Who Needs Mailboxes

Email: Its Good and Bad

Emails have now been familiar in the technological society for quite some time now. Starting back in the 1980's companies used Email to send data and info to one another electronically for faster and more reliable transportation. It has spread quite quickly to everyone, with so many different Email providers now, many of which are on the Internet, such as Yahoo Gmail and AIM Mail. But how great is this new medium of stationery? I will go through some of my good and bad experiences of using Email and how it affects my life.

First with the bad. The obvious nuisance to Emails is spam. With all the spam blockers and filters out there, you think that the problem of unnecessary advertisements and badgering money hounds would be solved. Overall, yes, I can say the problem is generally gone. But sometimes, it blocks too much. I remember numerous occasions where I have had Emails from family and friends that get blocked because it met some criteria for spam, and that person or persons wonder why I wasn't getting any of their Emails. I never truly lost any of their Emails, but it was hard to go through all the crap I was giving as "spam" and find what I was suppose to get. Another problem is receiving too many chain letters, either in the form of support for God or the soldiers fighting wars, to the "If you don't send this to 100 people in three seconds your family is going to be murdered by little demon children!!!!" I like the effort but it really gets old fast. Another thing that puts Email at a disadvantage to the postal service is packaging items or gifts. No matter how advanced our computers get, they will never be able to send matter through the airwaves....Sorry.

Now for the happy good things! One thing I love about Email is you don't have to remember anything about anyone you know again! You simply put down ANY information about the person in question (AIM screen name, phone numbers, addresses, schedule for school, likes/dislikes, when they sleep and wake....just kidding, etc)when you first put them into your Email's convenient address book and away you go! Another thing I like is getting funny chain letters. I get jokes from long chains of Emails from friends and family and they are quick and easy to look at and send. Having the Email system helps to at least send pictures. Those are either cute or hilarious to get sent to you, like the baby pictures or some picture of a redneck bike made of shoes. The process itself is definitely better than having to buy stamps and lick the back of some envelope.

Overall, the Email system has helped keep people informed and connected with each other longer and faster, and the system will continue to improve as technology advantages. I mean they already have Email accessible on phones now....think of where they'll be in 20 years!

Matlab VIII

If You Were to Read This Article...

Hello everyone, how are we all doing this evening? If you answer good, then I would have to output a "I'm glad" statement. Else if you were to answer bad, then I would probably output a "That's really too bad" statement. My else would just be "Try again". Yes yes, I did just write that opening with poor, incomprehensible English. But I was speaking in terms of Matlab language. This week on Matlab Tutorial, I was going to focus on talking about If, Elseif, and Else commands while working on Matlab programs.

The basic function of an If, Elseif, or Else statement chain of commands is to give the program some options of what exactly it will be computing. Based on what is inputted and what certain variable values are, the if statements help filter and sort these values based on parameters that you set within the code so that the program runs through different choices of computations. Basically if you want the program to do a certain calculation when an arbitrary variable has a certain value, then you write an if statement there along with what the program does when it meets those needs specified.

For example: Lets say you have the user input (back from Matlab II) a value for the variable X. You then have a line of code squaring the value of X. Now you want to have two separate chain of commands depending on what the new value Y (X^2) is. Write the "if" command on the first line followed by a condition. For this example, the condition will be when Y = 4. You must use double equal signs when writing conditional arguments. So now if Y does indeed fit the statement it will do whatever follows that code. So this example will then have Y be divided by 2 to equal the variable Z. Now that is one option. If you finish the if statement with an "end", then you have a simply if statement. But you usually want an if statement to have outputs for every possibility. So you can either write the "else" syntax after your first computation followed by a line telling it to simply make Y = Z, or I will take it one step further and add the "elseif" statement in this example program. After the if statement and the equation for Z, a line of code should start with an "elseif", telling Matlab, "if Y didn't equal 4, see if it equals this". Let's just say if Y = 5. If this is true then our next line with ask the program to multiply Y by 2 to get Z. If Y doesn't equal either, then Y will just equal Z. End your if statements with the end command and output Z. Whew, that was a little rough. Lets see this example in the correct syntax:

