Daily Science Dose

I find it ironic that just a few weeks after watching the finale of the great space soap opera known as Battlestar Galactica, a tale of technology running amok and former-slave-labor-robots evolving on their own to exact revenge on humankind, that we get news that scientists have developed robots or software programs that can think for themselves in terms of science experimentation and theorizing.

But does that robot look like this?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

But back to the news…

Aberystwyth University in Wales has a robotics department that has built ADAM. The head of the ADAM team, Ross King, says that ADAM carries out experiments and uses reason to theorize and plan for additional experiments.

It is the world’s first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery — in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker’s yeast.

“On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we’ve checked that it’s got the results correct,” King said in an interview. –Reuters

And yes, EVE is being built next.

Around the same time, another team working on artificial intelligence has announced that they have developed a program that can independently reason its way through Newtonian physics.

…Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt of Cornell University in New York, who have developed a computer program capable of working out the fundamental physical laws behind a swinging double pendulum.

Just by crunching the numbers — and without any prior instruction in physics — the Cornell machine was able to decipher Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and other properties. — Reuters again

My only fear with these AI “sci-lons” is what will happen when they figure out the only way to solve the climate crisis, the food crisis, the extinction crisis, the water crisis, etc would be to kill all humans?

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Finally, the internet and wireless phones can be put to work on the side of good rather than just porn.

A test run of a new software suite called INSTEDD in Southeast Asia holds a world of promise when it comes to coordinating information across multiple users and agencies, locations, database configurations. Think of it as social networking among emergency and crisis workers and the people locally by anything from disease outbreaks to natural disasters.

I think everyone can agree that recent disasters like the Indian Ocean Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina has shown everyone that communication can be an effective key to mitigating the most profound effects of emergency situations. And as our methods of communication have expanded beyond telephones and telegraphs, so too must our tools for responding to disasters and epidemics.

As an example, the “test run” in Stung Treng Province, Cambodia was meant to simulate an outbreak of a disease scattered among many small villages throughout the region. Text messages, emails, and even blogs are useful tools to communicate, but with this new suite of three programs, INSTEDD can coordinate all methods of communication and can turn all that info into useful data for government agencies, relief workers, local residents, health officials, and anyone else who would be involved in relief efforts.

The INSTEDD suite consists of GeoChat, which “enables team members to communicate their position and important information using text messages, email or a web browser, with data instantly synchronized on every team members’ mobile phone or laptops.” The second component of the suite is Mesh4X, which translates all the different software among different agencies (stuff like which database software they use) among all the users. Finally, INSTEDD gives us Evolve, a tool that mines data and then provides vizualization tools like maps and charts to better understand all that information that is coming in now that all forms of communicating are linked up, with no software compatibility issues.

INSTEDD comes from a Palo Alto, California non-profit of the same acronym, which stands for Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters. INSTEDD has received money from Google, so it’s no surprise that Google Maps and Google Earth are part of the visualization tools.

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And why not, ladies?

Computers are so hard. I might get wrinkles.

I ran across an interesting article in the New York Times today (the article is from the 15th). It is one of those essays that explore an issue, but never offers a full answer, only leaving me with more questions that before I read it. Anyhoo, it seems that women and computers do not go hand in hand. Sure, there are a gazillion female web designers, but nary a girl to be found in collegiate level computer science classes.

From the article:

What’s particularly puzzling is that the explanations for under-representation of women that were assembled back in 1991 applied to all technical fields. Yet women have achieved broad parity with men in almost every other technical pursuit. When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor’s degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.

When one looks at computer science in particular, however, the proportion of women has been falling. In 2001-2, only 28 percent of all undergraduate degrees in computer science went to women. By 2004-5, the number had declined to only 22 percent. Data collected by the Computing Research Association showed even fewer women at research universities like M.I.T.: women accounted for only 12 percent of undergraduate degrees in computer science and engineering in the United States and Canada granted in 2006-7 by Ph.D.-granting institutions, down from 19 percent in 2001-2. Many computer science departments report that women now make up less than 10 percent of the newest undergraduates.

The article goes on to blame the gaming community for being so dude-centric. And all the games that are developed don’t appeal to girls. I can agree with first part of that, but not necessarily the second.

Anyone hear of the Sims? How about Tomb Raider? Sure, you could argue that TR is a male-fantasy in the badassness of Lara Croft, but it is a bit of a girl-fantasy, too. What little girl doesn’t want to find ancient artifacts in the jungles of Peru, while totally looking hot, and blasting away the bad guys with your twin 9mm’s?

The gaming community is male-dominated, for sure, but I don’t think that the gender-inequality is really to blame. Think about the caliber of men in the gaming community. They send shivers down my spine, and I am a gamer that can barely tolerate being in Gamestop for more than ten minutes, lest the dorks rub off on me (ahem). What girl would choose to spend every working day, be it in school or on the job, with those guys? Sorry to generalize, gents, but come on, you know what I am talking about.

In a previous life, I worked in the media industry, i.e. television, and let me tell you, those guys are weird, and I mean weird. The first few jobs were okay, because they were short-term projects, but after ten months of working with quasi-virgins and totally socially-awkward male editors, I quit and vowed to change careers. It is really difficult to work with such men, that have cloistered their entire lives in their parent’s basement, graduating from Sega to the Playstation to the Xbox, all the while missing out on crucial social interaction time to become well-rounded and non-creepy chronic self-pleasurers.

Sorry to rant. Back on topic…

Ms. Cassell [director of Northwestern University’s Center for Technology & Social Behavior] identifies another explanation for the drop in interest, which is linked to the pejorative figure of the “nerd” or “geek.” She said that this school of thought was: “Girls and young women don’t want to be that person.”

I spoke with Ms. Spertus last week about her thoughts about the declining percentage of undergraduate women majoring in the field. “Women choosing not to go into computer science is fine,” she said, “if there aren’t artificial barriers keeping them out.” She lamented the recent decision of one of her outstanding computer science students who chose to major in nursing because of what the student perceived as better prospects for finding employment.

Yeah, again, not so much that a girl doesn’t want to be a nerd, we just don’t like hanging out with geeks. Even geek-chic isn’t going to help some of those guys.

Not a very scientific post today, but some days we need to have a little fun around here.

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