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Archive for the 'Science' Tag
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Joseph Weizenbaum is dead
Joseph Weizenbaum died yesterday in Berlin as a result of a stroke at the age of 85.
Throughout his life he has provided many outstanding contributions to computer science and AI. After he created the first banking computer in the world while working for General Electric he took up a position at the MIT as professor for applied and political science. In 1966 he published “ELIZA” – his best know work – and the first computer program demonstrating natural language processing. His academic contributions include the creation of the SLIP (symmetric List Processor) programming language and research on pointers, list structures and garbage collection schemes.
Over the years he also became one of the strongest critics of computer science and a society that blindly believes into technology. His influential book “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation” displayed his grown ambivalence towards computer technology. Many concepts from this book have by now become common understandings like, for example, how programmers are seen by society or his critics of the promises by AI.
In one of his last mails “Joseph Weizenbaum” wrote: (translated from German)
“…our death is the last service we can provide to the world: Would we not go out of the way the following generations would not need to re-create human culture. Culture would become fixed, unchangeable and die. And with the death of culture humanity would also perish…“
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Games / Multi-touch screens: The Fentix Cube
We came across the name Andrew Fentem a few times when we did research on multi-touch screens the last years. The Fentix Cube one of his most recent work is the first cubic multi-touchscreen games platform. In the video clip below the Fentix Cube has been programmed to emulate a Rubik’s cube puzzle…
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Video: Morpho Towers
A interesting video showing the beauty of science within an installation with ferrofluids and magnetic fields…
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Science: Nanotechnology barcodes to identify biological weapons
You might still remember the scene from the movie “Blade Runner” when Harrison Ford with the help of a chemist and the serial number on microscopic scale finds out what type of material he is looking at. It seems we got just one step closer to be able to do something similar today. Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) recently developed a novel bio-sensing platform that uses engineered nanowires for biochemical tests…
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Advertising: Career in Computer Science
Besides the “cool” skateboarder meeting girl and having a good time plot this video is full of great and potentially not so far away gadgets. MS Research is using the short film to get young people interested in a career in Computer Science. We really liked the flying personal robot but what is awesome and most likely to happen very soon is the data transfer visualization on the virtual computer table in the cafe…
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BBC: Horizon – most of our universe is missing
Another great documentary from the “BBC science series”. This 50 minutes movie is explaining the fundamentals of gravity, astrophysics, galaxies, dark matter, and dark energy. It is also the story of a controversy in science based on observation supporting a theory that has yet to be experimentally or conclusively proven…
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