May 2009 Archives

Pingdom har kartlagt var i världen Googles datacenter befinner sig någonstans, sånt som kan vara bra att veta.

Om man vill lära sig mer om hur ett sånt där datacenter fungerar kan man läsa boken The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines (PDF), av de två Google-ingenjörerna Luiz André Barroso och Urs Hölzle. (via: Espen Andersen, som anser att Norges västkust vore en idealisk plats för att förse Europa med alla datakärnkraft det behöver).

Jo, men det här inlägget sammanfattar känslorna de två senaste månaderna rätt bra. (Tack Sven för tipset!)

Finns det forskningsdagis i stil med Bing Nursery School vid Stanford, i Sverige?

Bing Nursery School is part of the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. The school was established to provide a sound educational environment for young children, to provide a laboratory setting for research in child development, and to teach undergraduate and graduate students about children through observation and first-hand experience in the classroom. 

Jag blev uppmärksammad på det i en New Yorker-artikel om psykologen Walter Mischel, som på slutet av 1960-talet genomförde sina marshmallow-test där, på intet ont anande 4-åringar:

Footage of these experiments, which were conducted over several years, is poignant, as the kids struggle to delay gratification for just a little bit longer. Some cover their eyes with their hands or turn around so that they can't see the tray. Others start kicking the desk, or tug on their pigtails, or stroke the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal. One child, a boy with neatly parted hair, looks carefully around the room to make sure that nobody can see him. Then he picks up an Oreo, delicately twists it apart, and licks off the white cream filling before returning the cookie to the tray, a satisfied look on his face.

Men det skulle tydligen vara svårt att upprepa experimentet idag (min fetstil):

The classrooms were designed as working laboratories, with large one-way mirrors that allowed researchers to observe the children. In February, Jennifer Winters, the assistant director of the school, showed me around the building. While the Bing is still an active center of research--the children quickly learn to ignore the students scribbling in notebooks--Winters isn't sure that Mischel's marshmallow task could be replicated today. "We recently tried to do a version of it, and the kids were very excited about having food in the game room," she says. "There are so many allergies and peculiar diets today that we don't do many things with food."

Enligt The W demonstrerade Konrad Zuse den här dagen 1941 världens första programmerbara och fullt Turing-kompatibla dator, Z3 kallad (en best på 1 ton, byggd av över 2000 reläer som läste program från hålkort). Hittade det här i biografin över Zuse (min feststil):

In 1967 Zuse also suggested that the universe itself is running on a grid of computers (digital physics); in 1969 he published the book Rechnender Raum (translated into English as Calculating Space). This idea has attracted a lot of attention, since there is no physical evidence against Zuse's thesis.

Lite kul. Phil Gyford berättar om hur han och hans frilanspolare startade ett "Pretend Office" för att få lite gemenskap, en e-postlista helt enkelt (som man kan läsa arkivet för):

And a weird thing happened.

With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn't exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company.

Det är fascinerande hur det typiska kontorsbeteendet kan uppstå så naturligt.