Artificial Intelligence - Available Now

Artificial Intelligence - Available Now

  8:59:00 PM    Science Lover

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Whenever a person wants to present themselves as an industry expert, one credible approach is to paint a shining picture of future technology and what people can expect from hopeful visions of things to come. One potential that has long bothered me is the current general perception of artificial intelligence technology.

There are a few key concepts that are not often included in the general discussion of creating machines that think and act like us. First, the problem with artificial intelligence is that it is artificial. Trying to create machines that work like the human brain and its special creative properties has always seemed useless to me. We already have people to do all that. If we succeed in generating a system that is every bit as able as the human brain to create and solve problems, such an achievement will also result in the same limitations. There is no benefit in creating an artificial life form that can surpass us to further degrade the value of humanity. Creating machines to enhance and compliment the wonders of human thinking does have many appealing benefits. One significant plus to building artificially intelligent systems is the benefit of the teaching process. Like people, machines have to be taught what we want them to learn, but unlike us, the methods used to imprint machine instructions can be accomplished in a single pass.

Our brains allow us to selectively flush out information we do not want to retain, and are geared for a learning process based on repetition to imprint a long term memory. Machines cannot “forget” what they are taught unless they are damaged, reach their memory capacity, or they are specifically instructed to erase the information they are tasked to retain. This makes machines great candidates for performing all the tediously repetitive tasks, and storing all the information we do not want to burden ourselves with absorbing. With a little creativity, computers can be adjusted to respond to people in ways that are more pleasing to the human experience, without the need to actually replicate the processes that comprise this experience. We can already teach machines to issue polite responses, offer helpful hints, and walk us through learning processes that mimic the niceties of human interaction, without requiring machines to actually understand the nuances of what they are doing. Machines can repeat these actions because a person has programmed them to execute the instructions that offer these results. If a person wants to take the time to impress aspects of presenting their own personality into a sequence of mechanical instructions, computers can faithfully repeat these processes when called upon to do so.

In today’s market place, most software developers do not add on the extra effort that is required to make their applications seem more polite and conservatively friendly to the end users. If the commercial appeal for doing this was more apparent, more software vendors would race to jump onto this bandwagon. Since the consuming public understands so little about how computers really work, many people seem to be nervous about machines that project a personality that is too human in the flavor of its interaction with people. A computer personality is only as good as the creativity of its originator, which can be quite entertaining. For this reason, if computers with personality are to gain ground in their appeal, friendlier system design should incorporate a partnering with end users themselves in building and understanding how this artificial personality is constructed. When a new direction is needed, a person can incorporate that information into the process, and the machine learns this new aspect as well.

People can teach a computer how to cover all contingencies that arise in accomplishing a given purpose for managing information. We do not have to take ourselves out of the loop in training computers how to work with people. The goal of achieving the highest form of artificial intelligence, self-teaching computers, also reflects the highest form of human laziness. My objective in design is to accomplish a system that will do the things I want it to do, without having to deal with negotiating over what the system wants to do instead. This approach is already easier to achieve than most people think, but requires consumer interest to become more prevalent.

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Holographic Projection Glide Paths

Holographic Projection Glide Paths

  8:58:00 PM    Science Lover

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Holographic Technologies are getting closer to becoming reality and soon we can see the data on our computers in 3D, 4D and 5D. We will enjoy Virtual Reality on our 360 X-Box in our living rooms. Military strategists and war fighters can play out the battle in the virtual battlespace in advance and then watch it un-fold in real time. Great, great grandchildren will be about to meet their past ancestors and watch a holographic video. We will communicate in video conferencing with the image of the other people sitting next us, but not actually there. All this is on its way and even more, as the applications are endless indeed.

One application, which has not been mentioned, yet is the potential for pilots to have projected glide paths in front of them as they fly, actually watching their aircraft (full-size) in front of them. All they will have to do is follow the projection and match their aircraft to the angles and speeds of the holographic aircraft ahead. The projection will be set for safest glide path, avoid wake turbulence and be the most fuel-efficient decent. This will make flying easier and become a great training tool for new pilots building hours and their skills.

