HCI

Man kann ja nie präzise genug sein, wenn es um das Ranking von Suchergebnissen geht. Ein Platz eins, zwei und drei reicht mir jedenfalls nicht. Ich freue mich über jede Nachkommastelle.

destatis.de

Let’s round up our coverage of useless OS X applications. Todays pick is Heart Monitor.

Dear Finder,
can you please tell me which copy operation failed?

Finder message that conceals vital information

I had multiple copy operations running in parallel and one of them failed. But which?

I had to remember the files I wanted to copy and manually check which of them had made it the target drive…

I just realized that about 42 years ago the well known and often misperceived computer program Eliza was published. It was written by computer science legend Joseph Weizenbaum, who sadly past away a month ago.

Elizas’ most commonly known implementation “Doctor” resembles a conversation between a psychologist and her patient. Basically everything the user says is rephrased into a question by some pattern matching algorithms. The algorithms used in Eliza are actually pretty simple and fit into some hundreds lines of code. No world knowledge or databases to store the conversation are needed.

The program was never intended to serve as surrogate for real psychotherapists. In fact Weizenbaum wanted to show how easy it is to create the illusion of “intelligent” computers and he was shocked when he realized that many people took his simple set of transformation rules so serious, that they even asked him to leave the room while talking to it.

Weizenbaum became a critic of computers and especially a critic of a society that heavily depends on computers and accepts their judgment without doubt, as little errors in small parts of a complex system may lead to fatal consequences.

I strongly recommend reading his famous article “Albtraum Computer” (german) and maybe his book linked on the right.

I think his concerns are especially true today and our society should be extremely careful about how far we trust computer generated no-fly lists, bombing target optimization systems, and automated tools for stock market evaluation.

Have fun with the JavaScript version of Eliza after the page-break and feel free to post your funniest dialogs with Eliza as a comment.

Remember you days at school and your physics class? Wouldn’t it be great if that sketch of a pendular or that hand-drawn solar system magically turns into an animated physics simulation?

Actually this is possible for some time now, as MIT developed ASSIST, an sketch understanding system for whiteboards.
It lets you draw objects like bricks, balls, and springs. Your sketch is interpreted so that the system gets an understanding what is a moveable object which elements should stay in place.
After hitting "Run" your drawing is feed into a physics engine and magically turns into a nice animation on your whiteboard.