Category: Technology

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Singularity University GSP

The Singularity University is crazy. I like crazy. If I were a grad student with copious time on my hands (trust me, in comparison, you have copious time, dear GradStudent) I’d apply to attend the Singularity University summer school:

SU’s Graduate Studies Program (GSP) is a 10-week summer program (June 19 through August 28) located at NASA Ames Research Park in Silicon Valley. The program is for top graduate and postgraduate students worldwide to learn about the various exponentially growing cross-disciplinary technologies (biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, artificial intelligence, robotics, medicine, etc.). The inaugural 2009 class was limited to 40 students. The 2010 class will have a program size of approximately 80 students.

Note that unless next year’s class is 160 students, SU will be considered a failure (of the polynomial kind?)

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More Human Than a Human

A while back I posted a short, hopefully jocular, note about the machine learning algorithm for catching card counters at blackjack. Here is a more substantial article about the system. I wonder if systems like these will find use outside of gambling: anywhere an employee performs a repeated physical task (think a grocery store clerk?) and the company want to catch the errors. Boy those jobs are going to stink it up kind of rotten: “Johnny, if you make one more computer detected error tomorrow at the check stand, we’re going to have to let you go!” Is it better to be fired by a computer or by a human?

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Science Fiction Prototyping

Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write–always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a “consumer experience architect” in the Digital Home – User Experience Group at Intel. Okay that is a bit odd for a typical seminar speaker, but still lies in the “reasonable” range. And then you find out the title of his talks is “Brain Machines: Robots, Free Will and Fictional Prototyping as a Tool for AI Design” and you say, whah? Which is exactly what a group of about forty of us said upon hearing about this seminar, and is exactly why we showed up to hear the talk!
Continue reading “Science Fiction Prototyping”

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I Am Poor the iPhone App

I Am Poor, the $0.99 iPhone app:

The mac & cheese, Ramen noodles, and tuna is my artistic rendition of what poor college students eat with their limited funds.
The icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this.
But, we all would like to get a little richer so tapping on the info button will let you read on old classic by P.T. Barnum called ‘Art of Money Getting’ to give you some sage advice to help you increase your wealth.
Barnums “Golden Rules for Making Money” found in ‘Art of Money Getting’ will pay for ‘I Am Poor’ many times over.

h/t @ravenme (Apparently it took over 11 months to get approved on the iTunes store.)

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Google Wave

Catch the wave. Long but worth watching:I suspect that collaboration will never be the same after the wave.
Another observation is about gadgets and iphone apps. One beauty of iphone apps is how easy it is to write one. This has always been true of many gadgets (like gadgets for google’s homepage.) But the later has always suffered, it seems to, in a lack of functionality. I think wave might push this problem in a very positive direction (see for example the yes/no/maybe widget.) Further having things server side is also allows for a sort of gadgetology with a large amount of power, which I really like.

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Life Sized Katamari Controller

Katamari Damacy is a very cool game, if for no other reason than it is a game in which “scale” changes. The basic idea is that you roll a ball around which picks up objects that aren’t too big for the ball and then the ball grows. Usually you are racing a clock to make your ball big enough. I know, I know, it sounds crazy, but it’s highly addictive.
But this, this is way cool. A controller for the game which is….a big shiny metal ball:

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Thoughts on Lazowska's Seattle Comments

Over at TechFlash there is an article about some words Ed Lazowska, professor extraordinaire here in the computer science & engineering department at UW, had for the Seattle tech scene (see also xconomy):

“It seems to me that the issue with this state is that we are one big happy family in which everybody is doing extremely well. Everyone’s college program is above average. And everyone’s company is above average. And everyone’s venture fund is above average. And if you go a little bit more above average than the next guy, then they get all Dirty Harry and whack you down. It is a state of Whack-a-Mole…. I worry that those who excel, and excel honestly, aren’t celebrated in this state.”

and

“We think of ourselves as being in the innovation big leagues, where in fact we are in the minors compared to those who are in the really big leagues like Boston and the Bay Area,” said Lazowska, who cited the recent bizjournals report showing that Seattle ranks fifth as a technology hub.

(though that study is whack. Washington D.C. at number 2? L.A. not in the top ten?)
Now I’m just an outsider to the tech scene (and nothing I say here should be construed as ever being endorsed, associated with, or even vaguely connected to my employer, the University of Washington), but I can think of at least one very good reason that Seattle is behind Boston and the Bay Area: its university system. Now, the University of Washington is a great university, our medical school is superb, and there are quite a few rather good departments across campus, but….
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Kindle DX Drooool

I’ve not had a chance to play with a Kindle, but seen a lot of them in the coffee shops of Seattle (Amazon will soon be moving to a neighborhood very close to mine, in South Lake Union.) My first impression was: cool, but a bit small. Now here comes the Kindle DX with a 9.7″ display and better integrated PDF. Now if Amazon will just offer an easy method for connecting to the arXiv, and I can scrounge up $500 bucks (can I put a Kindle on one of my grants?), I might think of getting one. One question I couldn’t find an answer to was whether one could use the “basic web browser” in the Kindle DX to download PDFs.

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arXiview: A New iPhone App for the arXiv

Over 9 months ago I decided to apply for teaching tenure track jobs. Then the economy took what can best be described as a massive, ill-aimed, swan dive. Thus creating an incredible amount of stress in my life. So what does a CS/physics research professor do when he’s stress? The answer to that question is available on the iTunes app store today: arXiview. What better way to take out stress and at the same time learn objective C and write an iPhone app that at least one person (yourself) will use?
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