Missing my old car

Last years i was so happy when i got a new coupe Infiniti G37. I was in shock because it had everything i wanted, full equipped, navigator, sunroof, power windows, v-tec, 6 cylinders so it can go as fast as hell. Sport wheels so i was in heaven because since i was a kid i love this kind of cars. The sad news was that i had to replace my loyal Honda Civic 98, it wasn't a modern car but it help me a lot specially in winter conditions. I never had any problems with this car only that it was old and i spend many hours in the mechanic changing brakes, filters, tune up and these kind of things that the old cars requires. 

The other day while i was driving perfectly my new car and suddenly i couldn't start it. What happen? Everything seemed ok in that moment, i checked the engine, the battery, the wheel, so why my car didn't start and i was in a hurry. I use all my knowledge trying to realize what was happening. So after i spend a couple of hours trying to deduce whats going on with my car I decided to call AAA to has an assistant to help me out and deduce why my car didn't start so i wait for a couple of hours for them. When the AAA guy came and checked my car i was expecting that something serious happen to my car since it couldn't start and i used my expertise trying to figure out what happen. My surprise was enormous when he told me that it was a simple circuit on the computer panel that it was out so it didn't make connection so the car couldn't start. For just a piece of circuit my car could start and i lost my appointment for that reason. i was in shock. I never had this kind of problem with my old Honda. This car was strong as hell, never had any kind of circuits inconvenient. When i had a problem with my Honda, they were really serious problems not just a simple circuit. 

Even though new and hi tech car are prettier, faster and fancier, i miss my reliable and strong old car that i knew i won't never have this kind of problem.

The Second Machine Age: A Return to Normalcy?

Most discussions about the current state of the USA focus on the plight of the working man, his inability to provide for his family despite working multiple jobs, the need for a change back to the good old days, sentiments most accurately captured by a certain presidential candidate’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.”  This call to return to a better time refers to the boom years experienced in the decades following the Industrial Revolution and the World Wars, fondly remembered by those of older generations as times of great prosperity. 

Although the country did indeed experience great prosperity, many ignore the turmoil which led to the economic boom.  The Industrial Revolution was marked by extremely poor, often deadly, working conditions in the factories which churned out mass produced goods by the truckload; workers had few rights and could easily be replaced as necessary due to the unskilled nature of the work.  The Great Depression was ended only by America’s participation in the Second World War, and the middle class to which politicians so often appeal has only existed since the end of that world-wide conflict.   This middle class was a result of the economic prosperity brought on by the industrial bulk left over from wartime, as well as the 1944 GI Bill and various other measures that allowed returning soldiers to affordably build comfortable lives for themselves.  So when people call for a return to a time of middle class prosperity for all, they really mean a return to no more than one or two generations ago.

The entire concept of a middle class in America thus seems to be a recent construction, with no real historical basis upon which to rest.  In discussions of technology’s impact on society, as in The Second Machine Age, with its talk of “bounty” and lack of “spread,” people often focus on technology’s ability to increase economic inequality between classes of citizens via centralization of capital control.  However, is it really technology that is causing the rise of income inequality, or is America’s economy simply returning to its peacetime state?  While technology seems to be facilitating this centralization of wealth, it could be simply exacerbating a preexisting trend back towards the inequality of pre-World War 2 America.  Much of the data cited and graphed by The Second Machine Age goes back only to the early 1970’s; it doesn’t show how most measures of inequality take a hit with the creation of the middle class, but are now returning to pre-war levels.

The question then shifts, away from the overused “How do we return America to its former glory” to a more open ended “How do we create a new economic equilibrium where a middle class is a sustainable construct?”  Technology, while currently increasing the “spread” between economic classes, could eventually serve as an equalizing agent in society; computer technology is a new invention whose full impact has not yet been realized.  But utilized indiscriminately, all the new technology wrought by this second machine age will likely facilitate society’s slide back into the pre-middle class normalcy of inequality and centralized capital control characteristic of historically regular economies.

Codie, The Toy Robot That Teaches Kids Programming

Recently at TechCrunch Disrupt in London, Codie Labs showed off “Codie” the programmable toy robot. The toy was invented to teach programming concepts. Users can write different programs that roll the toy robot around and have it perform simple tasks. I think Codie is an awesome way to get really young kids interested in programming.

I think having skills as a programmer is becoming increasingly more important today. There are countless new jobs and even hobbies that can benefit from having knowledge in programming. So why shouldn’t kids start coding at young age? They start spelling and math very young. I think programming is the next logical step.

