05-29
PDF: 3 pages, 82 KB

On War
Review of "War: What is it good for?" by Ian Morris
2014-04-25
PDF: 2 pages, 74 KB

Toward a Science of Morality
A note for Sam Harris
2014-02-07
PDF: 2 pages, 51 KB

The Answer
My answer is not 42 but V
2014-01-01
PDF: 8 pages, 211 KB

Parsifal
Royal Opera House, Live in Cinema, 18 December 2013
A personal review by Andy Ross
PDF: 2 pages, 115 KB

Parsifal
Royal Opera House, Live in Cinema, 18 December 2013
Unauthorized introduction by Andy Ross
PDF: 2 pages, 117 KB

Globorg: The Emerging Global Organism
Transformations 3-4 (78-79) 2013, 199-216
A review in terms of spiral dynamics is offered of the growth in the history of civilization of a hypothetical global organism that the author calls Globorg. The anthropology, biology, cognitive science, dynamics, economics, and philosophy of this process are traced far enough to sketch a unified account of the roots of Globorg that may serve to motivate further interdisciplinary work on the long-term trajectory of life on Earth.
PDF Preprint: 16 pages 175 KB

Cars: A Rant
August 2013
PDF: 4 pages, 432 KB

CORAL
The Next Twist of Fate
Rover, 2013
Paperback, 12.8 cm x 19.6 cm, 300 pages
ISBN 978 148234223 9

Shaping Virtual Lives
Online Identities, Representations, and Conducts
Edited by Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska, Theo Meder, and Andy Ross
Lodz University Press, 2012
Softcover, 148 pages
ISBN 978-83-7525-671-0
Selected papers from a panel session on virtual lives held at the 10th
Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF)
17–21 April 2011, Lisbon, Portugal

LIFEBALL
Birth of a New God
A Novel
Rover edition 2012 with the text of the 1996 edition
Paperback, 15.6 cm x 23.4 cm, 432 pages
ISBN 978 147014644 3
We are not alone. And we are not the end of the line. Aliens from other star systems will find us one day. And our own machines will one day overtake us. Or both — at once.
Jon Christie knew this. Androids and aliens didn't faze a computer jock with a CIA past. But even he was unprepared for the sudden, combined impact of these threats when he traveled to Japan in the summer of 2013.
First published in a limited private edition in 1996, this novel became a cult classic for a select group of fans and has been hard to find ever since. Now, just in time, here it is again.

PHILOSOPHER
A Memoir
Rover, 2012, paperback, 15.6 cm x 23.4 cm, 496 pages
ISBN 978 146647993 7
Andy Ross became a well trained philosopher but he kept asking why. It took him years to find out. As a baby boomer his soul was more seared than he expected by the wars of the twentieth century and their bitter aftermath in Britain. He found a way forward in a move to Germany and a new life of service to science and technology.
Gradually, over decades of patient work as well as failed love affairs and times of redemptive clarity, Andy worked out a set of answers to his questions that have universal scope and significance. He has forged a radical new philosophy. Its impact on his personal life has resulted in an often dramatic and finally moving human story.

Matchmaking Through Avatars: Social Aspects of Online Dating
By Violetta Krawczyk-Wasilewska and Andrew Ross
Paper delivered on the panel Shaping virtual lives: identities on the Internet, during 10th Congress of the Société International d'Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF), Lisbon, April 17-21, 2011
PDF: 10 pages, 621 KB

Online dating and gaming with avatars have merged in the new phenomenon of avatar dating. Since online dating is a big and growing industry, gaming technology is still advancing rapidly, and avatar dating is popular with young players, the phenomenon is likely to grow in importance in future. This paper explores the advantages and disadvantages of this new form of dating and relates the findings to previous work in social psychology.

GLOBORG
Interviewing Andy Ross
By Ivy Cross (a.k.a. Andy Ross)
The Ross Blog, January 2011
PDF: 38 pages, 2.3 MB

Cars replaced horses last century, robots replace humans this century. That claim was all I knew about controversial philosopher Andy Ross and his Globorg ideas before I met him. Globorg is his name for the global organization — G20 summits and all that. In G.O.D. Is Great he argues that Globorg dominion — the GOD in the title — is the biggest news for life on Earth in half a billion years.

Global Dominion
The Ross Blog, June 29, 2010
PDF: 3 pages, 89 KB

The G8 and G20 summits have just wound up their latest meetings in Toronto. No one would say they enact global governance in any politically meaningful sense, any more than we can say United Nations sessions reflect the general will of the human community on planet Earth. But, hey, they're a start. We could do worse. Could we? ... The latest G8 and G20 summits took place in the former British dominion of Canada. Let future GO summits take place in the Globorg dominion of planet Earth.

