Should computer scientists have a conscience

A recent article in The Atlantic titled The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists argues that computer scientists should take on the surveillance state rather than providing governments with the tools to strip away citizens privacy. Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, puts forward his opinion in an interview with journalist Kaveh Waddell.
My colleague Mark Wilson brought this to my attention.

from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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Top 5 Best Graphics Cards Of 2015 By Qubimaxima

Links To All The Products In This Video.

AMD Radeon R9 290x - http://amzn.to/16jaEZF

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti - http://amzn.to/1nGbnqd

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 - http://amzn.to/1D0ucyH

Nvidia GeForce GTX TITAN Z - http://amzn.to/1DHxTrD

AMD Radeon R9 295x2 - http://amzn.to/18PfuzH


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These robots cheer for absent fans at South Korean baseball games

File this one under "weird." The South Korean baseball team, The Eagles, havent won the championship in 15 years; theyre commonly know as The Chickens! But still their loyal fans come to watch and cheer their side on. So of course, being South Korea, it was natural for them to create robots who could cheer for absent fans. An unusual use of the concept of telepresence. Watch the video below to see how its done. This story was brought to my attention by my colleague Mark.



from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/

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New Stuff

Hi Everybody!

We have a new page called Student Work with sides shows of student projects created on the computer. Check it out!

We also have a new Donors Choose project posted. We are raising money to buy digital frames so we can display student work in school in a slide show just like on the new page. Click on the link below to go to Ms. Bransons Donors Choose site to donate to our project.

http://www.donorschoose.org/ms.branson

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Using your RPi2 for Valentines Day

Thought I would share something cool I did with my Raspberry Pi that others might like for Valentines day.

I basically had a lot of devices sitting around that I realized I could amalgamate together for a good Valentines day surprise for my girlfriend.

First off I had my robotic bartender (bottender), which you can see in my Hackaday projects page.
I modified it so that it would pour wine on command.

Next I had a set of WeMo light switches that you can get here:

Belkin WeMo Light Switch, Wi-Fi Enabled

These are really nicely made. They are easy to install WiFi-enabled and it is easy to interface with them using our custom API.
I found a nice API for the wemo light switches here.
In the end though, I ended up creating a simple shell script API that uses CURL. You can see mine on github here.

I set up my WeMo light switch to control my bedroom fan. Then I sprinkled the top with rose petals.
Connecting this all together, I have a button on my phone that turns the fan on, sprinkling rose petals down, and turns bottender on, pouring two glasses of wine. Resulting in this:

Happy Valentines Day everyone!

Consider donating to further my tinkering since I do all this and help people out for free.

Places you can find me

• Facebook
• Google+
• Linkedin
• Blogspot
• Google-Code
• Github
• YouTube
• Twitter

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Sergey and Larry awarded the Seoul Test of Time Award from WWW 2015

Posted by Andrei Broder, Google Distinguished Scientist

Today, at the 24th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW) in Florence, Italy, our company founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, received the inaugural Seoul Test-of-Time Award for their 1998 paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, which introduced Google to the world at the 7th WWW conference in Brisbane, Australia. I had the pleasure and honor to accept the award on behalf of Larry and Sergey from Professor Chin-Wan Chung, who led the committee that created the award.

Except for the fact that I was myself in Brisbane, it is hard to believe that Google began just as a two-student research project at Stanford University 17 years ago with the goal to “produce much more satisfying search results than existing systems.” Their paper presented two breakthrough concepts: first, using a distributed system built on inexpensive commodity hardware to deal with the size of the index, and second, using the hyperlink structure of the Web as a powerful new relevance signal. By now these ideas are common wisdom, but their paper continues to be very influential: it has over 13,000 citations so far and more are added every day.

Since those beginnings Google has continued to grow, with tools that enable small business owners to reach customers, help long lost friends to reunite, and empower users to discover answers. We keep pursuing new ideas and products, generating discoveries that both affect the world and advance the state-of-the-art in Computer Science and related disciplines. From products like Gmail, Google Maps and Google Earth Engine to advances in Machine Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Natural Language Understanding, it is our continuing goal to create useful tools and services that benefit our users.

Larry and Sergey sent a video message to the conference expressing their thanks and their encouragement for future research, in which Sergey said “There is still a ton of work left to do in Search, and on the Web as a whole and I couldn’t think of a more exciting time to be working in this space.” I certainly share this view, and was very gratified by the number of young computer scientists from all over the world that came by the Google booth at the conference to share their thoughts about the future of search, and to explore the possibility of joining our efforts.

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PowerShell v2 Function Switch ToParentFolder

A while back Jeff Hicks put some functions up to help navigate the file system a little more easily.  Somehow I pulled this (and one other) function-along with some aliases-to get around the system more quickly.  The aliases are w.stcf, down, and, d.  I use down the most.   The function lives in a Windows module, hence the Windows. in front of everything.

# Define function
function Windows.Switch-ToChildFolder {
 param(
  $Path = $PWD
 )

 pushd $pwd
 $dir = gci $path | Where {$_.PSIsContainer} | select fullname;
 if($dir.length -gt 0) {
  Write-Output "There are $($dir.length) children folders.";
  for($i = 1; $i -le $dir.length; $i++) {
  Write-Output "$($i): $($dir[($i-1)].fullname)";
 }
 $response = Read-Host "Type the number for the folder you want to select";
 cd $dir[$($response-1)].fullname | Out-Null;
 } else {
  Write-Output "The current directory has no children";
 }

} # end function Windows.Switch-ToChildFolder

# Set alias
Set-Alias -Name w.stcf -Value "Windows.Switch-ToChildFolder"
Set-Alias -Name Down -Value "Windows.Switch-ToChildFolder"
Set-Alias -Name d -Value "Windows.Switch-ToChildFolder"

