MachineMachine / stream

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Hilary Rose is a prominent feminist and sociologist and is currently a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Steven Rose is a neurobiologist at the Open University and…

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Computers are getting invisible. They shrink and hide. They lurk under the skin and dissolve in the cloud. We observe the process like an eclipse of the sun, partly scared,…

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To understand why it's worth building an almost 200-year-old mechanical computer, it's necessary to first understand what a computer is. Although Babbage's analytical engine is entirely mechanical, it has the…

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Earlier this year, IBM celebrated the 15-year anniversary of its supercomputer Deep Blue beating chess champion Garry Kasparov. According to a new book, however, it may have been an accidental…

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This essay is in many ways a companion piece to Gary Hall’s ‘Pirate Radical Philosophy’ in RP 173 (May/June 2012). Consider it a prequel, or something akin to a video…

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Digital information is accumulating at an astounding rate, straining our ability to store and archive it. DNA is among the most dense and stable information media known. The development of…

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For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the…

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For medical researchers and biochemists, simulation software will vastly speed the early stages of screening for new compounds. And for molecular biologists, models that are of sufficient accuracy will yield…

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Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves—the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity,…

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It's a testament to Turing's fascination with nearly everything that 76 years since his first major paper, there's still so much to write about his work. Expect this week to…

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Grandmasters of comparable skill now come to championship games with computer-generated analysis of their opponents’ opening lines and likely moves. Home preparation has always been important, but computers have made…

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Kernel on machines and memory, with some nice examples of apps that are exploring our changing relationship with both. We are all digital archaeologists now, writes Robert Carroll. But in…

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To err is human; to err in digital culture is design. In the glitches, inefficiencies, and errors that ergonomics and usability engineering strive to surmount, Peter Krapp identifies creative reservoirs…

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Revolutions are often thought of in terms of conflict and disorder, but they just as often come on waves of peaceful obsolescence. The old way of doing things is allowed…

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"Humans obviously evolved a much wider range of communication tools to express their thoughts, the most important being language," said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU's Institute of Arctic and Alpine…

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Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get…

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I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as…

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For many years, philosophers have been casting doubt on the common identification with meaning and signification as the primary human response mechanisms to the world. If we wish to understand…

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What will the digital world look like in ten years?  The trends are already clear. Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path.  The explosion in the…

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When you visit the History of Computer Chess exhibit at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the first machine you see is "The Turk." In 1770, a Hungarian…

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On June 17, 2010, Sergey Ulasen was in his office in Belarus sifting through e-mail when a report caught his eye. A computer belonging to a customer in Iran was…

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Visual and audio reproduction have undergone massive changes as their underlying technologies shifted from analog to digital over the past two decades. It's clear that it is far more convenient…

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Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information…

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Largely unseen by the world, two dangerous germs homed in on their targets in the spring and early summer of 2009. One was made by man to infect computers. The…