Category Archives: Education

Artificial Intelligence Finds Ancient Indus Script Matches Spoken Language

Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery by Brandon Keim

An ancient script that’s defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers.
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The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long.
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They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.

The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle.

When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages.

Keeping Out Technology Workers is not a Good Economic Strategy

The barriers between countries, related to jobs, are decreasing. Jobs are more international today than 20 years ago and that trend will continue. People are going to move to different countries to do jobs (especially in science, engineering and advanced technology). The USA has a good market on those jobs (for many reasons). But there is nothing that requires those jobs to be in the USA.

The biggest impact of the USA turning away great scientists and engineers will be that they go to work outside the USA and increase the speed at which the USA loses its place as the leading location for science, engineering and technology work. This is no longer the 1960’s. Back then those turned away by the USA had trouble finding work elsewhere that could compete with the work done in the USA. If the USA wants to isolate ourselves (with 5% of the population) from a fairly open global science and engineering job market, other countries will step in (they already are trying, realizing what a huge economic benefit doing so provides).

Those other countries will be able to put together great centers of science and engineering innovation. Those areas will create great companies that create great jobs. I can understand wanting this to be 1960, but wanting it doesn’t make it happen.

You could go even further and shut off science and engineering students access to USA universities (which are the best in the world). That would put a crimp in plans for a very short while. Soon many professors would move to foreign schools. The foreign schools would need those professors, and offer a great deal of pay. And those professors would need jobs as their schools laid off professors as students disappeared. Granted the best schools and best professors could stay in the USA, but plenty of very good ones would leave.

I just don’t think the idea of closing off the companies in the USA from using foreign workers will work. We are lucky now that, for several reasons, it is still easiest to move people from Germany, India, Korea, Mexico and Brazil all to the USA to work on advanced technology projects. The advantage today however, is much much smaller than it was 30 years ago. Today just moving all those people to some other location, say Singapore, England, Canada or China will work pretty well (and 5 years from now will work much better in whatever locations start to emerge as the leading alternative sites). Making the alternative of setting up centers of excellence outside the USA more appealing is not a good strategy for those in the USA wanting science, engineering and computer programming jobs. We should instead do what we can to encourage more companies in the USA that are centralizing technology excellence in the USA.

Comment on Reddit discussion.

New Yorkers Help Robot Find Its Way in the Big City

Tweenbots by Kacie Kinzer

I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.
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Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
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The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

Very cool, fun and interesting. Cute integration of technology, psychology and an inquisitive scientific mind.

Honda’s Robolegs Help People Walk

The devices combine sensor-driven motors and weight-bearing chassis to guide strides and support body weight. Though derived from technologies pioneered during the ASIMO’s quarter-century of development, their use could be deeply human, boosting manual laborers or assisting people unable to walk without help.
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The devices are still in the research stage, and Honda has not yet formalized plans to go commercial. If they do, the market could be large, and not only in Japan. The number of Americans aged 65 and older is expected to double by 2030. More than 17 million report difficulty climbing stairs or walking a quarter-mile.

Home Experiment: Deriving the Gravitational Constant

Deriving the Gravitational Constant by Joe Marshall

In the summer of 1985 I was at home convalescing and being bored. It occurred to me one day that if Cavendish could determine the gravitational constant back in 1798, I ought to be able to do something similar
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Cavendish cast a pair of 1.61 pound lead weights. I found a couple of 2-pound lead cylinders my dad had lying around. I used duct tape to attach them to a 3-foot wooden dowel. Cavendish used a wire to suspend the balance, I used nylon monofilament. To determine the torsion of the fiber, you wait until the balance stops moving (a day or two) and then you slightly perturb it. The balance will slowly oscillate back and forth. The restoring force is calculated from the period of oscillation. Cavendish had a 7-minute period. My balance had a 40 minute period (nylon is nowhere near as stiff as wire).

Cavendish used a pair of 350 pound lead balls to attract the ends of the balance from about 9 inches away. I put a couple of 8 pound jugs of water about an inch away. The next trick was to measure the rotation of the balance. Cavendish had a small telescope to read the Vernier scale on the balance. I used some modern technology. I borrowed a laser from Tom Knight (Thanks again!), and bounced it off a mirror that I mounted on the middle of the balance. This made a small red dot on the wall about 20 feet away. (I was hoping this would be enough to measure the displacement, but I was considering an interferometer if necessary.)

