Posts Tagged ‘computer design’
“Aging, quite simply, is a loss of information.”*…
And as it is in the human condition, so it is on the internet. As the Pew Research Center reports: 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later…
The internet is an unimaginably vast repository of modern life, with hundreds of billions of indexed webpages. But even as users across the world rely on the web to access books, images, news articles and other resources, this content sometimes disappears from view.
A new Pew Research Center analysis shows just how fleeting online content actually is:
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible, as of October 2023. In most cases, this is because an individual page was deleted or removed on an otherwise functional website.
For older content, this trend is even starker. Some 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are not available today, compared with 8% of pages that existed in 2023.
This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023…
The not-so-pretty results of their study, and an account of their methodology at “When Online Content Disappears,” from @pewresearch.
Happily, the Internet Archive‘s wonderful Wayback Machine, where one can find saved copies of (many, many, if not all) web pages that have disappeared, is a(n at least partial) antidote. Indeed, via a background script, the Wayback Machine supplies the most recent archived version of many Wikipedia links that have gone dead.
(Image above: source— where one can find the origin of “404” as the designator of a broken link…)
* David Sinclair, controversial anti-aging researcher
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As we search for the missing, we might send elegantly-designed birthday greetings to John Cocke; he was born on this date in 1925. A computer engineer, he made numerous important contributions to computer architecture and to optimizing compiler design. Most notably, he is considered by many to be “the father of RISC architecture” (which first appeared in his design of the IBM 801).
“Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”*…
Two researchers have proposed a new way of thinking about intelligence: one in which intelligence is related to entropy– one in which intelligence is a fundamentally thermodynamic process…
Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physicist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Cameron Freer, a mathematician at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, developed an equation that they say describes many intelligent or cognitive behaviors, such as upright walking and tool use.
The researchers suggest that intelligent behavior stems from the impulse to seize control of future events in the environment. This is the exact opposite of the classic science-fiction scenario in which computers or robots become intelligent, then set their sights on taking over the world…
Read the full story at the always-illuminating 3 Quarks Daily; read the paper in the journal Physical Review Letters.
* Susan Sontag
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As we reckon that maybe “hot air” isn’t so bad after all, we might send intelligent birthday greetings to Claude Elwood Shannon; he was born on this date in 1916. A mathematician, electronic engineer, and cryptographer, Shannon is best remembered as the “father of information theory” (for his 1948 paper that launched the field); but he is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master’s degree student at MIT, he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship– widely considered to be the most important master’s thesis of all time.
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