We are predicting the future by creating it ourselves. It’s a magical time. Male Voiceover: A lot has happened in the last hundred years. -: Our intuition about the future is linear. -: But today the world is global and exponential. -: Your smartphone is actually billions of times more powerful per dollar than the computer I used when I went to college. -: Singularity University is a place that teaches about exponentially growing technologies. Those technologies doubling in power, year on year. Computation, centers, networks, artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, virtual and augmented realities, synthetic biology. All of these are technologies that are riding on increasing computational power. And these are the technologies that are gonna be changing our world. (bright music) -: Allen Kay said, “The best way to predict the “future is to invent it.” -: If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down while others catch up and pass you by. Male Voiceover: We are living in the most extraordinary time ever in human history. Male Speaker: You have the ability as individuals and as small teams to literally do what only governments and large corporations could have done in decades past. -: I don’t care if you work at Coca-Cola, or you’re a start-up, policy maker, you work for the government, are you doing meaningful work. (bright music) Male Speaker: The more people solving problems, the better the world gets. It’s a mindset and a power that has never been possible before. (bright music) (group cheering) (whooshing)
[INTRO] So, in the last episode we talked about cassette
drives, if you haven’t seen that yet, I suggest you go watch it first since it sets the stage
for Floppy Drives. “Ahh! I love talking about floppy disks! Right, so here’s the thing.
I don’t care if they’re 8 inch, 5 ¼ inch, 3 ½ inch, or any of the 3 inch
Amstrad ones or any of the weird things in between. For all over the world, I love collecting
them, I love feeling them, I love looking at them. Floppy disks are more interesting
than pretty much any other older storage medium to me.” Technically floppy drives had been
in use since 1971 in the business market, usually in the form of these large 8-inch
disks. These things were huge, and you can see where they got the name floppy disk from.
These are probably most well-known from the movie WarGames, which came out in 1983. But
interestingly enough, nobody was using 8-inch disks in 1983. However, that doesn’t necessarily
mean the movie was wrong. It could just be that he was given a 5 year old computer by
his parents, which is not unreasonable I suppose. In fact, the computer I use every day is
5 years old, so there’s nothing wrong with that. Also, according to Futurama we’ll be
using these in the future for video recording. “Let’s just see what you were up to last night. While I was asleep.” But the 5 ¼ inch floppy disk is what most
people will recognize from the home computers of the 1980’s. Much smaller than the 8 inch,
but still works pretty much exactly the same. “So, when I think about floppy disks, what
I really think about are the 5 ¼ inch floppies. When I had the 3 ½
inch floppies, I already had a hard disk and so floppies sort of played a different role
in my computing habits. But when I was using the 5 ¼ jobs, that was really
the only storage media that I had.” So let’s have a look at how these work. First of all,
on the outside you have these “relief notches”. The purpose of this is to minimize any bending
of the disk right around the read area. This is the “index hole”, which was monitored by
a sensor so that the drive would know exactly where the disk was rotation wise, but not
all disk drives made use of this hole. This is the “write protect notch”. A sensor monitored
this notch and if it was found to be open, then the drive knew it was okay to write to
it. If you wanted to protect your data, you could put a sticker or piece of tape over
the notch so the drive would not allow anything to be written or altered on the disk. And
since it was not a good idea to leave this area exposed, a “paper sleeve” was used for
each disk to keep them protected. Let’s take a look inside and see how things work.
The magnetic material is very similar to the material inside of a cassette tape or VHS
video cassette. It just happens to be round and a bit stiffer. So this part of the disk
was used for actual data storage. Now you’ll never be able to actually see the data on
the disk, but if you could, here’s how it would look. Keep in mind that the typical disk had
40 tracks starting at the outer edge for track 1 and all the way to the inner edge for track
40. Inside of the disk drive, a “stepper motor” is used to move the read head back and forth
to access these different tracks. Now some drives had sensors to help it figure out
where the read head was, but some drives did not. So if you ever noticed when you turn on an
Apple II computer, the disk drives always make this knocking sound. So, what’s actually
happening here is that the drive is first powered on, since it has no sensor it has
absolutely no idea where the head is. So, the way to get around that is, they just send
the command to back the head back to track 1 and they send that command 40 times, so
it’s guaranteed to be back at track 1. Once the read head gets to track 1 it can’t go
any further so every subsequent attempt makes a knocking sound. It does work, however, and
does make sure the head always starts out on track 1. Commodore drives are known to
make the same sound when encountering a read error or when formatting a disk.Now let’s
take a little bit closer look at how the data is actually stored on the disk. In order to
help figure out where files are stored on the disk, the computer will divide it up into
sectors. These sectors are defined entirely by software and thus can be very different
from one computer to the next. This is an 8-sector format, typical of the IBM PC. So
if you asked for track 16, sector one you would be reading from this area here. And
if you could see the actual bits of data, they would look kind of like this. Each dot
representing a 1 and the blank area representing a zero. Now, one thing you might notice is
that a sector on track 40 is much smaller than a sector on track 1. And yet, they store
the same amount of data in this format. However, other manufacturers handled this differently.