This will insure a proper downwind to base and base to final approach, with perfect angles, no steep banks and help the pilot land at the perfect speed on the threshold. Additionally these Holographic Projections will be recorded and used for training air traffic controllers and used by flight instructors to watch to make sure the student pilot is coming along fine. The instructor will be able to reduce the scale of the aircraft to 1:24 or 1:48 scale and show student how they did. This can help in training new fighter pilots in the military as well. This can add to the simulator experience. Such technology will come in handy for the NASA SATS Program making general aviation safe as we move more private automobile traffic from our ground transportation infrastructures into the air and help with the Virtual Control Tower Simulation Training Systems to help commercial aviation.

http://sats.larc.nasa.gov/main.html

http://www.simlabs.arc.nasa.gov/vast/vast.html

Imagine eliminating wake turbulence accidents by helping pilots avoid wake turbulence, by using net-centric systems inside the aircraft, which will re-project the holographic aircraft in front of them. Good for collision avoidance as well. This will alleviate issues with the 3-minute rule, when it should be extended or when it is not a factor. The increased efficiency will help the traffic flow at the larger airports, moving more aircraft on their way in less time.

http://oea.larc.nasa.gov/PAIS/AVOSS.html

The Holographic Technology is almost here and it such advances in science has the potential of literally solving many safety and efficiency issues in aviation in the present period and safety in space in the next period. Think on this.

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UFO: Futuristic Concepts and the End of the World

UFO: Futuristic Concepts and the End of the World

  8:55:00 PM    Science Lover

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I was sitting on the front stoop wondering if I should wash the pickup or pick the last of the tomatoes off my one vine that has produced about a zillion marble-sized tomatoes this summer.

I learned last year that you only need one tomato plant in Idaho unless you want to supply (no derogatory remark here) Wal-Mart®. I accidentally picked a plant that pumps out those wee tomatoes that I didn’t like. I like the big ones that send juice running down your cheeks when you bite into them.

My granddaughter, L, loves the little ones and I found that if you get a handful and plunk them into your mouth all at the same time, like she does, you can get a big tomato sensation. I went out to my plant and grabbed a handful. That’s when Xrytspet showed up.

“I don’t see how you can eat those things!”

I said, “Go away, Xrytspet!”

She said, “I came to help. Is that how I’m to be treated?”

“What do you want, Xrytspet?”

“I’ve come to help you with that article you are thinking about.”

As is her custom, she sat on my lap. I said, “Get off my lap!”

“I want to help you with that Future-Concepts - Got futuristic dreams of changing the world? Put even your most eccentric or innovative ideas here! article for the new http://ezinearticles.com category.

“Sense when do I need you to help me write, Xrytspet? I’ve got my own ideas for the article.”

“They stink!”

“What do you mean, they stink? You’ve been in there messing with my computer, haven’t you?”

“I made a few revisions to your article.”

She kissed my cheek and disappeared after turning herself into a Northern Fish Crow, a Blue Bird, and a Northern Shriek.

Last week she turned herself into a cheetah, a puma, and a jaguar before she disappeared. The jaguar chased me up our cherry tree.

I decided to skip washing the pickup. It was getting cloudy in the west and maybe it would rain. I went into the computer and read her article which is as follows:

Futuristic Concepts and Dreams that Will Change the World Including Eccentric and Innovative Ideas. by Xrytspet and John T. Jones, Ph.D.

To determine the future we went to the Synchronic Isentropic Time Warp Predictor and typed in Earth. Here is the printout of significant events:

March 2017: Bush War II (Iraq) ends. The casualties not counting Iraqis (who don’t count) were 12337 Americans, 12 Australian, 987 Britons, 134 Bulgarians, 7 Danes, 9 Dutch, 14 Estonians, 9 Hungarian, 260 Italians, 3 Kazakh, 4 Latvian, 174 Poles, 4 Salvadoran, 6 Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, 8 Thai and 18 Ukrainians.

April 2034: Bush War II (Afghanistan) ends. The casualties not counting citizens of Afghanistan (who don’t count) were 1250 Americans, 8 Australian, 12 Britons, 16 Canadians, 12 Danes, 14 French, 45 Germans, 16 Italians, 5 Norwegian, 7 Romanians and 57 Spaniards. There were also Pakistani deaths (who don’t count).