X = input('Value for X= ')
Y = X^2
if Y == 4
Z = Y/2
elseif Y == 5
Z = Y * 2
else
Z = Y
end
Z

As you can see, the syntax and the process of the if statement is simpler to that of a loop. the only difference is that an if statement won't loop around multiple times. It will only go through the statements once. Unless of course it is nested in a for loop! Not only does it go through once, but understand that it goes through in sequential order. So make sure that the more important arguments and decisions you want the program to make be the first if statements in your chain of commands. Slowly but surely we are putting all the pieces together.....Good luck and stay tune for more exciting adventures of BATMAN AND -...oops, I mean MATLAB TUTORIAL!

Ok, I'm done.....

Resources: While Loop Help with Cyclismo, HTML Tags at Web Source

Computers learning to talk

My oldest sister and her husband are deaf but most of their children can hear. When her oldest finally learned how to talk, he had a bit of a speech problem but nothing that was too serious. His younger sister learned how to talk faster than he did and his youngest brother is already talking up a storm.

The way these babies, my nephews and niece, learned how to talk helps me be on the side of what researchers found using a new computer program.

Some believe that some language is hardwired into your brain. Some go to the extent to believe that babies are born knowing all the sounds in languages in all the world and learn language by how the sounds are put together.

To study how babies learn language, researchers at Stanford University are working on a computer model that does the same processes a baby's brain does when it is learning language. It's not fully completed yet, but they have tested their model out to make sure it is accurate. They found that, when studying both American and Japanese mother's and babies talking with each other that the model learned language at the same rate the babies did.

I'll admit now that I don't know very much about learning to talk. I am an engineering major, not a speech analyst. But I do know how my nephews and niece learned how to talk in a deaf home. My sister can speak but she can't hear so a lot of what she says is distorted. Her husband doesn't speak much. Her oldest son learned how to talk mostly from visiting us and from the TV. He ended up delayed a little in learning how to talk and formed words differently, like he had an accent. My sister's third child, her only daughter, learned in much the same way except that she had a very talkative brother to teach her words. The youngest is still in his toddler age, and he is the earliest of his siblings to talk. I think a lot of language has to be learned and isn't hardwired. I think that they learn from watching how mom and dad form vowels and consonants with their mouth and how they sound.

Of course, I haven't done enough research to say definitively, but I believe that babies aren't born with the knowledge of language. They are instead born with the openness to learn it.

Thanks Wasted News for the content.

Thanks Baby Talk Canada for the picture.

A Brief History of Computers (1940 - 2000)

Continuing with the history of computers...

In 1941, Konrad Zuse completed the Z3, the first operational programmable computer. It could add or subtract in one third to one fourth of a second, and it could multiply and divide in three or four seconds. In 1945, he developed the first higher level programming language, called Plankalkül.

In 1946, ENIAC was built at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, USA, by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was one of the first completely electronic computers and weighed 30 tons. It was used to calculate ballistic trajectories.

In 1947, the transistor was invented. Transistors would later replace vacuum tubes so computers wouldn't weigh tons.

In 1948, the Small Scale Experimental Machine was built. It was the first computer that stored both programs and data, as modern computers do, rather than reading them off tape.

In 1950, Alan Turing published a paper on the potential development of computer intelligence. In this paper, he introduced the concept of the Turing test, in which a judge speaks to a human and a computer and tries to tell which speaker is human.

UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was built in 1951, by the same people who built ENIAC. It was the first general purpose computer that could handle both numeric and textual information. It weighed only 13 tons.

In 1951, Whirlwind was built at MIT. It was the first real-time interactive computer. With previous computers, there was no way to issue new commands once the program was running. Whirlwind used a keyboard to input new commands. In 1953, the first computer with transistors is built at the University of Manchester.

In 1957, FORTRAN (Formula Translation), the oldest higher level programming language still in use, was made.

