Tuesday September 29, 2009 22:15
Find three useful Web pages or sites, one for each of three topics, that someone investigating it would be likely to find of interest. They should not be wikipedia articles (though wikipedia can be a good place to find links to other pages). Similarly they should not be on the first page of search engine hits for an obvious query. That’s too easy because the person doing that topic would surely find it without your help. This question will help start to familiarize all of us with these topics (leading to interesting discussions in class, for example.) (16 2/3 pts.)
Review them on your blog. For example, what is each about, what about it is interesting, what about it is not interesting, what do you agree or disagree with, why should or shouldn’t someone study it, what questions does it leave you with, etc. (16 2/3 pts.)
In class, briefly summarize your review(s) orally. (We may or may not have time to do all three, we’ll just have to see.) (16 2/3 pts.)
- Cybernetics
- In order to understand how to begin to build cybernetic technology, we need a deep understanding of how the brain works, and especially how our brains relate to our body image. VS Ramachandran is doing research into this topic, and this TED Talk video shows how little we really know about how it works.
- An interesting look at the state of cybernetics can be viewed through the experiences of Aimee Mullins, an athlete and fashion model who—because of a genetic abnormality—had to have both legs amputated. In these TED Talks, she details the types of legs she has had.
- A debate on the ethics of cybernetic implants is currently going on with the development of the Cochlear Implant. This device is not a hearing aid; instead, it directly stimulates auditory nerves leading to the brain. The question is, should they be implanted in children?
- What will the average human lifespan be in the US, in the year 2050?
- Longevity Insurance: A Missing Market provides an overview of this insurance product which will be on the rise as the population greys.
- Perhaps a future global shortage of food will entice people to adopt a Calorie-Restricted Diet, which will in turn increase longevity.
- Ray Kurzweil is devoting a lot of resources to solving the longevity problem, including “a radical shift in diet, a heavy supplementation regimen (he takes 250 supplements a day), and regular checkups and rejuvenation treatments to slow the aging process as much as possible using today’s technology.”
- DNA database(s) of the future
- 23andMe was one of the first public DNA testing companies. For $399 (originally $999), one can receive a kit to get their own genes assayed.
- The Human Genome Project was the first program to successfully sequence an entire human genome.
- Gene Therapy Clinical Trials from the US National Institutes for Health, list all the current US programs recruiting patients for cutting-edge clinical trials.
Apply TRIZ to your own topic. (10 pts) Pick a certain technology relevant to your topic. How could an implementation of it “branch out” and do other things? For example, pencils are a technology that “branched out” to also have erasers, storage bins for extra lead, clips for attaching it to a pocket, and so on. Cars now have air conditioners, play music, even have GPS devices for giving directions, etc. (40 pts) TRIZ also contains 40 principles for improving technologies. These are summarized in the course notes. Pick 10 and apply them to a technology relevant to your topic. What are 10 possible future advances you have discovered?
The topic of my research is the depiction of technology in popular entertainment, so in one sense, my topic is all about technology “branching out” and becoming more (especially how that is translated into popular fiction). For the purposes of this assignment, I would like to talk about driving. Not just cars, which are touched on in the prompt, but the experience of driving in general. For one, driving could branch out to become the destination instead of a journey: like we do with cruise ships, maybe we could have “cruise cars” which would provide most of the entertainment/accomodations in situ.
- Prior Counteraction. Redirect traffic flow in response to changing travel conditions.
- Rushing Through. On certain straightaways (such as Interstate 40 through the wastelands of Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona), speed could be vastly increased, resulting in shorter drive times for travelers.
- Composite Materials. Both roads and tires could be changed to increase friction (which decreases energy required to push a car forward).
- Homogeneity. When all cars (or sufficiently most) are made of the same parts, it will be cheaper to replace them. Maybe a nationalized car company could produce this car.
