I almost missed it this year with so much else going on, but I wanted to take a moment to bring your attention this Ada Lovelace Day to Dr. Anita Borg, founder of the Institute for Women and Technology in 1997, renamed the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology in 2003 after her death. The institute seeks to “increase the impact of women on all aspects of technology, and increase the positive impact of technology on the world’s women” through a strategy it calls “The Virtuous Cycle” where women learn leadership skills through embracing engineering and technical professions, which they use to influence the design and implementation of technological solutions to world problems, which demonstrates the capabilities of technically-empowered women, which influences societal perceptions, which results in more women taking technological paths to leadership.

Anita Borg
January 17, 1949 – April 6, 2003
Credit: Heinz Awards

Anita Borg received her doctorate in computer science from New York University in 1981, and in 1987 she started the Systers e-mail list, which has grown into the “world’s largest email community of technical women in computing.” She also started the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing technical conference for women. In 1999, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the Presidential Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology. Today Google offers the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship each year to women seeking higher education in Computer Science in Borg’s honor.

In addition to all these amazing achievements, she also wins my geek-vote for the coolest name in Computer Science “Dr. Borg.”

JavaScript Frameworks

I recently checked out Google’s AJAX Libraries, which, aside from being inaccurately titled, provides a means for web developers to access functionality in a wide variety of popular JavaScript frameworks and toolkits without having to host the libraries themselves. Simply include the base Google library, and then use it to load whatever framework you want to access in you code. It’s not for me, as I’m a total control-freak when it comes to production implementations of my code, and I don’t like having my web pages hang up trying to access URIs on outside domains, which definitely happens to the code I run locally using this tool; however, it does provide a convenient playground for testing out different JavaScript frameworks and toolkits.

You can do anything with JavaScript, but you have to program around its shortcomings. How JavaScript functions depends on the ECMAScript engine running it, with Firefox running TraceMonkey, Chrome running V8, and Internet Explorer running Trident, it makes it difficult to write code that runs the same in all browsers. Then there’s JavaScripts’ object-orientation strategy, which uses prototype chains for inheritance, confusing most OO programmers. Finally, there’s some major oversights in JavaScript functionality, like the fact that it lacks a trim() function.

There are two types of JS Frameworks, those that extend JS functionality for the advanced programmer and those that simplify coding for the novice. If you’re an advanced programmer, it’s nice to have true object-orientation in your JavaScript. If you’re a novice, it’s nice to be able to whip out some fancy special effects with just a few lines of code. What follows is my understanding and impressions of these frameworks as I used Google’s Libraries to play with them.

In his book Chess Metaphors, about chess, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Diego Rasskin-Gutman devotes a short section to the popular myths, literature, and films dealing with characters creating artificial humans from motivations like desire, necessity, curiosity, and power. More fascinating than the motivations for producing AIs, is the evolving origins of where the artificial life comes from in fiction:

8 AD

Pygmalion et Galatée
Credit: Alex Bakharev

One of the myths retold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is of King Pygmalion who, when he grows disenchanted with real women, sculpts a statue of a woman with whom he falls in love. The Goddess Venus brought the statue to life in response to Pygmalion’s prayers, and the King married her. There were other examples of artificial life in Greek mythology, but this is the most compelling throughout the following millennia, inspiring numerous works of art, including George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, which was later remade as the 1956 musical My Fair Lady

1800s

Rabi Loew and Golem
Credit: Mikolas Ales

As the legend goes, the 16th century rabbi of Prague Judah Loew ben Bezalel created a Golem out of clay or soil, bringing it to life with the word “emet” on its forehead. When the Golem had terrorized those prosecuting the Jews sufficiently to have them relent, the rabbi killed his creation by erasing the letter “e” from its forehead, leaving “met,” Hebrew for “death.” Although there is divine intervention involved in the creation of this artificial being, everything is under the rabbi’s control.

1818

Frontispiece to the revised edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Credit: Theodore Von Holst

A story of artificial life without anything divine in its origin’s is Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, where Dr. Frankenstein fashions “the monster” using ambiguous means; however, Dr. Frankenstein’s background in chemistry and other sciences certainly contributed to his success in creating life. The monster is an outcast, abandoned by the fearful doctor and alienated from other people due to his frightful appearance. So a second trend appears in the myths of artificial life, that the more involved a human is in the creation of life, the more inhuman that life becomes.

1921 and 1927

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)
Credit: BBC

This trending of artificial life into malevolence continues with Karel Capek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), where artificial humans, mass produced at a factory, revolt and drive the human race to extinction. The Machine from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis also serves as a cautionary tale, engineered by Doctor Rotwang, the robot impersonates the leader of the workers and uses their trust to inspire a revolt. In the first example, the artificials use their overwhelming numbers to overthrow humanity, in the second, a single artificial uses its resemblance to humanity to manipulate it. The robots grow increasingly insidious as they grow powerful.

2001

Artificial Intelligence: AI

Although not in Rasskin-Gutman’s examples, the robots in the film Artificial Intelligence: A.I both blend in with humanity and are mass-produced; however, Spielberg and Kubrick’s future AIs are highly benevolent beings, curious and generous. They lament the extinction of the human race that we brought upon ourselves, and try to understand us by resurrecting humans out of space-time. Although this new myth has yet to withstand a few decades of time to see if its message will stick in cultural memory, it does signal a new direction for human perceptions of artificial life, from divine gifts, to manufactured monsters, and now manufactured gods. “The secret of life is sought in a gradient of divine intervention to human intervention, which is also a temporal gradient,” Rasskin-Gutman notes, “representing the triumph of science over religion.”