In 1962, the first computer game, Spacewar!, was made by Steve Russell at MIT. It used an early version of a joystick.

In 1965, packet switching was developed. Packet switching is needed for computers to communicate with each other over a network. You're reading this right now thanks to packet switching. In 1969, ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, was started by the Department of Defense.

In 1974, the MCM/70 became the first personal computer to be commercially released. It came with 2 to 8 kilobytes of RAM and 0 to 2 cassette drives. It cost $4950 - $9800. It never took off.

In 1975, Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. In 1976, Apple was founded by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. I don't think I need to tell you the significance of those events.

In 1978, the Apple II, one of the first successful personal computers, was made. In 1981, MS-DOS was released.

n 1983, Apple introduced Lisa, the first computer with a graphical user interface. It was slow and expensive and ultimately failed. In 1984, the Macintosh was made. It had many of Lisa's features, but was much faster and cheaper.

In 1989, the World Wide Web was created. Although the internet already existed (it was only used by universities and government agencies), the World Wide Web is was made it easy to use.

In 1994, Linux was made by Linus Torvalds.

In 1996, Hotmail was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith.

In 1997, Deep Blue became the first computer to beat a world champion, Gary Kasparov, at chess.

A Brief History of Computers (1600 - 1940)

Computers are a significant part of today's society. Most of us have computers around us all the time. But computers have come a long way, further than most people realize.

The first automatic calculator was built in 1623 by Wilhelm Schikard. It was of course, completely mechanical, and not at all electrical or electronic. It could only add and subtract numbers up to six digits. Similar devices capable of adding numbers with more digits or in different bases were made soon after.

In 1671, Gottfried Liebniz made a machine that could multiply numbers. Liebniz also refined the binary system used in all modern computers. In 1774, Philipp Hahn built a calculator capable of all four primary functions.

In 1791, Charles Babbage was born. Although he never actually completely any calculating machines, his work was far ahead of his time and he was very influential. In 1822, he began designing his "difference engine" which would solve sixth-degree polynomials up to thirty digits.
Unfortunately, he lost support for the difference engine, so he began designing the "analytical engine", a general purpose computer, run off steam power, that could be programmed with punch cards and that would be capable of doing any computation modern computers can do. Had it been finished it would have been the first Turing machine, before Turing was even born.

In 1906 vacuum tubes were invented by Lee De Forest. In 1919 William Eccles and F. W. Jordan developed the first flip-flop circuit, a necessary component of electrical computers. In 1924, William Bothe built an AND logic gate, another necessary component of electrical computers. In 1930, Vannevar Bush built a partly electrical version of Babbage's difference engine, capable of solving differential equations.

In 1936, Alan Turing published a paper in which he introduced the concept of a Turing machine and showed that it is impossible to have a general solution to whether a program will continue infinitely or not. A Turing machine is a theoretical machine that read a tape and perform actions on the tape based off instructions on the tape.

Next time: A history of computers from 1940 to present.

One More Piece of Smart Furniture

Not too long ago, I went to a WWII museum with a class. It was a great museum! It had so much to learn from. There were pictures and artifacts everywhere and also high tech things, like the item I'm trying to introduce now.

Let me show you the Smart Table.

At the museum, the smart tables were all lined up in one room. You could use a red laser pen to select and navigate. It was pretty awesome. A series of projectors put the display onto the table top from underneath (It would be bad from above because there would be shadows every time anyone reached across the table.) and a sensor looking from the top kept track the red laser pen.

The only problems I had with it was that it could be very slow and that a well powered laser was needed.

According to Gizmodo Microsoft has been working on this for some time now and has been marketing it as a technology instead of a product under development(Thanks Gizmodo!). They see this developing into a gaming console and being put in casinos and other such places for entertainment.

After having had a chance to play with one myself I really see this product going far. It has great potential to appeal to some of the younger audiences. This could also be great in schools for kids to have fun while learning. It would also make a great gaming console, though the controls would be a bit difficult and online gaming would be out of the question.

All in all, I think it's a great idea.

Thanks The Daily Reel for the picture.