Doing Research at UT (and in the Digital Age)

Powerful Online Resources

• OED online• scoUT• Google Scholar

Let’s visit the UT Library web site:

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/

The OED

Let’s look up:

• robot

• silly

• blog

Go to Research Tools, then Reference Sites.

Google Scholar

Let’s look up

Turing Test

Moore’s Law

Pygmalion

In Google, scoUT, and Google Scholar.

scoUT Following Up the News

• http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/junk-dna-concept-debunked-by-new-analysis-of-human-genome/2012/09/05/cf296720-f772-11e1-8398-0327ab83ab91_story.html

• http://news.yahoo.com/test-aims-better-detect-viral-infections-180243374.html

Making Google Smarter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmQl6VGvX-c

The Knowledge Graph

What to Believe?

• Fact checking

• Bias• Marketing• Political

Fact Checking• www.google.com (Betsy Ross)

• www.google.com (Thanksgiving)

For matters of fact, Wikipedia is almost always very good.

But Wikipedia Isn’t Always Right and Claims Get Passed On

• From Wikipedia article “Automaton”:

• And again

• The text of Pindar’s 7th Olympic Ode

… to quote Pindar's seventh Olympic Ode:

The animated figures standAdorning every public streetAnd seem to breathe in stone, ormove their marble feet.

• From Wikipedia article “Automaton”:

Drive Thru Restaurants

Query: Who invented the drive through window?

Drive Thru Restaurants

Query: Who invented the drive through window?

On October 4, 2009 I got this answer.

Drive Thru Restaurants

http://www.google.com/

Query: Who invented the drive through window?

On October 4, 2009 I got this answer.

Making Wikipedia Better

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/23355/?a=f

WikiTrust

http://www.wikitrust.net/

Traveling the Web

Save for chemotherapy

http://www.snopes.com/

Traveling the Web

Federal law allows only the Texas state flag to be flown at the same level as the national flag.

http://www.snopes.com/

Evaluating Claims

A robot, in order to be able to exhibit human-level intelligence will need to have 1 petabyte of memory and be able to compute 109 mips.

Is this claim falsifiable?

1 petabyte = 10005 bytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes.

Evaluating Claims

Robots are artifacts, and consciousness abhors an artifact; only something natural, born not manufactured, could exhibit genuine consciousness.

Is this claim falsifiable?

Source: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/concrobt.htm

Evaluating Claims

ALPAC Report on Machine Translation, 1966

We do not have useful machine translation [and] there is no immediate or predictable prospect of useful machine translation.

Let’s see where we are today: http://www.google.com/

Evaluating Claims

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=1%23691

Forward to The Intelligent Universe By Ray Kurzweil

The explosive nature of exponential growth means it may only take a quarter of a millennium to go from sending messages on horseback to saturating the matter and energy in our solar system with sublimely intelligent processes. The ongoing expansion of our future superintelligence will then require moving out into the rest of the universe, where we may engineer new universes. A new book by James Gardner tells that story.

Accuracy in the Age of Photoshop

Libraries in the Digital AgeThis: Or:

?

Remembering History

The Wayback Machine: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

The Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/about/about.php

Translations

• http://www.fln.vcu.edu/hoffmann/sand_e_pics.html

E. T. Hoffmann, “The Sandman”

Certainly you must all be uneasy that I have not written for so long - so very long. My mother, am sure, is angry, and Clara will believe that I am passing my time in dissipation, entirely forgetful of her fair, angelic image that is so deeply imprinted on my heart.

• http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/sandman.htm

I KNOW you are all very uneasy because I have not written for such a long, long time. Mother, to be sure, is angry, and Clara, I dare say, believes I am living here in riot and revelry, and quite forgetting my sweet angel, whose image is so deeply engraved upon my heart and mind.

Citations

• … until in 1978 when a man named Vernon Mountcastle published a paper titled, “…”.

Citations

• … until in 1978 when a man named Vernon Mountcastle published a paper titled, “…”.

until the publication of “…” (Mountcastle 1978).

MLA Style

http://www.mla.org/style_faq1

MLA Style

• A Guide: http://library.osu.edu/sites/guides/mlagd.php

• Tools: • http://citationmachine.net/ • http://www.easybib.com/cite/form/book