January 2037: Cell Phone Production Wavers Off: Only 2.345 billion telephones were produced in 2036. The death count by drivers using cell phones reached 52,617 deaths and 7,260,006 injuries.

November 2248: Post revolutionaries attempt to bring freedom to the United States: Students from the University of Nevada, Tonopah called on President Valerie Clinton, a descendent of President Hillary Rodman Clinton, to convince the 47 states that left the Union last year to return and to start up Congress again. The President said, “Are you kidding? I can hardly manage the three states that are left (Utah, Nevada, and Idaho).”

October-December 2869: Meteor shower throw big ones at Aberdeen, Kansas and Aberdeen, Scotland. Most humanoids were killed in the two Aberdeens (and in their surrounding areas) during the recent rock show from the sky. A Mongolian horse breeder said, “At last! Now maybe I can raise my horses in peace without those National Geographic guys being around here all the time.”

February 2356: Nubian man creates fire from rubbing sticks together (Also called Kush, Land of Kush, Te-Nehesy, Nubadae, Napata, or the Kingdom of Meroei.) : Amun-Pa of Batn El Hajar or "Belly of Rocks" has discovered fire, something we all forgot. He lit a torch and ran all the way to the 6th Cataract above Khartoum. His run will be repeated at the First Nubian Olympics in September, at Khartoum, right after the hot season.

August 2459: Glaciers at Antarctica have all now melted. Geologists predict good beach conditions east of the underwater community of Sacramento, CA and at the lower elevations below Spruce Pine, NC.

June 2787: Astronomers apologize for not predicting the correct approach of Asteroid Humongous last fall. Speaking for the scientist at Area 51 near Los Vegas, Nevada, Dr. Alice Brown-Jones, a remote cousin of the famous cinema star, Catherine Zeta Jones that we have been watching on our television sets for decades, said in a news conference this morning at 1:17 a.m. that the trajectory of Asteroid Humongous was calculated incorrectly last fall and that the asteroid was going to hit the moon dead center rather than swishing by our earth sucking the ocean waters into the sky. (That would have been a sight!) She said that scientist at Area 51 near Los Vegas were calculating the consequences of this, but she suggested that we all take measures to learn the Nuclear Age Safe Position. As a public service we instruct you herewith:

1. Find a strong table or desk. (If you have a choice, choose the one in the cellar or basement.)

2. Sit under the desk or table.

3. Pull your legs up to your chin but keep your legs apart wide enough to kiss your butt goodbye.

End of Record

After I read this report, I was very relieved. None of this would affect me much.

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Future-Concepts : Merit Pay For Teachers - How Will It Work?

Future-Concepts : Merit Pay For Teachers - How Will It Work?

  9:36:00 PM    Science Lover

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Merit pay for teaching has been an unfulfilled goal of many teaching proponents for decades. There are examples that show it works elsewhere in this nation.

What about the private, entrepreneurial segments of America? Do they use rewards to recognize exemplary performance, as well as to motivate quality? One prominent performance measure in manufacturing is worker productivity. The more output a worker produces over a given time period, the higher the productivity quotient, with opportunity to increase earnings. In retail trade, customer satisfaction is a crucial measure of management focus. The healthcare sector uses trial studies to achieve success through improving patients' quality of life and lengthening life span. As diverse as these three enterprises are, they each remain worldly competitive by reducing errors. Through research and measurement, they isolate those areas of operation where most errors occur, and initiate practices to reduce those errors, with merit rewards as the prime incentive.

Although somewhat simplistic, it might be useful to identify the proven techniques that aid these employment segments with error reduction.

Goal Setting: With a continuing process in place for isolating error prone activities, goals that are observable and specific are stated in written form and communicated to all those involved in error reduction. Vague goals are easy to reach, but useless.

Computer-aided Technology Use: Creating software and/or hardware designed for alleviating tasks of a repetitive nature usually helps in reducing errors. Precision results are more likely to occur with technology use, than when humans perform the same tasks.

