Monday, August 29, 2016

Where Robot Cars (Robocars) Can Really Take Us

I've been blogging from time to time about driverless cars or autonomous vehicles for some years now. Brad Templeton it seems devotes his entire life to the subject, with an excellent website and blog on the subject of "robocars" - highly recommended if you are interested in this topic. Incidentally, I've put a deposit down on a Tesla 3 and looking forward to trying out its autopilot on NZ roads. I'm expecting delivery in 2018.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

New BBC documentary about Ada Lovelace

The BBC have just released an excellent new documentary about the Victorian computer pioneer and visionary Ada Lovelace called: Calculating Ada: the Countess of Computing. It's available on YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Happy birthday World Wide Web!

The WWW is 25 years old! The first web page at CERN, created by the web's inventor Tim Berners-Lee went online 25 years ago. That means that for many of this blog's younger readers you can't imagine a world without the web. Trust me, it was a very different place. The Telegraph newspaper has published a good history of the development of the web.

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Seymour Papert, 88, Dies

The New York Times reports that: "Seymour Papert, a visionary educator and mathematician who well before the advent of the personal computer foresaw children using computers as instruments for learning and enhancing creativity, died on Sunday at his home in Blue Hill, Me. He was 88. His death was announced by the Logo Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization that he co-founded. His wife, the Russia scholar and author Suzanne Massie, said the cause was complications of a series of kidney and bladder infections." Logo was one of the first computer languages I learned and I fondly remember watching that turtle draw it's way across the screen.
Thanks to my colleague, Mark Wilson, for noticing this.