- Continuity of Useful Action. How many times have you been in a rush of traffic, and all of a sudden the whole group has to stop to let one car cross traffic perpendicular to the main flow? This has been ameliorated somewhat by use of weight pads instead of strict timers for traffic lights, but the process could be “smarter” by allowing the large groups of traffic to continue using the energy efficiently (acceleration) instead of inefficiently (braking).
- Self-Service. “Driving drives itself.” Full auto-pilot could be the most efficient of all.
- Use Strong Oxidizers. Regarding internal combustion: one problem with using recycled oil for fuel is that it has to be sufficiently warm in order to be viscous enough to pass through the engine. By using a stronger oxidizer, namely gasoline, as an additional fuel source, we can use just enough gasoline to start the engine and heat the vegetable oil, then switch to different energy for propulsion.
- Inexpensive Short Life. If the lifecycle of a car were an order of magnitude shorter than now, advances in technology (safety, fuel efficiency, etc) could reach more people quicker.
- Equipotentiality. Driving should be sufficiently automated so that any position in the car (manned by a licensed driver) could take over the monitoring and intervention of the route, perhaps through an embedded touch-control or joystick system, or a wireless pad.
- Combination. If multiple cars have the same route for a sufficient period of time, physically link the vehicles to take advantage of possible fuel savings due to drag reduction. Picture cars joining in a “V” formation similar to birds.
Monday September 28, 2009 14:57
1) (22.5 pts.) Let’s assume you have $1,000 to invest in prediction markets. Naturally, you want to make more money, meaning that when you sell your best judgments you get more than the $1,000 you invested. Identify a prediction market company that you want to pretend invest in. We looked at www.intrade.com in class but there are others. Furthermore, www.intrade.com has both a set of real markets where you can invest (or some might claim gamble) real money, and a practice market site where you can invest pretend money. You can pretend invest in the real market without signing up for a login, or you can make a login account with them and use the practice market. Or you can find another prediction market other than intrade.com. The one thing you cannot do is open a real account (as part of this HW) because this course does not endorse, or suggest you to spend real money on, any particular company! For the next question let’s assume you are making pretend use of intrade’s set of real markets.
- I have successfully signed up for an account at Intrade. My account number is 11391869.
2) (22.5 pts.) Find 10 prediction markets that you are interested in or know more about than most others. For example, you might pick the prediction market for whether 2009 will be one of the 5 hottest years on record, the prediction market for whether Michael Jackson’s death will result in homicide charges, and some other eight. In fact there are dozens and dozens if not hundreds of markets they have easily accessible from their Web site. Make a list of them.
3) (22.5 pts) For each of the 10 markets, decide whether the current probability shown on the graph is higher or lower than your best judgment. List the ones for which you judge the current probability to be too low.
4) Invest your $1,000 in the ones you feel are currently too low, as follows.
- a. (3.5 pts.) Pick one of the markets. Say which one. I am picking the 2016 Olympics being picked to be in North America.
- b. (3.5 pts.) Figure out the price of a single contract (a contract is a little like a share of stock). That price is: (the probability in percentage points) x ($0.10). So if the probability on the graph is 65%=0.65, then a single contract will cost you 65 x $0.10, or $6.50, to buy. Give this price in your HW. The probability of the contract is 65.9%, so a single contract costs $6.59.
- c. (3.5 pts.) Decide how many contracts to buy (remember you have $1,000 but will want to spread that over a number of different markets). Note the number in your HW. I bought 50 contracts of the 2016 Olympics in North America, and 50 contracts of Humans having neural implants accessing the internet by 2020.
- d. (3.5 pts.) Figure out the total amount you are investing in this market. State this. $329 in the 2016 Olympics and $5 for Neural Implants (this is a just-started market).
- e. (8.5 pts.) Subtract that from $1,000 to find out how much you have left to invest in the other markets. Then go through the above steps again using another market. Repeat until you have invested all of the $1,000 in the markets you have chosen to invest in. They actually gave me $5000 of play money to invest.
