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Last week, an artificial intelligence computer named Cleverbot stunned the world with a stellar performance on the Turing Test — an IQ test of sorts for "chatbots," or conversational robots. Cleverbot, it seems, can carry on a conversation as well as any human can.
In the Turing Test — conceived by British computer scientist Alan Turing in the 1950s — chatbots engage in typed conversations with humans, and try to fool them into thinking they're humans, too. (As a control, some users unknowingly chat with humans pretending to be chatbots.) At a recent Turing competition, Cleverbot fooled 59 percent of its human interlocutors into thinking it was itself a human. Analysts have argued that, because the chatbot's success rate was better than chance, the computer passed.
So what magnificent algorithm lies in the gearbox of this brilliant machine, which can seem more human than not? How have its programmers equipped it with so much conversational, contextual and factual knowledge?

The answer is very simple: crowdsourcing. As the chatbot's designer, Rollo Carpenter, put it in a video explainer produced by PopSci.com, "You can call it a conversational Wikipedia if you like."
Since coming online in 1997, Cleverbot has engaged in about 65 million conversations with Internet users around the world, who chat with it for fun via the Cleverbot website. Like a human learning appropriate behavior by studying the actions of members of his or her social group, Cleverbot "learns" from these conversations. It stores them all in a huge database, and in every future conversation, its responses to questions and comments mimic past human responses to those same questions and comments.
If, for example, you were to ask Cleverbot, "How are you?" it will look back to the many times it has asked or been asked that question to retrieve a fitting response. And, because it's pulling up an answer that a human has typed, the response will sound mostly human (at least in theory).
The key to Cleverbot's success is that it doesn't respond solely on the basis of the last thing typed, but keeps track of words and phrases that have come up in the conversation already. As Carpenter explained, "It looks back to the whole conversation and says, there are maybe tens of thousands of people who have maybe responded to 'how are you?' in the past; which of those tens of thousands of responses is most suitable to use this time?" [How Do Calculators Calculate? ]
The online version of Cleverbot searches its database just three times before producing a response, while the more powerful version used in Turing competitions runs 42 database searches. "It's quite a few times superior to the online Cleverbot," Carpenter told the New Scientist.
The genius behind Carpenter's technology is that he simply programmed ground rules that allowed Cleverbot to grow smarter and smarter on its own, like a maturing human. We asked Cleverbot for its take on how this happens.
LLM: How do you get smarter?
Cleverbot: I don't really believe one can become "smarter." One can become more knowledgeable, but not more intelligent.
Oh, the wisdom of the masses.

Historically, knowing where you are on the surface of the Earth has been a very difficult problem to solve. Finding an accurate position without landmarks has been a matter of dead-reckoning, astral navigation and complex calculations of longitude and latitude. But, with the introduction of GPS (Global Positioning System) and cheap consumer receiver chips in the past few decades, knowing exactly where you are has become a simple fact of life. GPS has also revolutionized the shipping and airline industry, military operations and science.
GPS relies on a network of satellites that orbit Earth at a distance of 16,500 miles. There are dozens of such satellites in orbit. Each satellite knows where it is and sends out a constant signal which is picked up by receivers in smartphones, sat-navs and other GPS devices. The signal consists of the orbital position of the satellite (known as the ephemeris), the position and condition of the other satellites in the network (the almanac) and the time the message was transmitted.
If you use a GPS device, you may have noticed that they can take a long time to get an accurate reading, especially in cities. One reason for this is that the signal has a verylow bandwidth (50 bps) and is vulnerable to interference from buildings and other obstructions.
A good GPS-determined position typically requires a signal from at least four satellites and needs very accurate timing. When the receiver unit picks up a signal, it works out how long the signal took to reach it, and because radio waves always travel at the same speed, it can use that interval to calculate the distance from itself to the satellite — the pseudorange. With one satellite, then, the receiver knows that its position is somewhere on the surface of an imaginary sphere with the satellite in the middle. Each additional satellite signal allows it to calculate other spheres. The second sphere intersects with the first — imagine squashing two bubbles together, the "wall" between them forms a circle, so the position has been fixed to somewhere within that circle.