G.O.D. Is Great
How To Build A Global Organism
The Ross Blog, June 1, 2010
PDF: 90 slides, 2.6 MB

Via technology and globalization we are creating an organization so integrated that it becomes a single living organism — Globorg.

G.O.D. Is Great
How To Build A Global Organism
Ross Verlag, 2010
Paperback, 12.9 x 19.8 cm, 300 pages
ISBN 978-1-452-89792-9

Through our efforts to develop new technology and globalize its industrial application, we humans are working together to create a global organization so integrated that we become parts of a single living organism. Andy Ross calls this organism Globorg. Globorg is the natural culmination of biological evolution on planet Earth. It will embrace humans as living parts. It will include human history within its own history. We are building its brain with the infrastructure of the web and cloud services. We shall identify with Globorg. On a clear day we shall see and act as one. Globorg will have woken up. But first we need to win the war between science and religion. Andy Ross proposes a deeper foundation for a new philosophy of life. This book is a road map from here and now to Globorg. It will open up a new world for smart and ambitious readers.

Avatars 'R' Us
The Ross Blog, January 27, 2010
PDF: 2 pages, 275 KB

Avatar is now number one worldwide, but not because of its reception by the critics. Its meticulous technical details and magical alien ecosystem explain much of its success. Also, the avatar concept tells us something deep about ourselves.

Mindworlds
A Decade of Consciousness Studies
Imprint Academic, 2009
ISBN 978 184540 185 6
352 pages

Understanding consciousness is one of the central scientific challenges of our time. This book presents Andy Ross's recent work and discusses a range of perspectives on the core issues. The chapters are based on texts written for a variety of occasions and audiences. Reading them in order, one senses a growing clarity in the articulation of the new ideas, some of which are deep and rather subtle, and glimpses the outlines of a dynamic field. Ross has taken pains to unify the collection and make the main thread clearly visible. His new ideas are of fundamental importance, and readers who grapple with them should gain insight that amply rewards the effort.

A Strategy For Cost Efficient Distributed Data Storage For In-Memory OLAP
Olga Mordvinova, Oleksandr Shepil, Thomas Ludwig, and Andrew Ross
Proceedings IADIS International Conference Applied Computing 2009,
Rome, Italy, November 19-21, 2009, pages 109-117
PDF: 9 pages, 290 KB

Abstract. With the availability of inexpensive blade servers featuring 32 GB or more of main memory, memory-based engines such as the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator are coming into widespread use for online analytic processing (OLAP) of terabyte data volumes. Data storage for such engines is often implemented in standard storage technologies like storage area network (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS) with high hardware costs. Given the access pattern, storage costs can be reduced by using a distributed persistence layer based on commodity architecture. We discuss an example of an in-memory OLAP engine with a focus on storage architecture. We then present an implementation of a distributed persistence layer that is optimized for the access pattern of such engines. Finally, we show the cost-saving potential and discuss the performance impact compared to SAN systems.

Godblogs
On Religion from Sam Harris to Bede Griffiths
Draft preprint, 2009
PDF: 266 pages, 1.1 MB

This book is based on a lot of old blogs about religion and related themes. The blogs were first posted on the web in 2007 and 2008. I have added value to my efforts by stitching them together with interlocutions to form a running conversation and tidying them up editorially for the record. The result is a web-age reincarnation of a classical Socratic dialog.

Contents: Introduction, God and Sam Harris, God and Others, God and I, God and Bede Griffiths, Panpsychism, Panpsychology, References

SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator
SAP Press Essentials 42
260 pages (2008)
ISBN 978-1-59229-192-2
Reading sample: PDF, 41 pages, 3 MB

This SAP PRESS Essentials book is your A-to-Z guide to understanding, setting up, and operating the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator. After summarizing the business case for the BI accelerator and reviewing its overall impact and architecture, the author provides detailed advice on all administrative tasks such as: setting up and configuring the system, building and maintaining the indexes, cloning the software onto new blades, updating the TREX engine, and much more. A substantial chapter is dedicated to advanced administration and should boost your confidence if you need to repair the RFC connection, reorganize the index landscape, check and rebuild indexes, recover the system from a backup, or collaborate with SAP experts. A further chapter looks at scalability, new developments, and success stories, and a final technical chapter introduces the novel technology behind the BI accelerator.