5) (10 pts., to be assigned toward the end of the semester. 10 if you make money, but only 5 if you lose money, sorry!) You may sell any of your contracts at any time during the semester, and buy any new contracts you like with the money you got from selling (or just hang on to the money if you prefer). You are not required to do this, if you just want to keep the same contracts. To sell, just see what the contracts you have are worth, using the graphs at the company Web site, and pretend you’ve sold them. Keep track of what you do by editing your blog entry for this HW. Toward the end of the semester I will ask everyone to sell everything and we’ll see how much money you’ve made or lost!
Wednesday September 23, 2009 14:19
- If your Delphi question was done in class on Wednesday 9/9 (i.e. “today”), then find the median and the range of the middle 50% of the responses. Using a graphics editor of your choice (even paint works for this), make a graph that is analogous or similar to the one in the lecture notes, showing the total range, middle 50% range, and median.
- My topic was not discussed because I was sick with pneumonia. However, I did write down the responses for James Canada’s question: “When will there be a move from PCs and laptops to all-in-one devices that have telephone, internet, etc. When will the downfall of the PC happen? When will marketshare of all-in-ones outpace PCs?”
- The middle 50% responses were: 5, 5.5, 7, 8, 12 (I have discarded the “infinity” answer). The median is 7 (mean is 7.5). The range is 5 to 12.
- Recall that a project is part of the course, and this project will grow step by step throughout the semester. In other words, you will keep adding to it as we go along, so that in the end it will be a piece of work you can be proud of! Make up a tentative plan for your term project, which will be a paper, software system, combination, skit or musical performance or painting (if you are a fine arts major), or whatever it is. You may analyze the same topic as you used for your Delphi exercise, or change topics but include the Delphi results as an appendix or supplemental report. Also, answer the question, “What would be a good thing to do next on this project?”
- For my project, I would like to examine by comparing, contrasting, and extrapolating on the depiction of human-computer interaction in entertainment (movies, books, short stories) and technical literature. The final form of the project will be a multimedia presentation (similar to the one we viewed at the beginning of class) and perhaps an interactive part describing my findings.
Wednesday September 9, 2009 10:00
1. If your question was one of those that the class used the Delphi method on, find the median and the range of the middle 50% of the responses. Using a graphics editor of your choice (even paint works for this), make a graph that is analogous or similar to the one in the lecture notes, showing the total range, middle 50% range, and median. If your question was not discussed in class, then (1) figure out a way of saying the question that will hopefully work well when we apply the Delphi method to it in class, and (2) explain why you designed the question the way you did.
- My question was not asked in class, but it would be: “How long will Homo sapiens sapiens be the dominant species on planet Earth?” I ask this question because it is disruptive: not many people regularly think about the long-term survivability of the species, and maybe they should. I’ve recently been following The Long Now lecture series, which is all about different experts’ take on how to survive the next 10,000 years.
- I designed this question because we only rose to dominance on the planet a short while ago (200,000 years ago on a planet with 4,540,000,000 years of history). Also, there’s a pretty hard limit to the end date, and that is the end date of the planet itself, some 7,500,000,000 billion years distant (according to estimates).
2. Read up on the Delphi method on the Web (or the library). Explain how the process that we went through in class differs from the process as described in the sources you found.
- From Rowe and Wright (1999): The Delphi technique as a forecasting tool: issues and analysis. International Journal of Forecasting, Volume 15, Issue 4, October 1999: “The Delphi method is a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of independent experts. The carefully selected experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator provides an anonymous summary of the experts’ forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the “correct” answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a pre-defined stop criterion (e.g. number of rounds, achievement of consensus, stability of results) and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results.”
- The process we performed in class differs from the “official” Delphi method in a few respects. First, I don’t believe we classmates meet the standard for “independent experts” who were “carefully selected.” Second, our predictions and reasoning were not anonymous; we were able to interact with the person providing the reasoning. We also chose (I think arbitrarily) the stop condition of 2 rounds of voting. Perhaps with more rounds, our answers would’ve converged even more.
