The Death of Alan Turing

Roadrunner supercomputer puts research at a new scale

On Saturday, Los Alamos researchers used PetaVision to model more than a billion visual neurons surpassing the scale of 1 quadrillion computations a second (a petaflop/s). On Monday scientists used PetaVision to reach a new computing performance record of 1.144 petaflop/s. The achievement throws open the door to [...]

Check this out (Thanks Steve!)
Insight into how we tell whether something’s alive

When viewers see the unscrambled pictures, they readily discern whether the point-light display represents a living thing or a random moving pattern. In fact, the task is so easy that it’s not actually very useful for researchers trying to understand the visual system. What [...]

Robot Swarms Invade Kentucky
One thing that the robots don’t know yet is how to define boundaries of the network, so they often spread out from the center and then get disconnected. The robots can communicate via one another (they know the neighbors, but don’t know about everybody else) but not with everybody at once. So [...]

The Soul in the Machine
When I was ushered into the room, the professor motioned me to a chair, his hands playing nervously, his shoulders rising with each breath. “Ask me anything you like,” he said, fixing me with an intent look, before staring at the floor despondently when I began to chuckle. “How many actuators [...]

I meant to post something on this a while ago, and never did, but let me save it for posterity.
More on Blue Brain:
“The column has been built and it runs,” Markram says. “Now we just have to scale it up.” Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, [...]

Speaking of long articles worth reading, Vanity Fair has assembled a good oral history of the Internet to celebrate it’s 50th anniversary.
How the web was won
Leonard Kleinrock: September 2, 1969, is when the first I.M.P. was connected to the first host, and that happened at U.C.L.A. We didn’t even have a camera or a [...]

Excellent article on the Internet up on The Atlantic (thanks, Lally!) that ties the internet into the long history of automated “choreography” characteristic of the industrialized world.
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at [...]

now that the drama is over
Meanwhile, Obama’s Chicago headquarters made technology its running mate from the start. That wasn’t just for fund raising: in state after state, the campaign turned over its voter lists — normally a closely guarded crown jewel — to volunteers, who used their own laptops and the unlimited night and weekend [...]