Orangutans Use Tablets To Chat With Friends In Other Zoos
Bored orangutans enjoy using iPads to video chat with their fellow kind in other zoos – it seems that we’re all just monkeys poking at the glowing screens we’ve been given by our handlers. Via Popular Science:
Orangutans living in captivity will soon start using iPads for primate play-dates, using Skype or FaceTime to interact with their brethren in other zoos, according to zookeepers. The great apes have been playing with iPads for about six months at the Milwaukee County Zoo, and they’ve been such a hit that other zoos plan to introduce them, too.
The “Apps for Apes” program started after a zookeeper commented online about getting some iPads for her gorilla charges. Someone donated a used iPad, and it turned out the gorillas didn’t care for it. But the orangutans loved it.
Seeing the primates with iPads has an effect on zoo visitors, according to Richard Zimmerman, who directs Orangutan Outreach: “They…
The Evils Of A World Filled With Touchscreens
All signs point to our heading towards a future in which we will exist surrounded by software-enabled touchscreens. Why this could be a grave mistake, via Slate:
What touchscreens lack is something called affordance — an object’s built-in ability to tell you how it works. A doorknob affords turning. The button on a car stereo affords pushing. A touchscreen affords nothing. It relies on software for any affordance, which in turn relies on total immersion for the user.
What we want, apparently, is to surround ourselves with touchscreens of varying size—tiny ones in our pockets, medium-size models for our laps and dashboards, and massive versions for our walls. We want tomorrow’s vintage shops to be lined with identical, blank, anonymous slabs. We want things to be vessels for software, and nothing more. Immersion is a fantastic quality while flicking virtual birds at digital pigs in your smartphone. Immersion at 80 mph is…
Laptop Wi-Fi Said to Nuke Sperm …?
Reports Reuters via Yahoo News:
The digital age has left men’s nether parts in a squeeze, if you believe the latest science on semen, laptops and wireless connections. In a report in the venerable medical journal Fertility and Sterility, Argentinian scientists describe how they got semen samples from 29 healthy men, placed a few drops under a laptop connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi and then hit download.
Four hours later, the semen was, eh, well-done. A quarter of the sperm were no longer swimming around, for instance, compared to just 14 percent from semen samples stored at the same temperature away from the computer.
And nine percent of the sperm showed DNA damage, three-fold more than the comparison samples. The culprit? Electromagnetic radiation generated during wireless communication, say Conrado Avendano of Nascentis Medicina Reproductiva in Cordoba and colleagues.
The Golden Age Of Female Computer Programmers
Via the blog of software developers Fog Creek, a look at the forgotten history of women programmers, and the strange ways in which different work fields are labeled as “male” or female”:
Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong.
In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984.
In fact, for a hot second back in the mid-sixties, computer programming was actually portrayed as women’s work by the mass media. Check out “The Computer Girls” from the April 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. It…
Microsoft Shows What The Future Will Look Like
Microsoft has released this “positive” (hear the cheery music?) thought-exercise short film titled “Productivity Future Video” which shows “how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go.”
It’s an affluent, depressing world in which every surface has been turned into a screen with notifications telling you what do or think, interpersonal relations have completely atrophied, and emotions and sensation are muted as one is shuttled between airports, hotels, and other highly-planned spaces. Just wait until everything around you, the walls and the floor the table, is a Microsoft product with malfunctioning software.
Steve Jobs Has Died
Wow, AP just reported and go to the Apple homepage to confirm. In case anyone doesn’t know, he was battling cancer for years. In terms of significance aside from the human, Apple is considered to have more cash than the U.S. government.
“Death… is Life’s Change Agent”
Face Substitution In Realtime
On the internet you can be whomever you wish to be — it gets truer every day. In the future, when video-chatting, the first step will be to pick which face you want to use:
Supercomputer Predicts Revolution
OK, so it predicted Egypt and Libya – how about the United States? From BBC News:
Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events, according to US research.
A study, based on millions of articles, charted deteriorating national sentiment ahead of the recent revolutions in Libya and Egypt.
While the analysis was carried out retrospectively, scientists say the same processes could be used to anticipate upcoming conflict.
The system also picked up early clues about Osama Bin Laden’s location.
Kalev Leetaru, from the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, presented his findings in the journal First Monday.
[continues at BBC News]
Using A 30-Year-Old Computer For Today’s Functions
In PCWorld, Benj Edwards explains how he booted up a dusty 1981 IBM 5150 and attempted to perform typical 21st century computing duties on it. The 5150 fared pretty well at most essential tasks, including lolcat browsing (below left) and Twitter (below right). The lesson being, perhaps, that we should try to do more with less? And that today’s consumer-market computers can’t hold a candle to classic models in regards to appearance and style. The old ones even have ports for hooking up cassette tape players:
Despite the malfunctioning RAM, the machine seemed to work well. The 5150 contains, as the Apple II did, a full version of BASIC in ROM that loads right up if you don’t boot from a disk.
Targeted mostly at computers without floppy drives (the lowest-priced 5150 sold with 16KB of RAM and no drives), this version of BASIC could save programs only to cassette tapes.
