Posts archive

• Reclaim your name 27 May 2023
• Al-Jazari: the father of robotics 26 May 2023
• A PC Success 26 May 2023
• In space no one can hear you … 25 May 2023
• The last piece of the continental drift puzzle 20 May 2023
• Digital lollipop: no calories, just electronics! 15 May 2023
• The tale of the mote and the petrel 14 May 2023
• Fran Allen: Smart Translation 11 May 2023
• A gendered timeline of technology 7 May 2023
• Operational Transformation 6 May 2023

 

Full archives

• Reclaim your name
• Al-Jazari: the father of robotics
• A PC Success
• In space no one can hear you …
• The last piece of the continental drift puzzle
• Digital lollipop: no calories, just electronics!
• The tale of the mote and the petrel
• Fran Allen: Smart Translation
• A gendered timeline of technology
• Operational Transformation
• Engineering a cloak of invisibility: manipulating light with metamaterials
• Alexander Graham Bell: It’s good to talk
• Manufacturing Magic
• Solving problems you care about
• Sameena Shah: News you can trust
• Object-oriented pizza at the end of the universe
• Stretching your keyboard – getting more out of QWERTY
• Is ChatGPT’s “CS4FN” article good enough?
• Understanding Parties
• A machine wrote this post – OpenAi’s ChatGPT
• Mood Gloves
• What the real Pros say
• Susan Kare: Icon Draw
• Celebrating Jean Bartik – she was one of six women who programmed the ‘ENIAC’, a computer from the 1940s
• What’s that bird? Ask your phone – birdsong-recognition apps
• Spot the difference – modelling how humans see the world
• Inspiring Wendy Hall
• Barbara Liskov: Byzantine birthdays
• Marissa Mayer: Lemons Linking 41 Shades of Blue – A/B Testing
• Opinions, Opinions, Opinions
• Joyce Wheeler: The Life of a Star
• The Devil is in the Detail: Lessons from Animal Welfare? (Temple Grandin)
• Ingrid Daubechies: Wiggly lines help catching crime
• Mark Dean: An Inspiration
• 100,000 frames – quick draw: how computers help animators create
• Edie Schlain Windsor and same sex marriage
• Understanding matters of the heart – creating accurate computer models of human organs
• The Dark History of Algorithms
• Lego Computer Science: Logic with Truth Tables
• Lego Computer Science: Truth Tables
• Jacquie Lawson: the multi-million pound greeting
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: tautology and truth tables
• Alan Turing’s life
• Cognitive crash dummies
• Chatbot or Cheatbot?
• Daphne Oram: the dawn of music humans can’t play
• Kimberly Bryant, founder of Black Girls Code, born 14 January 1967
• Bringing people closer when they’re far away
• Hedy Lamarr: The movie star, the piano player and the torpedo
• Gary Starkweather (b 9 Jan 1938) invented the laser printer and colour management
• Lynn Conway: revolutionising chip design
• Sorry to bug you: Grace Hopper
• The first computer music
• Swat a way to drive
• Future Friendly: Focus on Kerstin Dautenhahn
• The last speaker
• The joke Turing test
• The Chinese room: zombie attack!
• The paranoid program
• How does Santa do it?
• Pepper’s Ghost: an 1860s illusion used in ‘head-up displays’
• Making sense of squishiness – 3D modelling the natural world
• Watching whales well – the travelling salesman problem
• A round up of our posts for #BlackHistoryMonth 2022
• Recognising (and addressing) bias in facial recognition tech – the Gender Shades Audit #BlackHistoryMonth
• Happy Hallowe’en – free spooky puzzles and activities
• Devices that work for everyone #BlackHistoryMonth
• Facing up to ALL faces
• Hidden Figures: NASA’s brilliant calculators #BlackHistoryMonth
• Writing together: Clarence ‘Skip’ Ellis #BlackHistoryMonth
• Freddie Figgers – the abandoned baby who became a runaway telecom tech star
• Gladys West: Where’s my satellite? Where’s my child? #BlackHistoryMonth
• Kakuro, Logic and Computer Science – problem-solving brain teasers
• Cold hard complexity: learning to talk in nature’s language
• Love your data
• Delicious computing: gestural computing with bananas and pizzas…
• Hiding in Skype: cryptography and steganography
• Naked Mole-Rats Go Digital – monitoring colonies remotely (while respecting their privacy)
• The heart of an Arabic programming language
• Escape from Egypt
• Chocoholic Subtraction – make an edible calculating Turing machine
• Chocolate Turing Machines – edible computing
• Microwave health check – using wearable tech to monitor elite athletes’ health
• Microwave Racing – making everyday devices easier to use
• Can a computer tell a good story?
