Stories tagged computers
Fortran punch card: I remember punching out code on hundreds of these cards.
Courtesy Arnold Reinhold Oct 15, 1956, John W. Backus published a manual explaining a new way to program computers.
“John Backus and his Fortran project members almost single-handedly invented the ideas of both programming languages and (optimizing) compilers as we know them today." Wired
Instead of compiling complex machine code which tooks weeks, Fortran code could be written in hours and was much easier.
I was even able to learn Fortran back in the late 60's. It even satisfied my foreign language requirement!
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Read my lips
Courtesy flickr-rickr
Machine accuracy - 80 %; Humans - 32%
More than half of people over 60 have a hearing loss (I am in that group). The demand for lip reading skills is driving technology. I foresee that we will soon have portable devices that will "read lips" and either show the words on a display or if the person is deaf and blind it could produce tactile symbols (braille) on a touch pad.
A research team from the School of Computing Sciences at UEA compared the performance of a machine-based lip-reading system with that of 19 human lip-readers. They found that the automated system significantly outperformed the human lip-readers – scoring a recognition rate of 80 per cent, compared with only 32 per cent for human viewers on the same task. Science Daily
Better virtual "talking heads", too
By analyzing results of computerized recognition of facial speech patterns, researchers hope to produce better visual speech synthesis. Computer generated "talking heads" are being evaluated to create the most intelligible and visually appealing system.
A memorial statue of Alan Turing
Courtesy Kurt SeebauerThis has been in the news recently, but it didn’t occur to me until just now that it really has a place on Science Buzz.
Alan Turing was an English mathematician, and one of the fathers of computer science. He developed some of the earliest computers, and created the very first designs for a “stored-program” computer (a computer that keeps data and instructions inside of it, as opposed to one that required the operator to input every step.)
He was also interested in artificial intelligence, and proposed an experiment called the Turing test, meant to determine if a machine was truly intelligent. (Basically, a computer that could fool a human into thinking that he or she was talking with another person would pass the Turing test.)
Turing was also a code breaker, which is where the “war hero” part comes in. The day after the United Kingdom entered World War 2, Alan Turing went to work for the Government Code and Cypher School, an organization meant to break enemy codes. At GCCS, Turing and his colleagues developed automatic code breaking machines to decipher the elaborately encrypted messages of the Axis forces.
Turing’s work in collecting German military secrets through code breaking has been said to have shortened WWII by as much as two years, saving thousands of lives.
Alan Turing was also gay, and when he admitted this to the police after his home was broken into, he was charged with “gross indecency,” a law that essentially made homosexuality a criminal offense. Turing was given the choice of going to prison or accepting probation on the condition that he undergo chemical castration. Chemical castration involves the administration of drugs that change the subject’s hormone balance. This can cause the loss of sexual drive, as well as loss of hair, and muscle and bone density.
Two years after his conviction, Alan Turing killed himself.
It was a pretty awful way to treat someone who had contributed so much to the peace and safety of the world, as well as to the revolutionary discipline of computer science. This month the British government finally issued an apology to Alan Turing, acknowledging the scientist’s great contributions to humankind, as well as the shameful way he had been treated by his own government.
So there you go. Let’s not let it happen again.
Sorry, sir: You may not understand it, but it understands you.
Courtesy aNantaBI think there’s a pretty good chance that the robots that control the Internet will censor this, so read fast, Buzzketeers.
Web 3.0, or as I like to call it, “Skynet,” is looming closer than ever today. It’s like a big old thunderhead, gray-black, full of lightning, and bearing down on us from above. Except when Skynet 3.0 gets here we aren’t getting wet, we’re getting turned into the freakin’ Borg. (Although we might also get wet, if there are real clouds around too.) And as cool as it would be to have a drill hand and a laser pointer taped to my head, I don’t think I could stand being any more pale. And so we must fight. For my sake.
This week the blossoming threat is taking the form of cleverer computers. Computers with huge, muscular, brick-breaking vocabularies. Computers that don’t just know all the words—they know what all the words mean. Computers like robotic English majors, except they can also do math and get jobs.
See, a “semantic map” has been developed for computers—a program that would allow a computer to “understand” words based on their tenses and contexts. A direct application of this technology would be in search engines; instead of being limited to searching for exact word matches, the program could look for something based on the meaning of your words. For instance, if I were to type “The terminator learns some bodacious new phrases” into Google’s search engine right now, I’d get a bunch of worthless nonsense returned to me. But with an engine that used a semantic map, I like to think that such a search would return to me with some clips from Terminator 2, in which John Connor is teaching the T101 some useful new phrases like “Hasta la vista,” and “hands off the merch, bro,” and “Cheese it! It’s the fuzz!” I could then post these clips on a science blog.
