Tech Brief
Today on Tech Brief: Google searches for new conquests in nature, the computer with the hardest homework ever and why Tweets might one day upstage Dickens and Shakespeare.
• Not content with harnessing the world's information, Google is now planning to control nature itself with another investment in wind turbines off the US Atlantic coast.
The search giant has been investing heavily in wind energy and this latest deal will see a 350-mile stretch of wind turbines, dubbed the Atlantic Wind Connection.
it would be "the world's first superhighway for clean energy".
• One of the ultimate goals in computing is to create a machine that thinks and learns in the same way as people do.
Now a computer at Carnegie Mellon University is beginning the arduous process of reading and learning the whole internet.
Creators of NELL, the Never Ending Language Learner, plan for it to be the largest ever repository of information, possibly even brainier than Stephen Fry.
that creating an infinite and immortal database is a big task.
"Since NELL was activated a few months ago it has learned over 440,000 separate things with an accuracy of 74% which, to put it in terms that any Carnegie Mellon undergraduate can understand, is a C."
Must try harder, Tech Brief thinks, although to be fair learning the internet could be the hardest homework ever set
• Stephen Fry's thoughts are also to become the subject of academic study along with other popular celebrity tweeters, including Gordon Brown's wife Sarah Brown, Lily Allen and Jamie Oliver.
Dr Ruth Page, from the school of English at the University of Leicester is going to study their tweets as part of her research into how stories are told.
of why she thinks social media is fast becoming part of the fabric of literature.
"Telling stories is a human impulse. Through social media, millions of people are telling their own stories every day in status updates, tweets and blogs."
• Apple has been awarded a patent that prevents users from sending or receiving rude or offensive text messages.
whether it will sound the death knell of so-called Sexting.
"Jobs and company have just sealed the deal on a solution to the number one fear of parents across America, kids sending 'unauthorized texts.' As it looks like whatever algorithm or control the system is comprised of will basically censor the transmission of R-rated content on iPhones."
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