To my surprise, it all worked. After carefully putting the jugs of water in place, the dot on the wall started to visibly move. Within a few minutes, it had moved an inch or two. I carefully removed the jugs of water and sure enough, the dot on the wall drifted back to its starting position.

Very cool example of a home physics experiment.

Bacteria Communicate Using a Chemical Language

Each person has about 1 trillion human cells and about 10 trillion bacterial cells. In the webcast Bonnie Bassler, Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, discusses the chemical language that lets bacteria coordinate defense and mount attacks (quorum sensing). The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry — and our understanding of ourselves.

Bacteria do all sorts of amazing things for us: educating your immune system to keep bad microbes out, they digest our food, they make our vitamins…

Fellowship Winners Announced

Several science and engineering fellowships and scholarships have announced winners recently:

NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
Goldwater Scholarships
Marshall Scholarships
Department of Defense (NDSEG) Fellowships – no online list of winners yet

From the NSF GRFP site:

Due to the complexity of the current budget situation, the 2009 GRFP awards will be announced in installments based on fields of study and other factors. The first installment is now available on FastLane. Awardees, as well as Applicants not recommended for funding, have been notified by email. Recipients of Honorable Mention and any additional Fellowship award offers will be forthcoming. Applicant ratings sheets will be available after all award announcements have been made. We thank you for your patience.

Find out more about these and other science and engineering fellowships and scholarships. Also see: How to Win a Graduate Fellowship – NSF Graduate Research Fellows 2008

The Software Developer Labor Market

With the economy today you don’t hear much of a desperate need for programmers. But Dr. Norman Matloff, Department of Computer Science, University of California at Davis, testimony to Congress (Presented April 21, 1998; updated December 9, 2002) on Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage is full of lots of interesting information (for current and past job markets).

The industry says that it will need H-1B visas temporarily, until more programmers can be trained. Is this true?

No, it’s false and dishonest… The industry has been using this “temporary need” stall tactic for years, ever since the H-1B law was enacted in 1990. In the early- and mid-1990s, for example, the industry kept saying that H-1Bs wouldn’t be needed after the laid-off defense programmers and engineers were retrained, but never carried out its promise. It hired those laid off in low-level jobs such as technician (which is all the retraining programs prepared them for), and hired H-1Bs for the programming and engineering work.

Unlike Dr. Matloff, and many readers of this blog, I am actually not a big opponent of H-1B visas. I believe we benefit more by allowing tech savy workers to work in the USA than we lose. I understand people fear jobs are being taken away, but I don’t believe it. I believe one of the reasons we maintain such a strong programming position is due to encouraging people to come to the USA to program.

I also do believe, there are abuses, under the current law, of companies playing games to say no-one can be found in the USA with the proper skills. And I believe those apposed to H-1B visas make reasonable arguments and this testimony is a good presentation of those arguments.

This obsession with specific skills is unwarranted. What counts is general programming talent – hiring smart people – not experience with specific software technologies.

Very true.

What developers should do.

Suppose you are currently using programming language X, but you see that X is beginning to go out of fashion, and a new language (or OS or platform, etc.) Y is just beginning to come on the scene. The term “just beginning” is crucial here; it means that Y is so new that there almost no one has work experience in it yet. At that point you should ask your current employer to assign you to a project which uses Y, and let you learn Y on the job. If your employer is not willing to do this, or does not have a project using Y, then find another employer who uses both X and Y, and thus who will be willing to hire you on the basis of your experience with X alone, since very few people have experience with Y yet.

Good advice.

What is on the Other Side of Earth?

Do you ever wonder what is on the exact opposite side of Earth? This website uses Google Maps to let you see: Antipodes Map. It also makes clear how much of the earth is covered in oceans. The entire continental USA is opposite ocean. Hawaii is opposite Botswana and Namibia. Hong Kong is opposite Argentina. Singapore opposite Ecuador. India, Ireland, Turkey, France and Egypt are among the many countries that opposite oceans. Madrid is opposite New Zealand.

Why Toddlers Don’t Do What They’re Told

Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.

“I went into this study expecting a completely different set of findings,” said psychology professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they’re just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different.”
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“If you just repeat something again and again that requires your young child to prepare for something in advance, that is not likely to be effective,” Munakata said. “What would be more effective would be to somehow try to trigger this reactive function. So don’t do something that requires them to plan ahead in their mind, but rather try to highlight the conflict that they are going to face. Perhaps you could say something like ‘I know you don’t want to take your coat now, but when you’re standing in the yard shivering later, remember that you can get your coat from your bedroom.”