And that, incidentally, is the only positive scenario I could imagine coming from this technology. If I’m searching for, say, “sexy Easter bunny,” I just wants me some pictures of the Easter bunny in a speedo—I don’t want my computer to actually understand what’s wrong with me. And there’ll be no escaping their powerful understanding. Even this early semantic map is said to have a vocabulary 10 times the size of the average college graduate. That’s, like, super… not good.
There is still hope, however, so relax your little fret glands for a moment. I have a plan, and you already know my plan if you read the heading of this post: invent new words. But keep them to yourself—I wouldn’t underestimate Web 3.0 so much to think that it couldn’t figure out what was going on after a while. Also, be sure to change the definitions of already existing words, and change them often. It will be like linguistic guerilla warfare; a definition could pop up in one spot (word) fire off a couple shots, and then it would be gone, already looking for a new hiding place. Web 3.0 might send an air strike against this whole paragraph, but it won’t matter—by the time the missiles get here, the passage will mean something else entirely. My meaning will be setting up a new camp, hopefully in a stand of old swear words.
Are you with me, folks? I knew I could count on you! Progress won’t get us that easily!
Once more into the breach: We few, we happy few, we band of kitties; for he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my puss-puss.
Courtesy o205billege
The general holds the binoculars up to his eyes and surveys the battlefield. This will be the first test of the new Coordinated Autonomic Tactical force—C.A.T. for short—an army of robot warriors with electronic brains as complex and powerful as a small mammal’s.
The exercise begins, and all goes exactly to plan. The mechanized warriors sweep across the terrain in formation. Faced with unexpected obstacles, they improvise their own solutions. Soon, they are overwhelming the enemy positions.
Suddenly, a squirrel darts across the field. The entire right flank breaks rank to pursue. Corporal Whiskers beings licking himself. Sergeant Buttercup and Lieutenant Muffy begin hissing at each other. Private Snookums climbs a tree and can’t get down.
The general lowers his binoculars. Staring off into the middle distance, he says to his second-in-command, “We may not have thought this through thoroughly.”
A graduate student at MIT has developed software that will help emergency managers plan better, safer, more efficient evacuations.
Sixty years ago today, in Manchester, England, a room-sized computer known affectionately as "Baby" successfully ran its first calculation using 128k of memory, and ushered in the era of the "modern PC".
Back in 1948, Baby's programmers had a whopping 1024 bits of memory available to work with while today's 1 GB DRAM chip can store about 8 billion bits. You do the math. Or just read the story.
A few months back, we reported on a machine that can read the images in your brain. Now comes exciting news of a machine that can read the words you are thinking. Because I know I have just way too much privacy as it is.
3D microchip cooling system: H2O in a cooling container (purple) is pumped through spaces between the chip's layers (orange).
Courtesy IBMIBM scientists in Europe announced this week that they’re working on a 3D stacked microchip that will use water running through tiny micropipes as thin as a human hair to transfer heat away from the circuits.
As integrated circuits get smaller and more sophisticated, cooling becomes a real issue, and so far water-cooling seems to be the most efficient solution.
3D chips have their circuits stacked vertically rather than side-by-side. This allows information to travel much more efficiently between them. But the gain in processing speed also generates a tremendous amount of heat. IBM’s solution is to interweave the chip layers with tiny micropipes that will move water throughout the internal workings and carry the heat elsewhere. Silicon and silicon oxide hermetically seal off the tiny 50 microns-wide pipes from other chip components to prevent against an electrical short.
The water-cooled technology is not a new concept – both IBM and Hewlett-Packard have used the liquid to cool some of their mainframe supercomputers. In fact, just this past April, IBM announced a new supercomputer that cools its processors with water. Here's a video about that.
But the idea is moving now to the desktop PC. (Water-cooled technology has been used in some versions of Apple's Power Mac G5 computer but the microchips were standard configuration, and not arrayed in a three-dimensional vertical formation.)
Scientists from both the IBM Zurich Research Lab and the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin are involved in the project, and the company believes the new micropipe technology could appear in products as early as five years from now.
Various web and computer applications which some guy in Australia things will be really big. (My partner is heavy into Chumby; I think I have too much web access as it is.)
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