Technology

At least they’re not using GTA as a data source

By AMH

MIT’s Media Lab wants you to help crowd-source solutions to the Trolley Problem as a decision-making data set for self-driving cars. This is exciting news, because asking the internet to solve tricky moral dilemmas using binary decision making will surely reflect our societal values accurately. Putting aside snarky skepticism, I had the following thoughts as I went through a judging session: Having to pick one of these options without any “it depends” or “I don’t want to choose” selection got uncomfortable fast. After a few scenarios I started to question the definiteness of the outcomes. How is there equal certainty that plowing straight ahead through four … Continue reading At least they’re not using GTA as a data source

Getting to Effective Ed-Tech

By AMH

This Chronicle article discussing the Jefferson Education incubator at University of Virginia has been rolling around in my head the past couple of days as I’ve been part of a number of conversations about education, computing, and classroom technology. The problem Jefferson Education says they are setting out to solve is that the ed-tech industry is light on efficacy research for the technologies they are selling, and “”universally, everyone thinks it’s not their fault or not their problem” that the research isn’t a bigger part of the purchasing equation.” So their group will study “the political, financial, and structural barriers that keep companies … Continue reading Getting to Effective Ed-Tech

Beautiful Lumino City

By AMH

I try out many more games than I finish – even when they’re short – from a combination of lack of attention span and lack of skill. So it stands out to me when I finish a game of more than trivial length. This weekend I played through the end of Lumino City and I can say with confidence that I would have finished this one off even without a snowstorm keeping me inside. The major selling point of Lumino City, which of itself is enough to make it worthwhile, is the artwork. The scenes in the game are entirely … Continue reading Beautiful Lumino City

User Tracking Apps

By AMH

There’s an interesting story out there about ads that play ultrasonic sounds that permit cross-device tracking. While this is being described as detecting devices that all belong to one user, it seems possible it would sometimes detect devices all belonging to the same family – a slightly different task but also one marketers are interested in solving. It likely depends on where and how frequently these linking ultrasonic sounds are emitted. And, as I’ve seen others note and is alluded to late in this article, the SilverPush software development kit that is largely being credited for current implementations of this technique … Continue reading User Tracking Apps

Security/Learning Linkdump

By AMH

I’ve accumulated a big collection of links this summer that are roughly related to security and/or machine learning and mostly connected to personal identification or human characteristics that I’m intending to share with my senior students when they return to campus in a few weeks. Having just noticed quite how large the collection has grown, it seems kind to pull them together into a semi-organized structure, as compared to my original plan of hitting send on an email filled with URLs, for their sake as well as my own. Taken together, it’s a nice little reading list. How your smartphone’s battery life … Continue reading Security/Learning Linkdump

Robots are great but where will I put all my stuff?

By AMH

I was catching up on some podcasts on a recent roadtrip and listened to an interesting two-part series on vehicle automation from 99% Invisible: Episode 170: Children of the Magenta which looks at the effect of fly-by-wire and airplane flight automation on flight safety and Episode 171: Johnnycab on automotive automation. Overall, the two episodes focus on the “automation paradox”, roughly the idea that as we automate more, we reduce our capability to deal with problems when automation fails. So, if automated cars become the norm, for the first stretch of time, essentially all drivers will still have experience driving … Continue reading Robots are great but where will I put all my stuff?

Exercising my writing muscle

By AMH

I was flipping through Spolsky’s Joel on Software today and, perhaps because I spent the morning working with our college-wide curriculum and some of our documentation of its outcomes, this passage jumped out at me: So why don’t people write specs? It’s not to save time, because it doesn’t, and I think most coders recognize this. […] I think it’s because so many people don’t like to write. Staring at a blank screen is horribly frustrating. Personally, I overcame my fear of writing by taking a class in college that required a 3-5 page essay once a week. Writing is … Continue reading Exercising my writing muscle

Rescue Robots in the News

By AMH

This semester my intro programming students are doing a very scaled down model of how search-and-rescue robots might very stupidly explore a space while trying to keep themselves from clumping up with each other. It’s a first programming course for most of them, so have I mentioned that these simulated robots are very stupid. However, since I’ve been playing around with their project, I seem to be seeing interesting content about search and rescue robots cropping up all over the place: Last week (on April 23rd), there was a great NASA JPL livestream of a talk on Rescue Robots focusing … Continue reading Rescue Robots in the News

Where’s my plow?

By AMH

The snow situation isn’t as bad here in Western PA as it is on much of the east coast, but while waiting for things to lighten up enough for me to go out and shovel, I’ve been playing around with Pittsburgh’s new snow plow tracker. The system itself is only live while snow is falling – access it through the button on the right. I like the use of the “multiple vehicle” icon to keep things legible when zoomed out. It took me a bit of playing around to realize that if you adjust the “history display” slider at the … Continue reading Where’s my plow?

Lorem ipsum ipsum ipsum lorem

By AMH

“While Google translate may be incorrect in the translations of these words, it’s puzzling why these words would be translated to things such as ‘China,’ ‘NATO,’ and ‘The Free Internet,’” There is so much to love in this exploration of what happens when you feed lorem ipsum text into Google Translate from Krebs on Security (or, at least what used to happen). Automatic translation algorithms, data sparsity problems, covert information channels… A bizarre, must-read article.