• Patterns for Sharing – making algorithms generalisable
• Your own electrical sea: sensing your movements
• Playing Bridge, but not as we know it – the sound of the Human Harp
• Strictly Judging Objects
• Cryptography: You are what you know
• Cryptography: Shafi Goldwasser and the Zero Knowledge Proof
• The First Law of Humans
• Dressing it up
• The Mummy in an AI world: Jane Webb’s future
• The naked robot
• Lego computer science: What is computation (simple cellular automata)?
• Shirts that keep score
• More Encrypted Deckchairs
• Full metal jacket: the fashion of Iron Man
• Lego computer science: binary
• Let buttons be buttons
• Encrypted Deckchairs
• Back (page) to the drawing board
• Tempest Prognosticator: look out, leeches!
• Quipu: tie a knot in it
• Bullseye! The intelligent dart board
• The Ultimate (do nothing) machine
• Simone Giertz: A pat on the shoulder
• Christopher Strachey and the secret of being a Wizard Debugger
• Sophie Wilson: Where would feeding cows take you?
• The Hive at Kew
• The beach, the missionary and my origin myth
• Hoverflies: comin’ to get ya
• Edge-notched cards and relational databases
• The Wood Computer
• Babbage’s barrels
• Ada and the music machine
• Ant Art
• Ant Track Algorithms
• Diamond Dogs: Bowie’s algorithmic creativity
• The algorithm that could not speak its name
• I Ching binary
• Predicting the future: marble runs, binary and the I Ching
• Mary Coombs, teashops and Leo the computer
• A custard computer
• The taming of the screw
• Quicksilver memory
• A storm in a bell jar
• Pass the screwdriver, Igor
• Babbage’s triumph over brutal reality
• Nikola Tesla: the invisible genius
• Babbage’s Adders
• Making core rope memory
• Core rope memory
• An ode to technology
• Swallow a slug-bot to catch a …
• “The thundering engines vibrate throughout your body”
• If the Beagle had landed…
• Fencing the moon
• Ada Lovelace in her own words
• Dickens knitting in code
• Understanding Ultron: A Turing test for world domination – Peter McOwan’s reassuring article that robots probably aren’t out to get us
• April Fooling with computing – IP over avian carriers, PigeonRank
• A Wookie for three minutes please – how Foley artists can manipulate natural and synthesised sounds for film, TV and radio
• The cure that just folds away: understanding protein folding to tackle diseases, and how computers (and people) can help
• Executable Biology – computing cancer using computational modelling
• Lego computer science: Gray code
• Lego computer science: representing numbers using position
• Lego computer science: representing numbers
• Lego computer science: compression algorithms
• Lego computer science: pixel pictures
• CS4FN Advent – Day 25: Merry Christmas! Today’s post is about the ‘wood computer’
• CS4FN Advent – Day 24: Santa’s Sleigh – track its progress through the skies
• CS4FN Advent – Day 23: Bonus material – see “Santa’s sleigh” flying overhead
• CS4FN Advent – Day 23: Father Christmas – checking his list, spotting the errors
• CS4FN Advent – Day 22: stars and celestial navigation
• CS4FN Advent – Day 21: wreaths and rope memory – weave your own space age computer
• CS4FN Advent – Day 20: where’s it @? Gift tags and internet addresses
• CS4FN Advent – Day 19: jingle bells or warning bells? Avoiding computer scams
• CS4FN Advent – Day 18: cracker or hacker? Cyber security
• CS4FN Advent – Day 17: pocket-switching networked reindeer
• CS4FN Advent – Day 16: candy cane or walking aid: designing for everyone, human computer interaction
• CS4FN Advent – Day 15 – a candle: optical fibre, optical illusions
• CS4FN Advent – Day 14 – Why is your internet so slow + a festive kriss-kross puzzle
• CS4FN Advent – Day 13: snowflakes – make your own six-sided hexahexaflexagon with our templates
• CS4FN Advent Calendar – bonus material: HexaFestiveFlexagons to make and colour in
• CS4FN Advent – Day 12: Computer Memory – Molecules and Memristors
• CS4FN Advent – Day 11: the proof of the pudding… mathematical proof
• CS4FN Advent – Day 10: Holly, Ivy and Alexa – chatbots and the useful skill of file management. Plus win at noughts and crosses
• Meet the chatbots
• CS4FN Advent – Day 9: gingerbread man – computing and ‘food’ (cookies, spam!), and a puzzle
• CS4FN Advent – Day 8: gifts, and wrapping – Tim Berners-Lee, Right to Repair & another computing puzzle
• CS4FN Advent – Day 7 – Computing for the birds: dawn chorus, birds as data carriers and a Google April Fool (plus a puzzle!)
