For people who like to find faults, good news appeared in 1989, in this study: “Locating Faults in a Constant Number of Parallel Testing Rounds,” Richard Beigel, S. Rao Kosaraju [pictured here], and Gregory F. Sullivan, Proceedings of the First Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, March 1989, pp. 189–198. The authors, at […]
Steven Sinofsky wrote a good (and long) essay about why and how computers crash less often than they used to. Sinofsky says in part: … In the early days of PCs before Windows, crashes froze the computer—nothing worked, not even banging on the keyboard. The only recourse was to turn the computer off and start over, […]
In 1969 a publishing executive mused about whether and how computers had helped his industry: “Pitfalls to Computer Use in Publishing and Communication,” Daniel Melcher, Journal of Business Communication, vol. 6, no. 2, Winter 1969, pp. 47-51. The author, chairman of the R.R. Bowker Company, says: Most large publishers now have computers; many small ones […]
“A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it.” When it comes to ‘Juiciness’ in Role Playing (Computer) Games, too much, or too little, it seems, can be non-ideal. Professor Dominic Kao and colleagues at the Virtual Futures Lab, Purdue University, US, have experimentally investigated such […]
“We want to start a theoretical and empirical discourse on the paradigm ‘computers as leaders’, because the world has changed since 1967, when Peter Drucker stated that computers are morons and make no decisions.” – explain Jenny S.Wesche [of Freie Universität Berlin, Institute of Psychology, Division of Social, Organizational and Economic Psychology, Berlin, Germany] and Andreas […]
The TV crew that visited today to interview me did something different—something that may mark the end of an era. This was, perhaps, the first TV crew that did NOT ask to film me typing at a computer. Maybe the trope of “science writer typing on a computer” is no longer assumed to be exotically […]
The 30+ years since the launch of Super Mario Bros. have given ample opportunity for scholars to study the game’s possible influences in academia and society at large. Here is a short list of some representative academic works [ all of which can be read in full via the links ] that have documented ramifications […]
“Hair detection in images is useful for many applications, such as face and gender recognition, video surveillance, and hair modelling.” – prompting the development of a new Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) software application which can sort images of hair styles into straight, wavy, curly, kinky, braids, dreadlocks, and short – with an accuracy of around […]
You might find that reading comic books is complex and confusing, if you are a machine. If both of those ifs afflict you, you might seek relief by reading this new study: “Deep CNN-based Speech Balloon Detection and Segmentation for Comic Books,” David Dubray, Jochen Laubrock, arXiv:1902.08137v1, 2019. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this […]
Opportunities for Animal Computer Interactions (ACI) are, it seems, in ascendance : “Take, for instance, the phenomenon where a cat walks on a keyboard when its owner is trying to work. This is called “cat typing”, and it results when the cat wants to be near the owner, and is attracted to the typing motions […]