Decision Making: The responsibility for problem solving is usually best vested in persons closest to the problem. If you see it, fix it. Don't just call a specialist.

Merit Rewards: For that person who causes success above the level of expectation, their repeated performance at that level will more likely occur with merit recognition.

Entrepreneurial Competitive Support: American ingenuity remains the reason for surges in the unprecedented growth in start-up small business employment. This American service sector continues to grow, and create solutions wherever challenges exist.

COULD MERIT REWARDS WORK IN EDUCATION ?

Now, let's examine how well these techniques are, or could, benefit public education. If the private sector finds competitive success by implementing proven approaches for error reduction, could the public sector do the same? Perhaps attention to the elements that have made our American private sector the envy of the world would do the same for education.

Let's examine them one-by-one:

Goal Setting: This is one of the important sections of the Federal Policy "No Child Left
Behind" law. Each State is empowered with the task of writing, communicating and implementing specific, measurable student learning outcomes. This state-by-state process is moving slowly and many of the already published learning goals are not measurable, therefore no one can precisely agree if these stated student-goals have even been reached.

A practical solution to this dilemma would be an insistence that all goal statements contain action verbs that define observable human behaviors. One simple, but useful list of these verbs, arranged from simplest to most complex would be to: identify; distinguish; name; place in order; describe; contrast; state a rule; apply a rule; demonstrate; and interpret.
Not only would statements containing these verbs be observable, but they would also lead to measurability, a necessity for tracking learning progress with standardized testing.

Entrepreneurial Competitive Support: With the availability of goals containing observable academic behaviors, the task of preparing test questions focused on these outcomes becomes a precision task. Research by qualified test making companies can match questions to goals very precisely. At the present time these companies provide standardized achievement tests and scored test results.

But these results are of little use to teachers who need immediate feedback to diagnose areas for remediation. The thing that would be most useful to educators would be an Internet system that could electronically supply teachers with short classroom quizzes and instant scoring.

Unique tests of any length could be downloaded, based on the teacher's subject choice of item characteristics, available from the test company's large test-item database.

Other support organizations might offer a way to provide the quiz according to teacher-chosen curriculum characteristics, but with each student in the class receiving only a few questions. And each student's questions would differ from questions of all the others in class.

When electronically graded and returned, the scoring would then cover all the questions, and a wider range of ideas, thus providing the teacher immediate feedback on reaching specific academic objectives for the whole classroom. This process has been well researched and documented for about 35 years by the independent, National Assessment Of Educational Progress.

Should the teacher find these diagnostic quiz results unsatisfactory and desire a fresh approach to teaching the concept, a database of research-proven approaches, in lesson plan format should be available by electronic means. Over the years, educational research into successful teaching approaches has been supported by government grants and contracts, but remains hidden in some government file or on some professors' bio sheet. An entrepreneurial opportunity exists to validate and communicate these ideas; greatly assisting teachers through Internet downloads.

These are just a few ideas that should be available to help teachers reduce the errors in instructing America's uneducated youth. The service sector is always willing, capable and ready to fill this void, and to accomplish it competitively.

Computer-Aided Technology Use: With the familiarity of Internet use by today's educators, transition to this classroom measurement processes could occur with little training. In fact, the proliferation of software and hardware service could even assure test-item security for test manufacturers.

The service sector has a proven ability to meet this need quickly. Teachers would need log-in codes for program entry, classroom printers to download and print unique quizzes for students to answer, built in machine scoring capability to produce a classroom score and then destroy the paper tests, and database development to capture quiz and longer test results over a semester or year for teacher look-back and self-analysis.

This is just a sample of the aids a creative society could provide as assistance for our Nation's teachers, and result in improved student academic performance.

Decision Making: It goes without saying that individual leaders manage teachers' classrooms. Their success in fostering student academic achievements rests on their ability, training and support. Having immediate, professional feedback is much better than waiting a long time for "standardized test" results that come too late to practice remediation.

Merit Rewards: The basis for granting merit pay for exceptional performance is imbedded in the record electronically produced with each use of technology outlined in this article. It can be done. The private sector has shown the way!

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