3. Based on what you can find about the Delphi method, what shortcomings, risks, or other weaknesses do you see for the process that we followed in class? Also do you see a way to fix some of these?
- The process we followed in class has plenty of shortcomings. Usually, anonymity of the participants is maintained, so that the “bandwagon effect” or “halo effect“ is minimized. Additionally, using the process in a class is not the best idea: the Delphi process must be interactive; it really only works if the participants are willing to participate, and are truly experts in the field being forecasted.
- Narrowing the topics being forecasted would help improve the accuracy of our predictions; perhaps a suitable topic would be “walking at UALR”—something we all have to deal with. Also, if it were compulsory to make feedback on the suggestions, anonymously, there might be some better discussion and possibly convergence on a single prediction.
Wednesday September 2, 2009 16:55
Part 1
Population evolution in different continents. The vertical axis is logarithmic and is millions of people.
Consider the different methods of making predictions that we went over in class. Pick the topic of your choice, apply them to that topic, and make some predictions about the future. You may focus on one scenario, or discuss alternative scenarios as well. You may write speculatively, or ground your discussion in facts and examples found on the Web or elsewhere. If purely speculatively without hunting down data on the Web, then more writing would make sense than if much of your time was spent finding data. A variation to a purely speculative essay would be to couch it as a short story, like a science fiction story. Alternatively, you can write a computer program that makes predictions, for example using the exponential curve equation or some other approach. In this vein, you could use Excel or another spreadsheet program to extrapolate. If you want to do something like that but aren’t sure how, let me know and we can discuss in class how to use spreadsheets this way.
- When will our species, Homo sapiens sapiens become extinct? Logically, the race must die out eventually (entropy must increase to maximum), but will that be years, centuries, millennia, or longer before that happens? And when it does, will it have been coming off a steady decline or will it happen sharply? Some (including Paul Davies and Martin Rees) think that recent advances in technology—without corresponding increases in sense of social responsibility—will be our downfall. Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question posits that the end of the race will happen at the end of the universe, when “the stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.”
- Applying prediction methods, particularly the Plateau model, looks to work for this problem. What goes up, must come down, after all. The included graph charts, logarithmically, the human growth rate. It looks like most (with the exception of Africa) are either trending toward evening out, or downward (Europe). I think that the European curve is a bell-weather for the other continents, even though it may take decades for them to “catch up.” Eventually, the growth rate will trend down overall, and the human population will decrease (on Earth), peaking at around 9-10 billion humans near 2050, according to a 2006 UN World Population Prospects report.
Part 2
a)Estimate the doubling time of the software development productivity of the average programmer, if productivity increases at 6%/year.
- doubling time = 11.895 years
b)Estimate the percent per year of increases in the complexity of PC computers if this complexity doubles every 2 years. (By “complexity” we could say we’re talking about the number of transistors on a CPU chip, if you were wondering.)
c)Estimate the percent per year of increases in the complexity of PC computers if complexity doubles every 18 months, as some think it is doing.
d)What is the doubling time of your money if you have it in the bank making 2% interest per year?
Friday August 28, 2009 18:40
I’m always tired of the local places not having their menus online, so I’m going to upload them one by one to this website. First up is New Fun Ree!
This also gives me a chance to test out Gallery3, the next-generation photo gallery software from the makers of Gallery2, which I use on almost all Savory Ape websites.
Wednesday August 26, 2009 13:15
For fall semester 2009, I’m enrolled in a bunch of higher-level Information Science courses at UALR. One of these is Dr. Berleant’s “Computing, Information, and the Future” class, a special-topics class being taught the first time this semester.
