Kickstarter Campaign Begins for Babbage & Lovelace

Just in time for Ada Lovelace Day I’m starting off the Kickstarter campaign to fund my newest book Babbage & Lovelace: The Victorian Computer Wizard and the Enchantress of Numbers. It’s the completely true story of the efforts of two of the most intriguing individuals in the history of science, and their efforts to build an actual working computer in the mid-1800’s, Charles Babbage was an iconoclastic mathematician willing to explore radical new technologies who conceived of a mechanical gearwork computer. Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the notorious poet Lord Byron and a brilliant mathematician in her own right. She took Babbage’s ideas, translated them for the public and then expanded upon them. Together they dedicated their lives to  bringing the computer revolution to Victorian England, and they very nearly succeeded. Therein lies one of the great what if questions of history as well as the spark that helped launch the Steampunk movement.

If you’d like to learn more about Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, please check out the Kickstarter campaign page.

National Academy of Sciences Soliciting Input on Human Space Flight

I just received some interesting email about the NRC looking for input on human space flight. This is a great opportunity to let our voices be heard on an important issue, so please share this, and considering submitting a short input paper of your own.

From: David Brandt-Erichsen
To: nss-board-discuss@nss.org
Announcement of Opportunity to Submit Input to Study on Human  Spaceflight

Deadline is July 9

The U.S. National Research Council  (NRC) of the National Academy of
Sciences is currently  conducting a congressionally-requested study
to examine the  goals, core capabilities, and direction of human
space flight.  This study, which is being carried out by the NRC’s
Committee  on Human Spaceflight, will provide findings and
recommendations  to guide the U.S. human spaceflight enterprise in a
sustainable  manner. The Committee on Human Spaceflight recognizes
the  importance of reaching out to the communities interested in
human exploration and is using several approaches to solicit input
regarding the motivations, goals, and the possible evolution of
human spaceflight. One important source of input is this call  for
short papers from communities around the world with an  interest in
human spaceflight.

The Committee on Human  Spaceflight invites interested individuals
and groups to submit  input papers describing their own ideas on the
role of human  spaceflight and their vision for a suggested future.
In  developing their papers, respondents are asked to carefully
consider the following broad questions.

1. What are the important  benefits provided to the United States and
other countries by  human spaceflight endeavors?

2. What are the greatest challenges to  sustaining a U.S. government
program in human spaceflight?

3. What are the ramifications and what would the nation and  world
lose if the United States terminated NASA’s human  spaceflight
program?

In discussing the above questions,  respondents are asked to describe
the reasoning that supports  their arguments and, to the extent
possible, include or cite  any evidence that supports their views. In
considering #1  above, submitters may consider private as well as
government  space programs.

This request for input papers is open to any and all  interested
individuals and groups. For more information on the  committee and
the goals of the study, please see the statement  of task at http://www.nationalacademies.org/humanspaceflight.

Formatting  and Length Requirements

To facilitate document management, the Committee  asks that
submitters abide by the following formatting  guidelines:

• Input papers should not be more than 4 pages in length.  Papers can
include web links to other documents among the  references.

• Use a 10 or 12-pt font with 1-inch margins on all sides of  the
document.

• Use Microsoft Word (.doc) or Adobe  Acrobat (.pdf). No other
formats will be accepted.

•  Authors are responsible for obtaining any permissions necessary to
use, or for the NRC to reproduce, copyrighted material.

• Position  papers must be less than 50 MB in size. For file
management  purposes, please compress your figures if this does not
detract  from the clarity of your white paper. You should feel free

to include hyperlinks to high resolution versions.

• A cover page can be  included (beyond the 4-page limit) that shows
the title of the  white paper, a short abstract, the primary author’s
name, phone  number, institution, and email address, and a list of
co-authors with their respective institutions.

Utilization of the  Papers

All submitted papers will be reviewed by the Committee on  Human
Spaceflight. Note that, because participants will be  self-selected,
these input papers will not be used to judge the  prevalence of
attitudes or opinions within various communities.  However, they will
help ensure that the committee hears about  important issues from
interested parties. The submitted papers  will also be available for
public viewing at  http://bit.ly/13mEg1i. All input papers will be considered non-proprietary for  distribution with attribution.

Submission Instructions

Please  submit your white paper by navigating to http://bit.ly/11edCc8. Clicking on the  appropriate link there which will take you to a page where you can upload your  input paper as instructed. You must agree to the copyright consent form on that  page before uploading your document. Doing so will ensure that your paper will  be reviewed by the committee and that your contribution will be made publicly  available.

Submissions must be made through  http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DEPS/ASEB/DEPS_083343 by no later than July  9, 2013. All submitted white papers will be made public.

 

What do you think? Should we pursue human space flight, or leave it to the robots?

Name(required)

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Website

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Submit

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Is My Car Smarter Than I Am?

Robotic car from Tokyo start-up ZMP.

With all the high tech gizmos and gadgets added to cars every year; GPS, electronic ignition, automatic stability control, etc., it might cause some of us to wonder if our cars are smarter than we are. The short answer is not yet, but they’re working on it.

Granted, we haven’t quite reached the point where you can hop into a robocar, like the taxi in Total Recall, tell it your destination, and then sit back and enjoy a nice nap or lose yourself in the newest ebook while the car’s AI does all the work, but scientists and engineers are

Johnny Cab from Total Recall (1990)

constantly upgrading and adding to the computer controlled systems in our

family vehicles. That day may come sooner than you think.

