Hi everyone
It has been quite a week on the technology front with IBM's Watson cleaning up on Jeopardy. A good show, by the way and one that, until now, only humans could compete.
While Watson doesn't think like a person, or think at all, actually, it does give us some visibility on how Humans don't think and what we may be able to do with technology like that IBM has created.
A great article on the Watson experience can be found in this month's Atlantic but I do agree that this technology, particularly given its pattern finding capabilities will be incredibly powerful in terms of research with large quantities of data.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/is-it-time-to-welcome-our-new-computer-overlords/71388/
With Watson winning, a prize of $1,000,000 was to be awarded to the charity of IBM's choice. One of the charities selected with the World Community Grid ( http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ ) which I then investigated. This is basically similar to the SETI@Home project setup about a dozen years ago. It leverages a community of members who give unused cycles on their computers to solving broken down components of large problems in investigations underway by research organizations. This sort of approach is great for modeling problems such as molecular shapes, materials development, biochemical research and the like or just where there is a lot of data to be processed. Well, being the creature that I am, I immediately signed up. You will see the Grid's banner along with my latest stats at the bottom of this blog. Both my laptop and my rather overpowered desktop/multimedia machine are running the application. My multimedia box is an i7 Quad Core, hyperthread machine with 12 GBytes of RAM and a ridiculous 18 TBytes of disk. I could not, for the life of me, get that processor up to 20% utilization until I loaded the Grid software. Now, with no impact on performance for any of the other things I do with it, I am averaging 80%! Wow! And I get to help cure childhood cancer too. That makes me feel even better about my contribution that Suzanne Somers feels about hers! I least I am working with people who are educated, smart and honest.
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-human-condition/2009/10/23/breaking-health-author-suzanne-somers-mostly-wrong-about-science-medicine.html
One last thought on Grid Computing, if we are doing what we currently are doing as early adopters with free cycles on PCs, what are the possiblities when there are a couple of billion smartphones on the planet?
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/02/urban-supercomputers.php?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29&utm_content=Seesmic
Now, onto our last new bit of technology on today's blog. I am slowly moving paperless in my life. Both at work, I co-own a paperless computing company, and in my private life by the elimination of paper books and magazines from my home but with the edition of two iPhones, an iPad and a Sony eReader, I am trying to do my sustainable bit. As well as saving a fair bit of money and reading more, rather than less.
Well, if I can do that, why can't our technologically sophisticated children. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the iSchool initiative.
Wow! What a great time to be alive! Next blog is on the space program!
Paul
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