computer science

Imagine this scenario; you are in your new driverless car and a situation arises (doesn't matter how) where the driver (the computer) has to decide between crashing into a group of young school children, probably killing several, or slamming the car into a wall and probably killing the passenger, i.e. you! Simple ethics would recommend taking a least harm approach, but that means maybe killing you. Would you buy a car programmed to kill you? Or would you prefer to buy one that would make the less ethical choice and always seek to protect the car's occupants. These ethical dilemmas are coming to the fore with the advent of autonomous systems. Several years ago the UK's Royal Academy of Engineers published a report on the ethics of emerging technologies and autonomous systems . More recently MIT Technology Review posted a piece titled  Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill .  My colleague, Paul Ralph, also just gave a radio interview...

You may already conduct a lot of your life online, but few countries have totally embraced the concept of online citizenship. the small European country of Estonia has been conducting an interesting experiment making all their population " e-Residents ". The Register has just published an interesting article on its reach and impact . This was brought to my attention by my colleague Mark Wilson . from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/ Put the internet to work for you. Turn off or edit this Recipe Recommended for you

Computer Pioneer, Mainframe Computer Architect & Entrepreneur He is remembered for Amdahl's law that basically states that the intrinsically serial part of any algorithm will limit the benefits from parallel processing. He was one of the architects of the IBM System/360 line of computers that dominated the mainframe industry and are still a force today. He was a champion of high-end uniprocessing. Read his biography in the New York Times .    I am grateful to Dr Amdahl for creating a company at which I was able to work as a computer architect for 6 years, 1976-82 and consult at for more. I did not have much to do with him directly – he was way above my level and he left to form a new company in 1979. But some anecdotes are in order.    Dr Amdahl was revered by his Engineering Staff. He had a great knack of inventing rules of thumb to guide the designers. One was "one megabyte of I/O for every MIP of performance". Another, I remember vaguely, was that "caches shou...

If you are a regular reader of this blog you'll know that I'm a big fan of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Consequently I'd be certain to want a set of these Lovelace & Babbage Lego bricks should they ever be made. They would be a  fanciful and historical collection of bricks that pay homage to the Victorian roots of the computer age. The set would let you build a lego steam punk analytical engine within which you could embed a Raspberry Pi or similar mini-computer board. You can find out more on the Lego Ideas website . from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/ Put the internet to work for you. Turn off or edit this Recipe ...

If you've always wanted to walk one of New Zealand's classic walks now you can without even breaking a sweat. Google has added several classic NZ walks, such as the Milford Track , to Google street view within Google Ma ps. This was reported in the New Zealand Herald last week . from The Universal Machine http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/ Put the internet to work for you. Turn off or edit this Recipe Recommended for you

Even those of us who write professionally for a living often make typos, such as letter transpositions (did you spot "prefect" in the title instead of "perfect", and sometimes our grammar is less than perfect. All of us can use a little help. I've always recommended that my students use spell and grammar checkers built into software like Microsoft Word. However, as we increasingly create documents in the cloud, in browser-based software, that option is not available - enter Grammarly . If you're a regular reader of this blog you know that I don't often promote products, but I'm impressed with this. Grammarly once installed as a browser extension sits in the background watching every word you type. It then underlines words that may be misspelled or easily confused with similar words, either by spelling or meaning. Hovering the cursor over the word brings up suggestions that you can accept or reject. Grammarly also has O...