…
Algorithms Control The World
A graphical expression on Euclid's algorithm using example with 1599 and 650. Source: Swfung8 (CC)
Jane Wakefield explains for BBC News:
If you were expecting some kind warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again.
There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements.
In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.
Their weapon of choice – the algorithm.
Behind every smart web service is some even smarter web code. From the web retailers – calculating what books and films we might be interested in, to Facebook’s friend finding and image tagging services, to the search engines that guide us around the net.
It is these invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world.
At last month’s TEDGlobal conference, algorithm expert Kevin…
The Banks Of Today, As Predicted In 1969
“The system could eventually make cash entirely redundant.” A prescient episode of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World from 1969 looks at the novel arrival of computers to the world of banking. The outlook is more complex than mere rose-colored techno-utopianism.
Get A Bot To Live As You Online
rep.licants.org enables you to hand over control of your Facebook or Twitter account to a bot that simulates your speech patterns, personality, and interests. Your online friendships and connections will be maintained and even enriched and expanded, while you get to play outside in the sunshine:
rep.licants.org is a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users.
Social networks are the first medium showing the social success of a person via a statistical way (eg number of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter). For many users, reaching the hoped-for success can become a tough and difficult task. Especially when some human factors such as shyness, introversion or personal worth are present.
The bot does…
Facebook And The Destruction Of Innocence In Computing
The computer history blog ASCII lays out the meaning of Facebook in the grand scheme of things:
Facebook is the third of what is probably a quartet (or quintet) of the destruction of the innocence of computing. First was viruses, second was malware, third is facebook. I suspect fourth will be related to control of networking itself, and fifth will be licensing of high level computer ability. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Facebook is a living computer nightmare. Just as viruses took the advantages of sharing information on floppies and modems and revealed a devastating undercarriage to the whole process, making every computer transaction suspect… and just as spyware/malware took advantage of beautiful advances in computer strength and horsepower to turn your beloved machine of expression into a gatling gun of misery and assholery… Facebook now stands as taking over a decade and a half of the dream of the World…
Can AI-Powered Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans?
A technology CEO sees game artificial intelligence as the key to a revolution in education, predicting a synergy where games create smarter humans who then create smarter games.
Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Alex Peake, founder of Primer Labs, sees the possibility of a self-fueling feedback loop which creates “a Moore’s law for artificial intelligence,” with accelerating returns ultimately generating the best possible education outcomes.
“What the computer taught me was that there was real muggle magic …” writes Peake. And he reaches a startling conclusion.
“Once we begin relying on AI mentors for our children and we get those mentors increasing in sophistication at an exponential rate, we’re dipping our toe into symbiosis between humans and the AI that shape them.
How To Destroy Your Laptop In A Pinch
Attention cyber criminals, subversives, and ne’er-do-wells: place this handy sticker in the correct spot on your computer, just in case. Via DesignTaxi:
Your laptop, with all its sensitive data and/or ill-gotten gains, is about to be confiscated by the authorities, who are banging on the door. There’s no time to reformat it—you’ve got to destroy it, fast. This sticker will help you do just that, provided you’ve a drill by your side. (And which self-respecting cyber criminal wouldn’t?)
Meant to be placed directly above your laptop’s hard disk, the sticker sports a crosshair with which you can accurately destroy any digital evidence the cops are after.
Randy Sarafan, who created the stickers, advises to “research the build of your laptop and locate the position of your hard drive…The hard drive should look like a rectangular box with a centered circle somewhere upon it,” he said.
Stick the sticker’s drill guide slightly off center of…
Social Networking Surpasses Porn As Top Internet Activity
“My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”
Reuters claims that social media has overtaken porn as the primary reason for having an internet connection. (My advice: If you want to make a fortune, figure out a good way of combining the two.)
Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, has analyzed information for over 10 million web users to conclude that one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.
He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.
“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the…
Pentagon To Consider Cyberattacks As Act Of War
David E. Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller write in the New York Times reports:
The Pentagon, trying to create a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks on the United States, plans to issue a new strategy soon declaring that a computer attack from a foreign nation can be considered an act of war that may result in a military response.
Several administration officials, in comments over the past two years, have suggested publicly that any American president could consider a variety of responses — economic sanctions, retaliatory cyberattacks or a military strike — if critical American computer systems were ever attacked.
The new military strategy, which emerged from several years of debate modeled on the 1950s effort in Washington to come up with a plan for deterring nuclear attacks, makes explicit that a cyberattack could be considered equivalent to a more traditional act of war. The Pentagon is declaring that any computer attack that threatens widespread civilian…
Video: Are We Training Kids To Believe That Total Surveillance Is Normal?
Via TED Talks, Cory Doctorow discusses how parents’ and schools’ constant and total monitoring of kids’ internet usage and conversations trains young people to accept a complete lack of privacy, and total disclosure of their lives, as normal and good. Are today’s parents raising their children in a manner that plays into the hands of Big Brother?
The Gadgets We Never Heard Of
Did you know that the iPod is basically a ripoff of a German transistor radio from the 1950s? Via the Atlantic, selections from Bill Buxton’s collection of little-known gadgets (such as early touchscreen devices, the first robotic chess game, and a “mindblowing Casio watch from 1984″) which sadly are in the secret dustbin of history:
