Glimpses of the websurfing habits of a computer science professor, obsessive crafter, occasional gamer, and all around geek
So, seems that iRobot has come full circle, taken one of their high power industrial robots, and now attached a vacuum to it; specifically they have modded a Warrier to have an industrial vacuum attached to it to clean up radioactive dirt and debris at the Fukushima plant. Follow the link for video – go little robot, go!
I am awed by the magnitude of the video streaming task UrtheCast is taking on in intending to stream live HD video from cameras on the ISS. Even though it creeps me out a bit (1.1 meter resolution is pretty good!) I’ll be keeping my eye on this project and how it proceeds. I’m curious if there will be pressure to not show live footage of every region or if governments will press to have some regions blocked from public view. I can’t tell if they intend to make a profit on this project or not – I don’t see … Continue reading Streaming Urthe
In the further disappearance of the concept of anonymity, statistical analysis allows individuals’ marks on bubble forms to be identified as corresponding to the same person. That is, someone’s marks on a bubble form can be used to identify them the same way handwriting might (though it still seems with less accuracy). We learn that filling in your bubbles thoroughly and completely is probably the best way to stay anonymous. The shocker here of course is that a small little mark – filling in a circle – can be unique across a sample of almost 100 surveys. It did bring … Continue reading Fill-in-the-Bubble Anonymity
This is just the latest article I have seen about Peter Thiel’s scholarships to students to develop entrepreneurial ideas instead of going to college, motivated by a belief that college is not serving these students well. Listening to the interview and things he has actually said elsewhere, I think that Thiel is focusing on a very small set of students – highly motivated students with specific ideas for projects they would like to take on – and he is saying that these students ought to be encouraged to take a chance on those ideas. I have no issue with the … Continue reading Thoughts on Thiel and the value of college
If you hang out in logic/math/education/psychology circles (as one so often does….) you’ve run into the Wason selection task – give people four cards, each with a destination on one side and a mode of transportation on the other and ask them to flip over all and only the cards necessary to ensure that the scenario described doesn’t involve someone violating the ruled “If you travel to Boston, you take a plane.” The general point is that people are bad (really, epically bad….) at propositional calculus and inference. Bruce Schneier wrote recently on an interesting twist I hadn’t come across … Continue reading Also a reasonable test for psychopaths
Spring break included finally finishing one of my books-in-progress, Eon by Greg Bear. In retrospect, this was probably not worthwhile. Eon is a mid-eighties sci fi novel set in 2005, when a mysterious asteroid/interstellar spacecraft arrives at Earth at the same time as geopolitical pressures push Earth towards global nuclear war. My concern was not with the timeliness of the plot, though. The book centers around a presumption of technologies to manipulate space-time and reach alternate universes. This would be fine, but a book of this sort needs to decide either to assert that such technologies exist and leave it … Continue reading Review: Eon by Greg Bear
This is mostly a note-to-self that I need to watch this documentary on the “female computers of WWII”. Their excerpt alone is interesting, and poking around the site it seems that the film looks at Mauchly’s project and how these women became not just computing machines themselves but then ENIAC programmers. If it is any good it could be a great complement to the Campbell-Kelly and Aspray book we teach in IT & Society.
I will admit I was only partially watching the NHL All-Stars game today, but my mouth was hanging open during the second intermission when they unleashed the joint project between Stan Lee and the NHL: The Guardian Project. I don’t know if I’m just behind on hearing about this, but it is utterly bizarre. Who in the world thinks that what hockey teams need are cartoon superheros based on their team names? Given that the sport is about competition between the teams, why is the story line being created seemingly that all these team heroes are going to band together … Continue reading Save us Penguin! You’re our only hope!
Following up on a recent post, there are more people looking at pros and cons of reading difficulty. The question is being asked about E-readers now – do those wonderfully easy to read screens actually result in us retaining less information? More of those dots are connected in this article, though it seems like the studies to test the question remain to be done. While not entirely the same thing, I also am being tempted by a new book, Typography for Lawyers, wherein research on the persuasive and emotional impact of various fonts is discussed and recommendations for fonts, layout, … Continue reading Underline Shadow Strikethrough
A couple of thoughts on motivation and procrastination for your Monday… Working hurts less that procrastinating, we fear the twinge of starting “Thanks to hyperbolic discounting (i.e., weighting values in inverse proportion to their temporal distance) the instant pain of disengaging from an Internet article and paying a prefrontal override cost, can outweigh the slightly more distant (minutes in the future, rather than seconds) pain of continuing to procrastinate, which is, once again, usually more painful than being in the middle of doing the work.” where’s my motivation from pictures for sad children