Reducing Outer Joins
Coauthor: Gerhard Hill
VLDB Journal: The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases, 18(3), 599-610 (2009)
DOI 10.1007/s00778-008-0110-5

Abstract. We present a method for transforming some outer joins to inner joins and describe a generalized semijoin reduction technique. The first part of the paper shows how to transform a given outer join query whose join graph is a tree to an equivalent inner join query. The method uses derived relations and join predicates. Derived relations contain columns corresponding to join conditions and may have virtual row identifiers, rows and attribute values. The constructed inner join query, after elimination of virtual row identifiers, has the same join tuples as the outer join query. Both the theoretical maximum number of virtual rows and the average number in practice are shown to be low. The method confines consideration of the non-associativity of outer joins to a single step. The second part of the paper generalizes to outer joins the well known technique of semijoin reduction of inner joins. It does so by defining the notions of influencing and needing, and using them to define full reduction and reduction plans. The technique is applied here to perform one step of the method presented in the first part. Semijoin reduction is useful in practice for executing join queries in distributed databases.

Business Beyond Boundaries
From Landscape Visions to SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator
University of Trier, June 16, 2008
PDF: 60 slides, 13.5 MB

Hitting on Consciousness
Honderich Versus McGinn
JCS 15(1), 109-128 (2008)
PDF: 20 pages, 125 KB

Ted Honderich, 74, formerly Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at the University of London, recently published a short book on consciousness (Honderich, 2004). Colin McGinn, 57, his former colleague at University College London and now a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, Florida, reviewed it (McGinn, 2007a). The review is quite long and detailed, but the first sentences set the tone. ...

Der Einfluss der Datenverteilung auf die Performanz eines Data Warehouse
(mit T. Legler, W. Lehner)
12. Fachtagung Datenbanksysteme für Business, Technologie und Web, Aachen (2007)
PDF: 12 pages, 63 KB

Abstract: Dieses Papier befasst sich mit einer Studie über die Optimierungsmöglichkeiten von Anfragen auf verteilten DW-Architekturen mittels verschiedenartiger Verteilungsstrategien der beteiligten Tabellen am Beispiel SAP NetWeaver BI.

Will Robots See Humans as Dinosaurs?
JCS 13(12), 97-104 (2006)
PDF: 8 pages, 68 KB

The JCS report on the ASSC10 conference at St Anne’s College, Oxford, in June 2006, by Claude Pasquini (2006) was delightfully evocative of a delightful conference. But I was startled to read this dramatic paragraph ...

Data Mining with the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator
(with T. Legler, W. Lehner)
Proceedings VLDB 2006
PDF: 10 pages, 543 KB

Abstract. The new SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator is an engine that supports online analytical processing. It performs aggregation in memory and in query runtime over large volumes of structured data. This paper first briefly describes the accelerator and its main architectural features, and cites test results that indicate its power. Then it describes in detail how the accelerator may be used for data mining. The accelerator can perform data mining in the same large repositories of data and using the same compact index structures that it uses for analytical processing. A first such implementation of data mining is described and the results of a performance evaluation are presented. Association rule mining in a distributed architecture was implemented with a variant of the BUC iceberg cubing algorithm. Test results suggest that useful online mining should be possible with wait times of less than 60 seconds on business data that has not been preprocessed.

Omniscience
Life, the Universe and Everything
September 2006
PDF: 24 slides, 171 KB

Blinded by the Light
Response to de Quincey
JCS 13(4), 32-33 (2006)
PDF: 1 page, 68 KB

Christian de Quincey sees light as a metaphor for consciousness. He posits a scale of consciousness running from total darkness to cosmic enlightenment. ...

About Time
January 2006
PDF: 16 pages, 175 KB

Abstract. This essay is an exercise in scientific metaphysics. Its aim is to sketch a unified account of time that both works in modern physics and makes sense in psychology. The raw materials for the sketch come from elementary logic and set theory. The experience of time flow is seen as a direct manifestation of a fundamental physical process. The ontology and epistemology of this experience can provide a foundation for psychology. If the physical sciences in their present form depict "the view from nowhere" onto reality, the new foundation can depict the view from anywhere.

Speed, Scalability and Flexibility All at Once
SAP Insider, 4 (2005)
PDF: 4 pages, 583 KB

SAP NetWeaver 2004s Business Intelligence (BI) is faster than ever before, accelerated by a massively boosted capability for high performance analytics (HPA) humming behind the familiar BI frontends. ...

Roads to Reality
Penrose and Wolfram Compared
JCS 12(2), 78-83 (2005)
PDF: 6 pages, 65 KB

Sir Roger Penrose, retired professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford and collaborator with Stephen Hawking on black hole theory, has written 'a complete guide to the laws of the universe' called The Road to Reality. ...

