Thanks to Cynthia for sending an article about a very interesting (terrifying, maybe? Unnerving? Perhaps nefarious?) article about a new and unexpected technology being used downtown. Street lights known commercially as ‘Intellistreets’ are light fixtures that can strobe, play announcements, be controlled from an iPad, but can also record audio and video. Specifically, audio and video of *you.*

Here one is.

Like the guy in the hat? If not, do you at least use Twitter? Now that it has had its IPO, everyone who runs the company has become an instant millionaire/billionaire.

In fact, Twitter share prices rose sharply after the initial announcement, meaning an even larger take for those involved with the opening. It’s an interesting phenomenon, since Facebook has four times as many users and Instagram is growing at a faster pace, Twitter seems to be the service that actually has the most immediate influence since it’s used for security alerts and emergency warnings, political announcements and revolutions as well as letting people know what sandwich you just ate.

Even if you’re not a billionaire just yet, do any of you by any chance use Twitter? Have an account but don’t use it? Use it a lot? Follow anyone else? These questions are important because Twitter, for all the bluster over its IPO, is not profitable and only vague promises about how it will become so have been made. Facebook did it, so perhaps Twitter can as well.

Hey, robots won’t stab us now!

Actually, this article is just discussing a newly-developed ability of robots to learn “behaviors” described by vague instructions. As the article notes, robots are terrible at doing this, as are all digital devices, they need very specific, step-by-step directions to complete even a simple task. Now, however, it appears that robots that will help us in the future will be able to pick up on cues during their training and learn the proper way to behave.

I can’t believe I just typed that. I’m not thinking of I, Robot at all!

Still can’t beat Spock, though.

Geez, we can’t even win simple children’s games anymore. First it was crosses and naughts (tic-tac-toe as we call it in the U.S.), then it was chess, checkers, and any other game you can imagine. Now, they can even win – every single time no less – at rock, paper, scissors.

A robot has been developed in Japan that is so fast at determining what shape is being made by its opponents hand that it is impossible to beat. However, as the article notes, it’s not really playing, it’s cheating. Still, it’s wining. Every time. When robots start winning at rock paper scissors, all hope for humanity is lost.

I haven’t posted here in a while because I have been preparing a post about what has been going on with the government healthcare website. As you should already know, it has been a disaster. People unable to get to the site, unable to log on, unable to create an account. I have seen video after video after video of people explaining what went wrong, and read all manner of article trying to make sense of it all. I couldn’t write a succinct, clear post explaining it all.

It makes my head hurt. I’m going to try to let you know some of the underlying problems that are happening and clear up some of the confusion without turning this into a dissertation.

There are several issues contributing to the difficulties the site is having: Bad design, lack of testing, mandate of conversion to name a few.

Regarding bad design, it turns out the site is designed so poorly that it is sending far more data (unsecured, no less!) back and forth among participants – including insurance companies,  the site itself, and the users – than is necessary. For example, let’s say the web page comes up and you are asked to enter your name and address. When you hit submit, it should only send that info, as well as some security and validation info as well. But it is sending much, much more. In fact, the belief now is that it is so poorly designed that major parts of it will need to be redesigned from scratch. That’s right – not redeveloped or improved, but scrapped and rebuilt from the ground up.

Next is lack of testing. When I teach systems analysis and design, which is essentially the subject of how to develop and implement large systems, students learn about three types of tests: Desk testing, unit testing, and string testing. In desk testing, the functionality and logic of the system is tested on paper. It’s an easy and inexpensive way to root out big problems and fix them efficiently. With unit testing, each function is tested individually. In other words, the ability of the system to accept user-submitted info would be tested as a standalone function, as would the ability to calculate a total or compute sales tax. With string testing, all those functions are tested together to be sure data is being passed between those functions properly. It might be discovered that while sales tax is being correctly calculated it is not being added to the total at checkout.

The point of all of this is it appears that the only type of testing that was done is unit testing. No desk or string testing at all. And for a system so dependent on so many participants and aspects, this is unforgivable.

There was also no capacity or load testing, meaning testing the system to be sure it can handle the expected traffic. Although it was assumed that millions would try to log on, it was only tested with 200 simultaneous users.

Finally, conversion. The government is notorious for forcing systems on line when they are nowhere near ready, and it has happened again. The site had to go live on a specific date whether it was ready or not, and it was not ready. This is one of the cardinal rules that should not be violated, but, especially with federal systems, it often is.