A third sphere intersects with that circle at only two points, one of which is the location of the receiver. The other point of intersection is usually somewhere in space, thousands of miles from the earth, and can be ignored (unless you're an astronaut). The fourth satellite is used to improve the accuracy of the timing; very small mistakes in the time, even billionths of a second, can cause positioning errors of hundreds of meters.
GPS was designed and is controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense, but there are alternatives in development, including the European Galileo program. When it was first made available for public use, GPS was only accurate to within 100 meters or so because errors were deliberately introduced into the ephemeris and the almanac. Since 2000, however, this Selective Availability has been turned off, although it can be reactivated for military purposes.
The GPS system is under constant development and new satellites are regularly put into orbit. It has become an essential part of 21st century life.

The Internet, boiled down to its most basic description, is a series of computers that are all connected through a series of Transmission Control Protocols (TCP) and Internet Protocols (IP). This network is better known as the TCP/IP network. The Internet was originally called ARPANet and was created by the United States government in the 1960s, and improved upon in the 1970s. ARPANet's original task was communicate between different branches of government and installations in the event of a nuclear war.

When the Internet transformed into more of a commercial venture in the 1980s, most home computer users connected to the network using a dialup modem, which transmitted specific data packages over phone lines to connect users to the network. Over the last two decades, dial-up modems have become outdated as most Internet connections use broadband cable and mobile devices to connect via wireless networks.

While most people tend to think that the Internet and the World Wide Web are one and the same, the Web is actually a way for people to access information while using the Internet. Instead of TCP/IP, the Web uses Hypertext Transfer Protocols (HTTP) in order to transmit data and share information with other web pages that use the same protocols as a sort of Internet language. The Web, not the Internet, uses browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome to access websites and webpages. Search engines allow people to use the Web to find specific webpages that are coded to certain Web addresses.

While the Web is one way in which to communicate using the Internet, there are others such as email and instant messaging that may be confused as being part of the Web but is actually a separate entity also utilizing the Internet in order to communicate with various servers. The easiest way to keep the Web and Internet separate is to realize that the Web communicates primarily with HTTP language while the Internet can also use SMTP for email messaging and FTP for instant messaging.

The best way to think of the Internet is as the backbone behind all your favorite sites, rather than any group of sites themselves.

You use a URL or "uniform resource locator" every time you open a website, send an email, or download a file. URLs are very important that without the use of this addressing scheme, it will be very hard for ordinary users to use the Internet   and all its services.

Both netbooks and laptops have LCD screens and keyboards that are connected by hinges. They both run on rechargeable batteries. That’s where the similarities between these two types of computer end.
Although netbooks and laptops are both designed for mobile use, the netbook is a significantly scaled-down version of a traditional laptop.
Most laptops are powerful enough for everday use and can perform the same functions as a desktop computer — word processing, spreadsheets, multimedia web browsing and more. Laptops have standard-size keyboards and screens 11 inches and up.
Netbooks are designed for portability, with smaller keyboards and screens — generally from 7 to 10 inches — barebones applications and stripped-down operating systems. At three to five pounds, netbooks are also lighter than most laptops, which can weigh as much as 10 pounds.

Both plasma and LCD TVs offer higher-definition images than the original CRT TV technology, but they each take a different route to get that pivotal scene from a movie or sporting event to the screen.
Plasma TVs generate the image using small cells containing electrically charged ionized gases between two panes of glass. These are essentially tiny lamps that are luminous when electrodes “electrify” them. Plasma TVs do not require any backlighting and are best viewed in a dark room. They offer superior color rendering, deep blacks, wider viewing angles and cinema-quality image reproduction, all of which make them a popular choice for home theaters. [What's the Difference Between LED and LCD TVs?]
LCD (liquid crystal display) TVs essentially employ the same technology used in computer and laptop screens. LCDs may rely on one or two large fluorescent lamps as a backlight source, but the different colors are controlled by units that control the passage of light from the backlight to red, green, or blue images on the front of the panel. They are generally more energy efficient than plasma TVs and are viewable in a bright room. In addition, LCD TVs are typically the flattest of the flat-screen TVs.