Mindworlds
Consciousness and Related Studies
Ross (2004)

Consciousness is hard to understand. The ongoing attempt to understand it is perhaps the central scientific challenge of our time. The 1990s were dubbed the Decade of the Brain, and we made huge advances, but the core mystery of consciousness remains. As a young student of scientific philosophy, I had a lot of deep ideas about how the mind related to reality but lacked the patience to follow them through. Despairing of the glacial tempo of academic life and the pompous opacity of its rituals, I chose to cut loose for a while and decided fiction was a valid vehicle for thinking out loud. Over the last decade, I have learned to appreciate anew the value of more method in the scientific study of consciousness. This book is primarily a presentation of work in progress, but also a log of my return to science.

Purpose in Life and Science
The Power of Purpose Awards
May 2004
PDF: 4 pages, 110 KB

As I look at my face in the bathroom mirror, I see an uneven pulp of ageing flesh around two beady eyes. My stare becomes hypnotic and the flesh seems to melt. I see a spectral zombie face shimmering behind two black holes. The holes glaze over and I get dizzy. Who am I, where is this, why does it go on? ...

Business at the Speed of Evolution
Internal Auditing and Business Risk 27(12), 12 (2003)
PDF: 1 page, 64 KB

If internal auditors and chief executives only assess IT projects by their impact on the bottom line, they are missing the point. Andy Ross explains how a new world view is needed to see the full picture.

A Photonic Theory of Consciousness
Prague, Czech Republic, July 2003
PDF: 60 slides, 3.3 MB

The Self: From Soul to Brain
A New York Academy of Sciences Conference
JCS 10(2), 67-85 (2003)
PDF: 19 pages, 104 KB

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine is an imposing monument to the wealth and power of scientific medicine. Set on its own block in upper Manhattan, its rhetorical centre is the Stern Auditorium. Here, just over a year after 9/11, a group of gurus and self-seekers assembled to confer on the nature of the self. I was there too, looking for help in constructing a grand unified theory of soul and brain. ...

First-Person Consciousness
Honderich and McGinn Reviewed
JCS 9(7), 55-82 (2002)
PDF: 28 pages, 191 KB

A nice everyday conception of consciousness is as autobiography. Ongoing experience is stored and restructured as a personal narrative, and consciousness is the generic mental state that accompanies this lifelong cognitive activity. On the higher scale of human cultural achievement, the literary form of autobiography brings this form of consciousness to a natural zenith. From this perspective, it is a happy coincidence that two distinguished philosophers of consciousness have recently published philosophical autobiographies. ...

Mindworlds
How Set Theory and Quantum Physics Can Give Us a Scientific Concept of Consciousness
Tucson, Arizona, April 8-12, 2002
PDF: 40 slides, 3.5 MB

Mindworlds
How Set Theory and Quantum Physics Can Give Us a Scientific Concept of Consciousness
March 2002
PDF: 162 slides, 7 MB

The Miph of Consciousness
The Mathematics, Informatics, and Physics of Consciousness and Its Place in Nature
Skövde, Sweden, August 7-11, 2001
PDF: 85 slides, 2 MB

Consciousness: A Logical Model
Consciousness is not personal but subjective. The subject structures an input stream of qualia into a dynamic unity. The unity synthesizes an evolving series of centered virtual worlds that represent pairwise contradictory epistemic and ontic states. Each world is symmetric relative to alternative possible successors. The proposed model is platform independent and can support personal identity.
Tucson, Arizona, April 10-15, 2000
PDF: 28 pages, 227 KB

Lifeball
Birth of a New God
Ross (1996)
Paperback,15.6 cm x 23.4 cm,  432 pages

We are not alone. And we are not the end of the line. Aliens from other star systems will find us one day. And our own machines will one day overtake us. Or both — at once.

Jon Christie knew this. Androids and aliens didn't faze a computer jock with a CIA past. But even he was unprepared for the sudden, combined impact of these threats when he traveled to Japan in the summer of 2013 ...

The Globall Hyperatlas
A Development Proposal
The Visual Computer 8, 1-7 (1991)
PDF: 7 pages, 705 KB

Abstract. A future hardware system designed to support an interactive geographic database is outlined. The basic system is intended for domestic and educational use and extensions of the system are foreseen as serving a wide variety of professional users. The main physical and functional parameters of the system are presented. Possible problems are indicated and development goals are suggested. The aim of the paper is to initiate a detailed and informed discussion about how such a system may be developed.