The average car already has more computing power than the Apollo rockets. It isn’t just a single computer. It’s more like 20 or 30, controlling almost every aspect of the car’s operations, from how much fuel to inject when you step on the gas to the safest way to stop when you hit the brakes. Engine temperature, fuel efficiency, traction control, exhaust, even the radio and air conditioning are optimized by computers to improve the car’s performance. Driving is rapidly being transformed from a tedious chore to the ultimate mobile app.

It’s not that the car is smarter than you, but it is better at many of the tasks that are critically important for driving. Between 30,000 and 40,000 people are killed every year in auto accidents, and we’re usually the cause. Humans are the weakest link. According to some estimates, 93% of all accidents are caused by driver error. It’s not that we’re incompetent, most of us any way. It’s that we’re distracted. We talk on the cell phone, text, eat, put on make-up all while trying to drive. Instead of giving our full attention to the road and its hazards, we’re worrying about picking up our kids or what to say in that big meeting. On top of that, we tend to do stupid things like speed or get behind the wheel after having a few drinks or when we’re sleepy.

Computers never have to worry about any of that. They never get tired or hungry or distracted or drunk. They don’t even blink. Their reaction time is also incredibly faster. In order to react to something, like a stopped car or a child dashing into the street, a message has to travel from our eyes to our brain. There it gets processed and a response gets sent to the muscles in our hands and feet. All of these messages travel across our nerves at about 200 mph. That sounds pretty fast until you compare it to a computer, whose messages are literally transmitted at the speed of light.

The Defense Advanced Research Administration (DARPA), the folks who brought you the internet, put the concept of autonomous cars to the test. In 2004, they sponsored the Grand Challenge for driverless cars. The contestants had to design and build a car that could drive itself through a rugged 150 mile course in the Mojave desert. The prize was $1 million. 21 teams qualified. None of them managed to cross the finish line. Undeterred, a second Grand Challenge was held in 2005. This time 5 cars completed the course. The team from Stanford University and their modified Volkswagon diesel Touareg named Stanley took home the prize money.

Stanford University autonomous car

Having shown that a car could navigate through a desert course, the DARPA folks decided to push the envelope a little farther in 2007 by sponsoring an Urban Challenge. Contestants’ cars had to navigate a 60 mile course set up at the now-closed George Air Force Base in Southern California. Along the way, they had to contend with obstacles including other cars, merge into traffic and complete the course in less than 6 hours. The winner was a Chevy Tahoe named Boss, built by Tartan Racing. Stanford University and their Volkswagen Passat named Junior had to settle for 2^nd place.

With the success of the DARPA competitions, several car makers, including Toyota, BMW and Volkswagen have unveiled autonomous prototypes capable of navigating, staying in lanes, merging into highway traffic and even parallel parking without the aid of a human driver.

Google’s autonomous modified Prius.

Google is getting in on the action too. In May of 2012, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles approved Google’s application to test an autonomous car on Nevada roads. They stipulated that the car must carry a $1 million bond and have two people in the car at all times, including one behind the wheel who can take control in an emergency, but it’s a start. So, while we’re not quite at the point where everyone has an autonomous automobile yet, that’s the direction we’re headed.  Once more around the park HAL.

Google’s autonomous modified Prius.

Making Up The Creativity Gap

Whether it’s in the science laboratory, the corporate boardroom or  the political arena what we need now is more creativity. Our increasingly complex world and its multifaceted problems demands unconventional approaches and innovative solutions, but that’s where the problem lies. Research is showing that instead of becoming  more creative to meet these demands, we are actually losing creativity. America, the nation that boasted of Yankee ingenuity, and gave the world some of the greatest scientists in history, is becoming less and less creative.

 Dr.Kyung Hee Kim (http://cfge.wm.edu/contact.htm) studies creativity at the College of William & Mary. Like other researchers in the field, she uses something known as the Torrance Test (http://www.indiana.edu/~bobweb/Handout/d3.ttct.htm) to assess an individual’s creative potential. Developed in the 1950’s by professor E. Paul Torrance, it’s a standardized assessment, administered to children, that focuses on divergent thinking and problem solving. The test has been used for decades, all over the world in over 50 languages, and been shown to have three times the predictive power of traditional IQ tests for lifetime creative accomplishment.

 Dr. Kim looked at the results of over 300,000 Torrance test results, and noticed a disturbing trend. For a number of years, Torrance test scores, like IQ scores, had been showing a fairly consistent increase. That is, until around 1990. Kim noticed that from that point on, the creativity scores of American children began to drop. The trend has been continuing over the last 20 years. According to Kim, “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant.” She went on to point out that the decline is most serious in children from kindergarten through sixth grade.

 It may be too early to assign a cause for the drop in creativity, but the usual suspects are frequently blamed, too much TV and computer time, not enough exercise and unstructured play. Another aspect of the decline in U.S. creativity may be attributed to our educational system. America’s current mania for high stakes standardized testing may be boosting test scores at the expense of creativity. School systems are under tremendous pressure to encourage students to give the “correct” answer, not the creative one.

 Compare that with the education systems of other countries. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently went to China to look  at how children are being educated in one of our country’s biggest competitors.  A July, 2010 Newsweek article (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.print.html) reported what he found:

“Plucker recently toured a number of such schools in Shanghai and Beijing. He was amazed by a boy who, for a class science project, rigged a tracking device for his moped with parts from a cell phone. When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ‘”

That backward rush toward standardization instead of innovation has enormous consequences. As our world and the problems we face become ever more complex, the need for “outside the box” thinking has never been greater. What we need is less of the dutiful bubbling in of the proper answer, and more of the questioning of the conventional. If America is going to retain what’s left of our technological leadership we need a willingness to take chances, to foster independent thinking. What we need is more creativity, and the only way to get that is to make a concerted effort to nurture it.