While both LCD and LED televisions are lighter and thinner than the cathode ray tube technology they replaced, there are some key differences in how they each create high-definition output.
As its name implies, liquid crystal display (LCD) televisions rely on a combination of liquid crystals and cold cathode florescent lamps (CCFLs). The white light illuminates crystals and an imact is created as it passes through. LCD TVs use less energy and offers a wider viewing angle of up to 175 degrees compared to old-style CRTs. Also, there is less risk that an image will "burn" into the screen compared to plasma televisions. The downsides include a low contrast ratio and a lack of true black picture quality.
While LED relies on a similar process to create a high-definition image, the technology uses light emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of CCFLs. This corrects the black spots that can plague LCDs. They also offer an improvement in terms of energy consumption, color levels and contrast ratios. LED TVs can provide more accurate color than LCD TVs because they use red, green and blue lights (also known as RGB).
Both of these technologies are edging out plasma TVs in the consumer market; although plasma can be a bit bulkier, they still offer the widest viewing angles and are closest to theater-quality pictures of all of HDTV display technologies.

A handful of jets have been blown up by lightning, including a Pan American flight in 1963 that killed 83 people.
But scientists have since figured out how to mostly harness Nature's fury. In the early 1980s, NASA (whose shuttle launch pad was struck by lightning the other day) flew a jet into a thunderstorm at 38,000 feet. It was hit 72 times in 45 minutes, and much was learned.
Commerical planes are still hit about once a year, by some estimates. A strike typically starts at a wingtip, nose or tail and courses through the skin, which is often made of aluminum—a good conductor. The plane's lights might flicker, but most of the energy just heads back into the sky if there are no gaps in the skin.
Modern jets often employ advanced composite materials, which are not so conductive, so metal has to be added to the composites to carry the lightning.

 


Percy Spenser was conducting radar experiments during World War II when he leaned up against a microwave-emitting tube and accidentally melted the candy bar in his pocket. Eureka. His dry cleaners were furious, but Spenser quickly understood the sweeter implications of the event, and he went on to patent the first microwave heating device.
The secret to his sticky mess? Let's zap some lunch and find out.
The frozen burrito in your microwave oven sits in an electromagnetic field, bombarded on all sides by high-frequency microwaves. Free water molecules (along with some fats and sugars) absorb the microwaves, and the resulting vibrations cause friction between molecules (i.e. heat). Because not all the water in your burrito has frozen (due to the presence of other chemicals, like salt), heat is generated in those pockets of free molecules sooner than in frozen areas. That's why your burrito sometimes comes out unevenly heated.
Why can't you wrap your meal in aluminum foil? Metal blocks the high-energy particles of the electromagnetic field, making for more trouble than a melted candy bar.

 


The first website on the World Wide Web went live 21 years ago, in August 1991. The site explained the concept and history of the Web, provided links to all "the world's online information" — a list that lengthened as the Web grew — and outlined the process by which people could improve and expand the Web. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, then a computer scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.
The website's homepage, titled "World Wide Web," has been archived in its original form here (found via the techblog Gizmodo). In heavily hyperlinked Times New Roman text set against a white background, the page defined the World Wide Web as "a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents."
Another page within the site directed readers to everything that was then available online, such as a page each devoted to law, the Bible, song lyrics and politics. The site requested that people "mail www-request@info.cern.ch if you know of online information not in these lists."
Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web to create a depot of publicly available information that could be accessed over the Internet, wrote on his "executive summary" page, "The project is based on the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups. Originally aimed at the High Energy Physics community, it has spread to other areas and attracted much interest in user support, resource discovery and collaborative work areas."

On a page called "How can I help?" Berners-Lee instructed readers on how to post data of their own and write software that would help make the Web more usable. For example, he urged people to contribute by building search engines.
"Now the web of data and indexes exists, some really smart intelligent algorithms ("knowbots?") could run on it. Recursive index and link tracing, Just think..." he wrote. Google and other such search engines now exist.
Another of Berners-Lee's directives did not bear out. On a page called "Etiquette," he advised creators of webpages to explicitly state the status of information they post. "Some information is definitive, some is hastily put together and incomplete," he wrote. "Both are useful to readers, so do not be shy to put information up which is incomplete or out of date — it may be the best there is. However, do remember to state what the status is. When was it last updated? Is it complete? What is its scope?"
Now, of course, the Web is a chaotic cobweb of information, old and new, true and false, trustworthy and misleading.

 


Because there are no angles for alignment, the round shape makes these heavy covers easier to put back on once they're taken off. Round covers are also easier to manufacture. But the main reason manhole covers are round is so they won't accidentally fall into the subterranean abyss. With a round cover, no matter how you hold it, you can't shove it in. It just won't go. If it were square, a prankster could hold the cover diagonally over the hole and drop it in, to be followed by who knows how many scooters and pedestrians.

