Category Archives: Engineering

Wednesday 7th October 2015

Drop the Dead Donkey! (Is that really ‘News’?)

Most of us, watching TV from time-to-time, find ourselves saying, “Why’s that made the news? Surely there are more important stories?” That may well be true so is there a logical way to approach the issue?

Let’s start with a couple of extreme examples, to try to get a feel for this:

On May 7th this year, the UK went to the polls to elect a new government. Just about every news programme on radio and TV, as well as the whole Press, led with variants on the ‘story’ “Voters start voting in the General Election”. But was this actually ‘news’?

At the other end of the scale, what about the dog that can play the piano? (Or any similar ‘and finally’ space-filler.) Is it worth the space?

1 Comment | tags: Information theory, Newsworthy, Prioritisation | posted in Algorithms, Computing, Engineering, Philosophy, Politics

Monday 10th November 2014

The Ins and Outs of Robot Sex

By Vic Grout

This post is not for the faint-hearted or easily offended. With the First International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots taking place in Portugal this week, once again, many of the key issues relating to emerging technology extend well beyond the purely technological …

Without labouring on detail, there’s a certain type of spiritual confession, which takes place all over the world, in which past sexual conduct is a major aspect. Some crude advice often given to those (males, in this case) about to confess is along the lines of, “Don’t worry – I’ve heard it all before. In the end, there’s only five things you can really have sex with: a man, a woman, a child, an animal and a milk bottle.” So … in the AI simulated world of the future, does that taxonomy still work? Is an android sex-machine still a milk bottle or something more? Continue reading

6 Comments | tags: Cyber sex, Moralty and ethics, Robot sex, Sex industry, Sex legislation, Simulation | posted in Computing, Engineering, Hardware, Philosophy, Politics, Software

Thursday 25th September 2014

How Many Computer Scientists Does it Take to Change a Light Bulb?

By Vic Grout

… and other wild and carefree – probably offensive – stereotypes. A collection of ‘light-hearted’ (see what we did there?) thoughts and anecdotes trying to get to the bottom of what makes a Computer Scientist tick. There may or may not ultimately be a serious point …

It’s an old one but a good one:

There are 10 types of people in the world; those that understand binary and those that don’t

(At least, it’s as old and as good as CS jokes tend to be, which may not be a long vector in either direction.) But how much truth lies behind it? We hear a lot about this ‘computational thinking’, for example, these days but what does it take to be good at it? To what extent is CS ability a natural thing compared to what can be realistically taught? How much ‘computational thinking’ does everyone need today and how much can be left to the ‘experts’? In which case, what do we expect from the ‘experts’? Are programmers born that way or can the skill be developed? (Compare with artists: can you teach someone with no sense of perspective to be a landscape painter?) How much have Computer Scientists ‘evolved’ from experts in other disciplines? Whatever the underlying statistics might say, it does often seem that Computer Scientists are a breed apart from the rest of the world so what makes them so ‘special’?

1 Comment | tags: academic anecdotes, academic stereotypes, academic subjects | posted in Academia, Computer Science, Engineering, Industry, Mathematics, Philosophy, Politics, Science

Thursday 28th November 2013

“To the Finish” … and Beyond?

By Vic Grout

Can we continue to make computing devices smaller and/or faster? Can we do this without limit? If so, how? What’s the next generation?

Microchip designers use a wonderful armoury of terminology, most of it (deliberately, one suspects) impenetrable to outsiders. However, one of the – on the surface at least – least alarming, and certainly most charming, is the phrase “To the finish”. It’s an intriguing term and behind it is the spirit of an admirable intention. The only problem is no one really seems to know exactly what it means.

“To the finish”, in its broadest sense, is some mythological-technological future in which logic circuits have shrunk to such an extent that individual components are measured on the atomic scale. On one level, although in nominally different research fields, this is comparable to the “intelligent dust” predictions of the most enthusiastic Internet of Things proponents. Continue reading

Leave a comment | tags: 14 nanometer, 16 nanometre, Atomic scale, Biocomputer, Brain, Chip design, Digital electronics, Human brain, Integrated circuit, Logic gate, Moore's law, Optical computing, Quantum computer, Technology | posted in Computer Science, Computing, Engineering, Hardware, Industry, Science