• CS4FN Advent – Day 6 – patterned bauble: tracing patterns in computing – printed circuit boards, spotting links and a puzzle for tourists
• CS4FN Advent – Day 5 – snowman: analog hydraulic computers (aka water computers), digital compression, and a puzzle
• CS4FN Advent – Day 4 – Ice skate: detecting neutrinos at the South Pole, figure-skating motion capture, Frozen and a puzzle
• CS4FN Advent – Day 3 – woolly hat: warming versus cooling
• CS4FN Advent – Day 2 – Pairs: mittens, gloves, pair programming, magic tricks
• CS4FN Advent – Day 1 – Woolly jumpers, knitting and coding
• How to get a head in robotics (includes a free papercraft activity with a robot that expresses ’emotions’)
• The machines can translate now
• Letters from the Victorian Smog: Braille: binary, bits & bytes
• Only the fittest slogans survive!
• What are birds actually saying?
• Stopping sounds getting left behind: the Bela computer (from @BelaPlatform)
• Ada Lovelace: Visionary
• I know where your cat lives (privacy and metadata)
• The red sock of doom – trying to catch mistakes before they happen
• Tantrix: P=NP?
• Emoticons and Emotions
• Knitters and Coders: separated at birth?
• Die another Day? Or How Madonna crashed the Internet
• The Emoji Crystal Ball
• Back (page) to health
• Gadgets based on works of fiction
• How do you solve a problem like arthritis?
• Are you there yet?
• So, so tired…
• Is your healthcare algorithm racist?
• Solving real problems with Bayesian networks
• Diagnose? Delay delivery? Decisions, decisions. Decisions about diabetes in pregnancy
• Bayes’ theorem as an algorithm
• Cloudy with a chance of pain
• A simple Bayesian network for having a virus
• Here
• A graphical explanation of Bayes theorem
• What are the chances of that? The church minister’s hobby and clever machines
• The ping pong vaccination programming challenge
• Smart health: decisions, decisions, decisions
• I’m feeling Moo-dy today
• Standup Robots
• Sabine Hauert: Swarm Engineer
• What’s on your mind?
• In a New York nanosecond
• Hiding in Elizabethan Binary
• The optical pony express
• Smart bags
• Punk robots learn to pogo
• The computer vs the casino: Wearable tech cheating
• Sick tattoos
• One in the eye for wearable tech
• Smart tablets (to swallow)
• i-pickpocket
• AI Detecting the Scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls
• Losing the match? Follow the science. Change the kit!
• DragonflyAI: I see what you see
• Studying Comedy with Computers
• Every Breath You Take: Reclaim the Internet
• Why would you accept inefficiency?
• The Cyber-Security Honeypot
• The very first computers
• A recipe for programming
• Florence Nightingale: rebel with a cause
• The Tactful Watch
• HMS Belfast: destroying the destroyer
• Machines Inventing Musical Instruments
• Return of the killer robot? Evil scientist?! Helpless woman?!?
• Who invented Morse code?
• Cyber Security at the Movies: Guardians of the Galaxy (Fail Secure security)