One other thing: This is not a commentary on the plan itself as many people try to make it out to be. It was hard to find links for this post because so many were biased one way or the other, using the site’s failures to attack or defend the plan itself, but that’s irrelevant, a red herring, don’t fall into that trap. The failures of the system are unrelated to that regardless of your feelings of the plan itself. But the site is a huge disaster, and apparently none of the designers have ever been in my class (or maybe they have) because these mistakes are design 101 errors. Hopefully they get it figured out soon, but I suspect it will take at least three months to get to operating speed. We’ll see.

You are all already familiar with the concept of a top-level domain, or TLD. It’s the extension at the end of a web address, such as .com, .net, .org or .biz, to name a few. Now, ICANN, the organization that oversees these domains and allows or disallows new ones, has for the first time approved and will roll out TLDs in other languages. I can’t write them out since they are in languages such as Arabic, Russian, and Chinese, so I will instead point you to this article at the BBC which does a very good job of explaining it.

Other large companies also applied for new TLDs, both Amazon and Google want .music of course, but Google also applied for the mysterious and enigmatic .boo. I’m intrigued…

Now, you may wonder why ICANN has the authority to do this, who made them boss? That’s a valid question, and I will fill you in when we talk about in class!

For anyone who runs torrents, today is a sad day. If you don’t know what they are or if you’re a media producer, it’s a victory. Isohunt.com has been shut down.

A little background: Those who remember the glory days of pioneering peer-to-peer file-sharing client Napster will be familiar with the point of torrents. Napster didn’t have central servers, it allowed you to connect to the machines of other individual users to download files, usually illegally, including music, movies, and software. Of course, with no central controls, it was also a haven for viruses and other malware that would do terrible damage to someone’s machine. It was a risky activity.

Napster

Nowadays, we have torrents. I don’t condone it, but I understand it. The way it works is as follows: You want to download a movie or television show, say. You would locate the appropriate torrent online (it actually has the .torrent extension), download it, and then click on it, which would open your chosen torrent client software, and the tv show/movie/whatever would download. It would then be added as a ‘seed,’ meaning others could connect to you to download the same file.

Similar to Napster, you are connecting to multiple other users to download the file with no central server which makes the transfer very difficult to track. In fact, ISPs (COX or Comcast or whoever) try to identify those running torrents by the amount of data transmitting over their connection.

Isohunt screen

Isohunt was the main site for locating these torrents, along with a comment section and listing of uploaders and downloaders to help verify the integrity of the file. However, because it was obviously a pirating site, it has agreed to shut down and pay a $10 million fine, although they have no way of paying. The creator of the site tried to argue that it simply listed he torrents without supplying them, as users connected to other users and not the site, but that logic was unsuccessful. It’s hardly the only torrent site out there, so I suspect others will pick up the slack.

We have talked a lot about artificial intelligence, about what it is and what constitutes an organism’s ability to think. We discussed sentience, which refers to self awareness, and compared machines to spiders, one of which was aware of its existence and the other which isn’t.

On top of that, there was a clue on last week’s crossword puzzle asking about the father of artificial intelligence, and from class discussion it appeared there was some question as to who that actually was. The correct answer is Alan Turing, a pioneer in not just AI but computing in general, mathematics, and other related fields. For all his contributions he lived a short, tragic life and it wasn’t until years after his death that he was issued a formal apology by the British government for the way he was treated.

Now, serendipitously (which isn’t a word), there is an article from the BBC titled ‘Will Machines Ever Be Able to Think?‘ It discusses the current state of artificial intelligence, which is right where we left it when we discussed it in class, but it also talks about the history of computing and the people who contributed in significant ways, including Turing, as well as Ada Lovelace who is noted for being a female pioneer in what was and is a male-dominated industry, and Charles Babbage, a friend of Lovelace who created the almost-but-not-quite completed Analytical Engine, a rebuilt version of which can be seen at the Computer History Museum today.

It’s a fascinating read and sets a solid groundwork for discussing where we are now in terms of intelligent machines, But we all know where we are in terms of that – right here.

I thought you all might be interested to see something I found at a Chili’s restaurant in Baltimore. It seems they are trying to make the experience more…interactive? At each table was a small digital display by a company called Ziosk, and it allowed patrons to peruse the menu, play games, join the frequent eater’s club or whatever it’s called, you could even pay your bill, dividing up the payment if necessary, and printing a receipt as well!

You still have to have the server take the order and bring it out, but other than that it’s pretty automated. I don’t know if they have them out here, perhaps one of you can confirm or deny that. Have any of you used one, even somewhere else? I also thought I would show the surreptitious picture I took of the family at the other table. They were all engrossed in the Ziosk and not paying attention to each other. That’s the downside to any device such as this, and I thought it was a sad thing to see. They did have the infant playing with a calculator, though, so on the bright side we may have a future mathematician in our midst.

On the sinks in the public bathrooms, for example. They ought to put them above the…you know.