This past summer I was trying to teach my younger brother about programming. He’s really into gaming so I thought he would appreciate understanding some of the logic behind creating a game. We went through an online introduction to programming course together. While the material was simple enough for him to understand, it was pretty dry. The hardest part was trying to keep him engaged. I tried to look for curricula that presented the material in a fun way, but nothing seemed promising.

I remember thinking back to educational toys/games I used as a kid. I had a lot of CD-ROM games that would give help with times tables or spelling. Even though the games were educational, I don’t remember that getting in the way of a fun game. I remember the all the fun characters in the games, and their catchphrases, but not how many of the games were basically homework. I think the field of programming really needs some engaging hook to draw in interest from young kids. Codie could be the answer to this.

Codie might just be a box that can be programmed to move around, but I think the most important part of his design is the fact that it looks like he has a face. On the front of the robot, there are two large round lights that resemble eyes. A grown person might like at the robot and think “those lights look like eyes”.  But to a kid, that robot is a character, and they can interact with him and control the character to move around and interact with the real world. If a child is able to write a program that brings Codie to life, letting him move around, this is so much more engaging than just teaching material. That kid is not going to forget that they programmed an actual little robot.

I think this is exactly what kind of toy young kids needs to get interested in programming. It really shows kids how powerful programming can be. Instead of going through really dry lessons like I had with my brother, kids can see first hand a practical use for programming concepts. And hopefully kids who play with Codie have a similar experience to me with my CD-ROM games. They won’t remember the experience as being forced to learn. Instead, they’ll just remember how fun it was. That will make the concepts stick a lot harder.

Source: 

http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/codie-is-a-fast-rolling-robot-toy-that-teaches-kids-progamming-concepts/

The Stock Market of Things

I recently watched a interesting TED Talk by Josh Luber about the secondhand sneaker market. Mind you, I couldn't care less about sneakers, but at the very end of the video, he brings up a very interesting idea: a stock market of things. Basically, he proposes that collectible items could be traded as commodities, with all of the different options available for a stock. This would include the ability to short-sell collectibles, buy into mutual funds, and run high-speed trading algorithms on them. So, what's the point of all of this? The idea is that people with specific interests can trade capital in forms that they are more intimately familiar with, rather than forcing everyone to play the same market

Whether or not this is actually worthwhile is anyone’s guess, but it’s an interesting idea to try. The main benefit that Josh Luber was advocating was that it would allow less educated people to participate in the stock market, particularly children. On that front, I support the idea. Teaching entrepreneurial children about finance is a great idea for the future of our economy, and kids will be much more interested in the action figure market than trading shares of company stock. However, there’s really no reason to create this system with real money. If it’s a teaching tool, it would be better to simulate it with a fake credit system. If it’s meant to involve the less educated people in the financial sector, perhaps it would be better to put in the effort to teach them, and then have them involved in the regular stock market. So overall, I think it’s an interesting idea for a teaching tool, but as an actual financial market, it would probably cause a lot more problems than it would fix.

Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes: Tactile Interaction In Gaming

My favorite video game to come out this year isn’t entirely a video game. Allow me to explain.

 The game I’m talking about is the bomb defusing game made by Steel Crate Games “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes”. If you’re not familiar with the game, here’s how it works:

One player uses the computer to defuse a suitcase bomb. They can see the bomb on the screen and must use the mouse to interact with it. They press buttons, cut wires, and such to race against the timer to defuse the bomb. All of the other players are away from the screen, where they can’t see it. These remaining players have a physical paper copy of a “bomb defusal manual”, which contains the overly complicated instructions on defusing the bomb. The players with the manual must communicate to the defuser what they have to do.

The reason I say that this game isn’t really a video game is simple: I’m convinced that the main reason that the game is so fun has nothing to do with the computer at all. The most fun part of the game, for me, is interacting with the manual: riffling through the pages trying to find the right section, tucking your finger in a page to flip back and forth, using your fingers to help keep track of complicated problems. There’s something about having actual paper in front of you that makes it feel like you’re actually helping to defuse the bomb in real life.

I’ve even played this game several times using the oculus rift, an augmented reality controller. As the defuser, I wore the goggles, and saw myself in the room with the bomb. I heard the ticking of the bomb in my ears, like the bomb were actually in the room. I turned my head in real life to look at the bomb from all angles. But when I went to cut the wires, I was still clicking the mouse. I didn’t feel myself pick up the scissors. I didn’t feel the wire give as I snipped it. Without any way of getting tactile feedback from a game, augmented reality doesn’t feel very real. It was much more fun being the guy on the manual.

I think the need for tactile interaction in gaming completely explains why people still play board games. There’s something about touching the pieces. The most fun board games have interesting pieces that we like to touch and move around. As mentally engaging as video games have proven to be, they have not matched board games in this physical regard.

