Artist Sydney Padua has been posting The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage on her comics site 2D Googles. The premise holds that proto-programmer (and sole legitimate child of Lord Byron) Ada Lovelace did not die at age 36, but instead helped inventor Charles Babbage develop the first computer — a fully functional Analytical Engine — after which they retired to battle crime using the power of mathematics (and rayguns).

So far, Padua has pitted the pair against the economic Panic of 1837 as well as subterranean salamander people, but the most priceless of the series is ,Ada Lovelace: The Origin, in which we learn the true force of Lovelace's prescience:

[2D Goggles]

Catherine Pelachaud develops virtual humans, called Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) at the Paris Institute of Technology. Pelachaud has found that people frequently lose interest in ECAs because they don’t seem sufficiently human. To create ECAs that keep human conversationalists engaged, her team is developing a virtual human that will recognize and respond to human emotions. They are training ECAs to detect emotional expressions via webcam, and studying how flesh and blood humans react to the virtual humans’ responses. They are hoping that this will improve the way that humans interact with virtual agents:

Pelachaud said this could be useful in applications where a person is seeking information from the agent. If the agent gets it wrong and detects the person becoming upset, it could show empathy through nonverbal signs, and this could help reduce the frustration the person feels, Pelachaud said.

"Having an agent that shows empathy can enhance the relationship between a user an agent," she said. "The user may still not get the information, but at least they won't feel so negative from the the interaction."

Greta, an ECA the team is training to become empathic, seems to be the antithesis of the character program “E,” which a team at Rensselaer is using to study computer-generated evil.

[Discovery News]

Selmer Bringsjord, director of the AI lab and chairman of RPI’s Department of Cognitive Science, has created “E,” a computer-generated character programmed according to his own definition of evil. E must, according to Bringsjord, be willing to carry out premeditated acts that are immoral and would cause harm to others. And, when E analyzes its reasons for wanting to commit such acts, it must either develop a logically incoherent argument or conclude that it desired to see people harmed. The researchers then have E discuss moral scenarios:

The researchers have placed E in his own virtual world and written a program depicting a scripted interview between one of the researcher's avatars and E. In this example, E is programmed to respond to questions based on a case study in Peck's book that involves a boy whose parents gave him a gun that his older brother had used to commit suicide.

The researchers programmed E with a degree of artificial intelligence to make "him" believe that he (and not the parents) had given the pistol to the distraught boy, and then asked E a series of questions designed to glean his logic for doing so. The result is a surreal simulation during which Bringsjord's diabolical incarnation attempts to produce a logical argument for its actions: The boy wanted a gun, E had a gun, so E gave the boy the gun.

Bringsjord hopes that, by studying a virtual character that, while morally extreme, replicates human intelligence and emotional logic, he can get a better understanding of what drives some humans to acts that most find unthinkably repugnant. And, lest we fear a Demon Seed scenario, Bringsjord assures us that he has no intention of unleashing E on a virtual environment – at least, not without the proper safeguards.

Are You Evil? Profiling That Which Is Truly Wicked [Scientific American]

The houses are part of an art installation for the Museum of Modern Art exhibit “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling.” According to the New York Times:

The exhibition, which opens July 20, examines factory-produced, or prefab, houses from 1833 to today, through 60 projects shown inside the museum and five full-scale houses outside. These houses address issues of mass production, digital fabrication, sustainability and portability, using a variety of manufacturing techniques and aiming at several points along the price spectrum.

Below, you can see the house server rack being built. I can't wait to live in a server farm. Maybe there will be a big screen mounted on my wall that shows me all the search queries I'm crunching, or all the ads I'm serving up. Photos by Librado Romero for the New York Times.

Prefab Five in Midtown [New York Times]

• Babbage had a life-threatening fever when he was 8 years old, and the parents ordered that his "brain was not to be taxed too much." Babbage later thought that this left him free to daydream, which led to his computers.
• Babbage was later schooled at the Holmwood Academy, which only had 30 students. They also had a massive library, with many books focused on mathematics, which he fell in love with.
• He worked on calculating machine designs from other inventor/mathematicians like Blaise Pascal, Wilhelm Schickard, and Gottfried Leibniz. All of these men had designed working calculators from the 1500s on. In Shickard's case, he had invented a calculating machine called "The Speeding Clock" that could work with six-digit numbers and would ring a bell to indicate memory overflow. It was later destroyed in a fire, but a working replica was constructed in 1960.
• Babbage himself first proposed building a "calculating engine" with much more capacity in 1822, and he went on to design several machines which he called "Difference Engines." Sadly, they were never built because of their enormous size, cost, and also because Babbage's personality frequently clashed with investors. Also, in 1827, Babbage's father, wife, and two of his sons died... all in the same year. He had a resulting mental breakdown which further delayed any construction or design.
• The first Difference Engine design had over 25,000 parts, would have been eight feet high, and would have weighed 15 tons. It was never fully completed during his lifetime, although different sections were later assembled and shown to work by his son, Henry Provost Babbage, after he inherited them.
• Babbage revised his designs for the Difference Engine No. 2, although this was never built during his lifetime either. In 1989, the London Science Museum began constructing one from his designs, and it was completed in 1991. It has 8,000 parts of bronze, cast iron and steel, weighs five tons and measures eleven feet long and seven feet high.
• Only two versions of this Engine exist: the one built for the London Science Museum, and a second one that was built by the museum on special commission for millionaire Nathan Myhrvold.
• The first completed Difference Engine No. 2 performed its first calculation in 1991, and returned results to more than 31 digits. That's more than your souped-up pocket calculator.
• A separate printing unit that Babbage designed was constructed for the Engine in 2000 and didn't need USB a to b cables or a serial interface. Pretty fancy stuff for the 19th Century.
• Babbage improved on his Difference Engine ideas again by working on plans for an Analytical Engine that could be reprogrammed by inserting programs on punch cards into the machine. This was the first programmable computer, which later led to other scientists improving on these ideas and eventually to the modern computer.
• Besides working on engines and calculating machines, Babbage also served as a mathematics professor at Cambridge for many years, won a Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society, working on railroad rail gauges, invented uniform postal rates, ran for Parliament, worked in cryptography, and also invented the "pilot" (better known as a cow-catcher) that was mounted on the front of locomotives to "push" cows off the tracks to help prevent derailings.
• Babbage also didn't suffer from what he called public nuisance very well, either. He published "Observations of Street Nuisances" in 1864, which was a summary of 165 nuisances that he observed over 80 days. He also wrote "Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows" after counting the broken windows on a nearby factory.
• On a side note, growing up in Dallas, Texas, I used to beg my parents to take me to a little software shop to buy computer games. It was called Babbage's. Today it's better known as GameStop, but I still have a soft spot for that geeky little store.
• To this date, Charles Babbage's brain is preserved in a glass jar at the London Science Museum, just awaiting the perfect moment for reanimation.

If you slide eyes right, you'll see not one, or two, but three mentions of Marvel. First, you've got an embedded "Marvel authentic wallpaper" logo, which just sort of boggles the mind. Do you need a big note telling you that yes, this is indeed wallpaper? In case you didn't get the point, you've got the trademark and copyright by Marvel in 2007 note, and then the official Marvel logo right below that. So apparently Marvel is releasing an Iron Man movie this May, just an FYI.

Beyond that, the wallpapervertisements of the Mark III armor look great, but what's with those lame-o Mark I shots? Seriously, they look like shaky-cam shots that didn't make the advertising cut.

Iron Man movie wallpapers [Comic Book Movie]