The really cool thing here is that when you run the cmdlet it gives you a numbered list of folders into which you can go simply by typing the folder number.  For example, using down to navigate the $PSHOME directory gives me this:

PS C:> down $pshome
There are 4 children folders.
1: C:WindowsSystem32WindowsPowerShellv1.0en-US
2: C:WindowsSystem32WindowsPowerShellv1.0Examples
3: C:WindowsSystem32WindowsPowerShellv1.0Modules
4: C:WindowsSystem32WindowsPowerShellv1.0 estmodules
Type the number for the folder you want to select: 4
C:WindowsSystem32WindowsPowerShellv1.0 estmodules
PS C:WindowsSystem32WindowsPowerShellv1.0 estmodules>

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What we can learn about effective meaningful and diverse organizations

Posted by Beryl Nelson, Software Engineering Manager

By becoming more conscious of our own stereotypes and biases, and making use of the insights revealed by the research on bias and stereotype threat, unconscious decision making, and cognitive illusions, each of us can bring more to our work and create diverse, innovative, and meaningful organizations.

Since 2009, I’ve been reading literature about the challenges and successes in making diverse teams effective, and speaking about this research. My goal is to help everyone understand more about unconscious decision-making and other barriers to inclusion, and through knowledge, combat these effects.

A short summary:

• A team that is heterogeneous in meaningful ways is good for innovation, and good for business.
• There are many challenges to making such teams effective, such as unconscious decision making, stereotype threat, and other cognitive illusions.
• There is repeatable quantitative research which shows ways to combat some of these effects.
• The barriers to effectiveness may seem overwhelming, but there is hope! Meaningful change is possible, and some examples of successful change are cited below.

In a bit more detail:

1. Diversity is good for innovation and business. There is a correlation between financial success and the diversity of leadership teams, as shown in research by Catalyst, McKinsey and Cedric Herring. Further, research shows a strong correlation between having women on teams and innovation; concluding that there is a strong correlation between the presence of women and the social skills required to get ideas percolating into the open.
2. We all make decisions unconsciously, influenced by our implicit associations. As an example of these effects, a large proportion of CEOs are taller than the average population and height is strongly correlated with financial and career success. It’s long been argued that women and underrepresented minorities are not represented in CEO leadership because there aren’t enough qualified individuals in the labor pool. This “pipeline issue” argument can’t be made for short and average-height people, however. Simple, repeatable tests measure, via response time and error rate, the implicit associations we have between concepts. These associations are created as an adaptive response, but we must understand our own implicit biases in order to make better decisions.
3. Stereotype threat plays a role in preventing people from being fully effective. The low representation of women and minorities in Science has long been the source of a troubling question: is this an indication of a difference in innate ability (see Ben Barre’s response to Lawrence Summers’ remarks), or the result of some other effect? Claude Steele and his colleagues elegantly showed that two groups of people can have similar or opposite reactions, depending on the way a situation is presented. These and other experiments show that stereotype threat can compromise the performance of the subject of a stereotype, if he or she knows about the stereotype and cares about it.
4. Change is possible. The above and other challenges may make it seem nearly impossible to create a diverse and highly functioning organization, but dramatic change can be made. Take, for example, the discovery of biased decision making and effective changes made via the use of data in the MIT Science Faculty Study, or the amazing changes at Harvey Mudd college, which not only increased participation of women as Computer Science majors from 12% to 40% in five years, but also increased the total number of CS majors from 25 to 30 per year to 70 CS graduates in the class of 2014.

If you’re interested in learning more, watch the video about the data on diversity below. You can read the full research in the November issue of Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery. You can read even more using the full bibliography.

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Do you want a computer for 9

Cant afford a Raspbery Pi ($35), well they have a competitor now. The ultra cheap CHIP; a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, with 4GB storage, WiFi, Bluetooth, support for most monitors and even a mobile capacity. It runs Linux and therefore supports many free productivity apps. As you can see from the picture its very small and so can be easily embedded in pieces of equipment. CHIP is a Kick Starter project and be honest for just $9 (US) can you not afford to own one.

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Facts About Bill Gates Must Read

Facts About Bill Gates


1. Bill Gates earns US$250 every SECOND, thats about US$20 Million a DAY and US$7.8 Billion a YEAR!


2. If he drops a thousand dollar, he wont even bother to pick it up bcoz the 4 seconds he picks it, he wouldve already earned it back.


3. The US national debt is about 5.62 trillion, if Bill Gates were to pay the debt by himself; he will finish it in less then 10 years.


4. He can donate US$15 to everyone on earth but still be left with US$5 Million for his pocket money.


5. Michael Jordan is the highest paid athlete in US. If he doesnt drink and eat, and keeps up his annual income i.e. US$30 Million, hell have to wait for 277 years to become as rich as Bill Gates is now.


6. If Bill Gates was a country, he would be the 37th richest country on earth.


7. If you change all of Bill Gates money to US$1 notes, you can make a road from earth to moon, 14 times back and forth. But you have to make that road non-stop for 1,400 years, and use a total of 713 BOEING 747 planes to transport all the money.


8. Bill Gates is 40 this year. If we assume that he will live for another 35 years, he has to spend US$6.78 Million per day to finish all his money before he can go to heaven.




Last but not the least: If Microsoft Windows users can claim US$1 for every time their computers hang because of Microsoft Windows, Bill Gates will be bankrupt in 3 years !!!!!!! !!!!


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Largest collection of Google Logos on the web Set 4

Set1 Set2 Set3 Set4 Set5 Set6 Set7 Set8 Set9 Set10

Set1 Set2 Set3 Set4 Set5 Set6 Set7 Set8 Set9 Set10

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