 

Large airports are slightly different all over the world, but one constant is the ubiquitous air traffic control tower, which always has windows that slope toward the tower at the base. Many people assume that they are designed that way to prevent the sun's reflection or glare from blinding incoming pilots.
But this explanation doesn't fly, because surrounding buildings (and the airport terminals themselves) have vertical windows.
In fact the benefit is not for those outside the tower but those inside it. Ordinarily, we see (and ignore) reflections in glass all the time, for example from computer monitors or car windows. But air traffic controllers must not have any distracting reflections as they monitor flights. By tilting the glass away, any errant light from inside the tower (such as video screens, lights, etc.) are reflected up onto the ceiling, which is painted black.
That way, the glow from a wristwatch across the room won't be mistaken for an incoming UFO.

Quartz, made up of silica and oxygen, is one of the most common minerals on Earth. Billions of people use quartz every day, but few realize it because the tiny crystals they use are hidden in their watches and clocks. But what do the clear or whitish crystal rocks found all over the world have to do with timekeeping?
Some materials, such as certain ceramics and quartz crystals, can produce electricity when placed under mechanical stress. The ability to convert voltage to and from mechanical stress is called piezoelectricity. Quartz crystals maintain a precise frequency standard, which helps to regulate the movement of a watch or clock, thus making the timepieces very accurate. Quartz is also used in radios, microprocessors, and many other technological and industrial applications.
While it's interesting to think that the quartz you find beautifying a landscaped lawn is also in your wristwatch, most of the quartz in electronics is synthetic, and specific quartzes can be created with specific frequencies for specific functions.

 
What do stars and hydrogen bombs have in common? They're both powered by nuclear fusion.
Nuclear fusion occurs when the nuclei of two or more light atoms, like hydrogen, combine to create one big nucleus, like that of a helium atom. This process also results in the conversion of mass into energy.
In order for nuclear fusion to occur, protons and neutrons must be exposed to temperatures approaching 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) which, to put things in perspective, is even hotter than the sun.
Under normal conditions, a positively charged atomic nucleus keeps other positively charged nuclei at bay. But during nuclear fusion, nuclei are brought very close together, which allows the attractive forces holding them together to override the repulsive forces keeping them apart. 

When nuclei fuse together, part of their mass is converted into energy. The sun and other stars convert this energy into light. And the same fusion process gives hydrogen bombs their destructive energy. Scientists are continually looking for ways to harness the energy produced during nuclear fusion into safe and practical uses.
This is a very different process from nuclear fission, a reaction in which a large nucleus breaks apart into two smaller nuclei, releasing a tremendous amount of energy.
Researchers believe the first instance of nuclear fusion on this planet occurred just minutes after the Big Bang, in a process known as Big Bang nucleosynthesis.

 

You can learn more about this from Hollywood than the Halls of Science.
In movies, a wheel spinning onscreen may appear to rotate slowly in the wrong direction. This is because movie cameras capture still images of a scene at a finite rate (usually 24 frames per second) and the brain fills in the gaps between these images by creating the illusion of continuous motion between the similar frames. If the wheel rotates most of the way around between one frame and the next, the most obvious direction of motion for the brain to pick up on is backwards, since this direction suggests the minimal difference between the two frames.

But the "wagon-wheel" phenomenon isn't just limited to Clint Eastwood flicks. People experience the effect in real life, even in continuous light. This cannot be explained by stroboscopic or filmic factors. Two competing theories are currently rolling around the academic journals for acceptance.
One proposes that the visual cortex, much like a movie camera, processes perceptual input in temporal packets, taking a series of snapshots and then creating a continuous scene. Perhaps our brain processes these still images as it does frames in a movie, and our perceptual mistake results from a limited frame rate.

While some form of temporal parcing certainly occurs in the brain, it isn't clear that this is sufficient to explain the wagon-wheel effect in continuous light.
One key experiment shows that two identical, adjacent spinning wheels are reported by subjects as switching direction independantly of each other. According to the movie-camera theory, the two wheels should not behave differently, since the frame rate is the same for everything in the visual field.
This has led some scientists to a theory that explains the effect as a result of perceptual rivalry, which occurs when the brain creates two different interpretations to explain an ambiguous scene.
Those interpretations then vie for attention from higher-order brain processes that determine, ultimately, how we see the world. A similar example of this is the Necker cube, a two-dimensional cube that "pops" back and forth between two three-dimensional visualisations.