I think that for people to take the field of virtual reality gaming seriously, it will need to account for physical interaction. Video game developers have clearly acknowledged that tactile interaction greatly improves the gameplay experience. This is why almost all game systems make use of vibrating controllers. But they really need to take it to the next level. Imagine if when defusing the bomb with the oculus rift, you could actually pick up the suitcase bomb and feel it in your hands. This new level of interaction, I think, would clearly make it way more fun to be the person on the computer.

Artificial Intelligence Defeats Visual Turing Test

            Artificial intelligence is catching up to humans. A new, military-funded artificial intelligence can generate new ideas as quickly and accurately as a human can. Brenden M. Lake, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum presented the Bayesian Program Learning framework, or BPL for short, in a paper published by the journal Science.

BPL is said to classify objects and generate ideas using just a single data point. To put BPL to the test, they showed BPL along with several participants 20 handwritten characters from 10 different alphabets. They then are asked to match the letter to the same character written by someone else. BPL scored a 97%, about the same as the other human participants, not to mention much better than previous algorithms. What’s even more amazing is that BPL also passed a visual form of the Turing Test. BPL was asked to draw letters that most humans couldn’t distinguish from another human’s writing.

An early form of this kind of AI dates back to 1997, when Gail A. Carpenter and Stephen Grossberg published a paper on adaptive resonance theory, or ART. Their model was based on a human’s neural network and, while learning quickly, was limited to simple pattern recognition. BPL, on the other hand, uses actual reasoning to infer why the data is the way it is.

If the reports are true, this could be a huge breakthrough in military surveillance, as indicated by the numerous military donors to the project such as the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Agency).

Pentagon leaders have been discussing the use of this kind of Artificial Intelligence in surveillance missions, where teams might fly for over 6,000 hours before deciding to strike a specific target. Of course the BPL is not in condition yet to fully replace pilots. “A lot of things will have to be done that involve expertise that none of us have” says Tenenbaum. Advances in this AI could also lead to far more capable drones, faster intelligence collection, and more accurate targeting through AI.

Erik Byrnjolfsson and Andrew McAfee predicted that artificial intelligence would soon reach our levels, and they appear to on the right track. Not long ago, AI couldn’t even pass the visual Turing Test, with the percentages ranging from 67% accuracy to 92%, more than double the error of both humans and the BPL. Now that an AI can pass the Turing Test, only time will tell what next breakthrough will be.  

Wiki - Shmiki

Mark Mirtchouk
I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System

People used to be divided into two distinct groups: the ones who read a lot and knew the answers to most of the questions and the ones who never opened a book and were considered ignorant. Life was a snob's paradise: if you cannot answer questions-you don't belong in decent society.

Computers became a common denominator and equalizer. With couple of clicks, you get tons of answers to pretty much any question that puzzles you at any given moment. What was the name of an actor that played in the first silent movie? What is the function that converts text into proper case? Is it finally decided if Pluto is a planet or a star? How long is the equator? What's Kipling's strange first name? What are the best looking cakes for gamers? Any field of knowledge - instant solution to any query! If you search these questions on Wikipedia a phenomenon will happen. It will give you detailed replies with historical background, illustration, chronology, personal data, etc.

So what is the difference between real knowledge and Wiki-"knowledge"? My personal opinion is that a lot of websites including Wikipedia have unreliable information. At best, the information posted on websites is incomplete, and sometimes it is even totally false. The data published in books is routinely double and triple checked. Special people go to great distance to make sure that the info published is correct. Also, the spelling and grammar in professionally published books is intact. Editors check the language flow as well. Most importantly, physical books cannot be hacked by an unfriendly outside entity so the information cannot be changed after the book is published. Generations of people can use the same book as source of information and nothing will change in it. Any website can fall victim to cyber crimes as well as it could contain unchecked data from the very beginning.

I still remember how I was doing an assignment on a biography of an author of my choice. I chose Somerset Maugham because I liked his novels and plays. I got numerous biographies of the author from our local library. After finishing reading all those books from Somerset Maugham's friends and contemporaries, I realized that none of the juiciest stories have made it onto the World Wide Web. For example: a fun fact is that Maugham was a spy while on allegedly reporting assignment in Russia. First and foremost, he could have changed history if his reports were taken seriously by British government. Also another writer Ian Flemming was so impressed by Somerset Maugham's life, he created James Bond spy books based on his life story. I never found any of this information on the Internet and if I solely relied on Wikipedia, my essay would have lacked and I would have deprived myself and my classmates those very intriguing facts.

So in conclusion, I would like to reiterate that although wiki has fast answers and tons of facts, it is absolutely crucial to take internet based information with utmost caution. One should be adamant in checking all data and taking instantly obtained info with a grain of salt.