For the first homework assignment, we were tasked with setting up a blog (or integrating course content into our existing blog), and then to “find a modern and timely place on the Web that deals with the future of the same or a similar topic” as a three of the links in the syllabus. Find my three links inside…
Read the rest of this entry »
Monday June 29, 2009 01:08
In doing some work for the ACLU of Arkansas, I needed to convert some colors, and was flummoxed when I couldn’t find a good converter that would to Pantone to RGB and HEX values. Wolfram Alpha, being a computation engine, should find this right up its alley. It’s the first feature request I’ve submitted to the site, and they promise “[...] to respond to as many suggestions and comments as possible,
and to implement good suggestions we are given.”
I think it’s a good suggestion; what do you think? Here’s what I sent:
Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday June 17, 2009 12:05
Say you have a script—like the previous CIM Repository Listing script—that outputs hundreds of rows of text via WScript.Echo. On the command line, this is fine; the text will go scrolling by, and can be piped to the more command or grep (yes, really), or logged to a file. But if you make the mistake of executing a script like this by double-clicking, you’ll get modal popup messages that prevent the rest of the script from running until you hit “OK” for each line.
You could change the default scripting environment to always be the command line:
CScript //H:CScript //NoLogo //S
But then you have to treat the GUI-based scripts differently, and launch them from the command line with wscript. Oh, bother.
It’s always been possible to just go ahead and launch vbscripts from the command line with the cscript command, but having to open a command prompt and type out the path to the script every time is a pain. Why not have the script auto-detect how it was launched, and if it wasn’t launched from the command line, relaunch itself correctly? Well, Tek-Tips user tsuji has figured out how to do it.
By including this subroutine in your VBScript and putting a call to it at the top of the script, it will do just that.
The edits to this script from tsuji’s version are that instead of keeping the command window open after execution with the “/k” switch, I continue to use the “/c” (close command after completion) but chain the “pause” command at the end of the command. This is a little-known (in the DOS/Windows world, anyway) way of doing multiple things at once:
On *NIX, this will execute command2 after command1 completes, if it completes successfully (return code 0). On Windows, however, command2 will always be run, no matter the outcome of command1.
Sub force_cmdline
Dim args : args=""
Dim i, wshshell
If right(lCase(wscript.fullname),11)= "wscript.exe" then
For i=0 to wscript.arguments.count-1
args = args & wscript.arguments(i) & " "
Next
Set wshshell = createobject("wscript.shell")
wshshell.Run wshshell.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%comspec%") & " /c cscript.exe //nologo """ & wscript.scriptfullname & """" & args & " && pause"
set wshshell = Nothing
WScript.Quit
End If
End Sub
Monday June 15, 2009 12:00
When starting to troubleshoot a Windows Server problem, the best place to look is the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI); this little enclave of information—on every Windows machine—acts like a datastore representing the configuration of every nook and cranny of a system. But knowing what to look for is half the battle.
Recently, I was faced with diagnosing slow replication times for Branch Office Distributed File System Replication under Windows Server 2003. I had no idea where to look, so I referenced the following script, pointed the two instances of strComputer to our DFS-enabled file server, and looked for DFS-specific properties and methods:
cscript "List Win32 Providers.vbs" | grep -i dfs
This gave me the performance counters I could use to monitor performance, as well as how to programmatically create DFS shares and namespaces.
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService=GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
For Each objclass in objWMIService.SubclassesOf()
intCounter=0
If Left(objClass.Path_.Class,5) = "Win32" Then
For Each Qualifier in objClass.Qualifiers_
If UCase(Trim(Qualifier.Name)) = "ASSOCIATION" Then
intCounter = 1
End If
Next
If x = 0 Then
strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject _
("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & _
strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set strClass = objWMIService.Get(objClass.Path_.Class)
Wscript.Echo "PROPERTIES:"
For each strItem in strClass.properties_
Wscript.Echo objClass.Path_.Class & vbTab & strItem.name
Next
Wscript.Echo "METHODS:"
For Each strItem in strClass.methods_
Wscript.Echo objClass.Path_.Class & vbTab & strItem.name
Next
End If
End If
Next