Commodore, for example, used 21 sectors on the outer tracks, then 19 sectors, then 18,
and then 17 for the inner most tracks. As you can see, this made the sectors similar
in size and made more efficient use of the disk space. Also Commodore had some other
oddities such as using track 18 exclusively for the directory. Also, Commodore
disk formats did not use the last 5 tracks on the disk, due to some quality problems
with early drives. However, it was possible to use all of the tracks with a custom format.
Perhaps now it is a little bit more obvious why computers during the 1980’s of different
manufacturers could not read each others’ formats despite being the same physical media.
So, an Apple, for example, could not read a disk formatted in a Commodore. Some systems,
such as IBM typically used double-sided disks. Now what that means is they used two read
heads, one on top, and one on bottom. So they could store twice as much data on a single
disk, well sort of. You see, on Commodore and Apple drives, you could turn the disk
upside down to use the back side of the disk. There’s only one problem. See how the write-protect
notch lines up over here. Well, when you flip the disk around, the drive will now think
that the disk is write-protected and won’t let you write anything here. The solution
is to make another hole. Now they actually sold products specifically designed to do
this. But I would usually just take another disk and use a razor knife to cut a slot
out. Now you had a write-protect notch for both sides, so you could use the full capacity
of the disk. So let’s talk about the actual drive mechanisms themselves. Now, this is
a typical full height drive that would have been used by an IBM PC or an Apple or even
a Commodore back when they were making the PET. A few years later most everyone had switched
to half-height mechanisms. Now check this out. See how much larger a Commodore disk
drive is compared to an Apple disk drive? Why is that? So, Commodore and Atari took
a very different approach to their disk drive controllers. Let’s take a peak inside this
Commodore 1541. Look at that huge circuit board. Wait, what is that? A 6502 CPU, the
same one used in the computers themselves. And here we have two I/O controllers, exactly
the same ones used in the computers, and 8 kilobytes of ROM, and 2 Kilobytes of RAM.
So, it’s very much its own self-contained computer. Let me demonstrate this. This is
a neat little program that makes your disk drive play music. It accomplishes this by
using the stepper mode for the head and vibrating it back and forth. But the more interesting
part is that you can now unplug the drive from the computer and it will continue to
do its thing all by itself, because the program is executing internally. [FLOPPY DRIVE MUSIC] Now, why did Commodore
put a whole computer inside of their disk drives? Well, my guess is that the probably
did it to reduce cost. Because it was no longer neccessary to put a drive controller inside
the computer. And many of the computer users were happy not even owning a disk drive and
just using a tape drive instead. Basically, with an Atari or Commodore, the computer doesn’t
even really know where the information is coming from. It just sends a request out the
serial port and says “I’m looking for file XYZ.” The drive will check the disk and see
if it can find it. Once it does, it sends the file back to the computer. An Apple does
something very different. It has to send specific commands to the disk drive telling it to move
the head, spin the disk, and all of the decoding of the tracks and sectors are handled by the
computer’s CPU. Now you might think that Commodore drives should be much faster, than say an
Apple or IBM drive because they had their own processor on board. Well, it didn’t work
out that way, and in order to understand why you have to go all of the way back to the
Commodore PET. The PET disk drives were HUGE, but they were decently fast because they used
the IEEE-488 parallel interface. It was a 24-pin connector and had 8 pins for parallel
data transmission. Well, when Commodore came out with the VIC-20 a few years later, they
decided to move to a serial interface where data was transmitted one bit at a time. That
wasn’t necessarily a problem, since they were going to use a hardware shift register, which
would take care of this at the hardware level. However, the hardware was faulty and it was
too close to the time of release, so they just did away with the shift register and
instead just programmed the CPU to address the data line directly, and it was
pretty darn slow. And they didn’t even use the most efficient routine possible. But,
that’s the kind of thing that happens when you push design changes into a product at
the last minute before it launches. Since the VIC-20 only had 5K of RAM, it really didn’t
matter that much. But the C64 came out soon after and had a lot more RAM. But they wanted
to maintain backwards compatibility with the disk drives for the VIC-20 so it ended up
being VERY slow. “I remember my first impression of plugging it in and loading up a couple
of disk games, I was very very underwhelmed by the actual speed of this thing. I mean,
this thing was as slow and in some cases even slower than the C2N datasette. And how could
this be? I had no idea that a disk drive would actually be slower than a turbo load on tape.”
Now, interestingly enough, people eventually figured out how to make some more efficient,
and thus faster software routines for communicating with the disk drive. So cartridges such
as this EPYX FastLoad came to market. All this cartridge does is replace some of the
kernel’s disk drive routines. “This is the EPYX FastLoad cartridge. And this is something
that I would recommend to anyone that wants to use a disk drive on a Commodore 64 with
the original disks. This thing will actually speed up loading times, 4 or 5 times. And
this is very compatible; in fact it works with every single disk I’ve thrown at my 1541.”
Commodore later sort of remedied this with the Commodore 128 and 1571 disk drive. The
combination of these two have very fast disk access, but the problem is it is only fast
when operating in native Commodore 128 mode. But since most games were required to run
in C64 emulation mode, the drive was just as slow thus still requiring a fast-load cartridge.
Now eventually we moved forward to the 3.5 inch floppy drives, and sometimes they were
mistakenly called hard disks by people that really didn’t know anything about computers.
Some of the first computers to use these were the Amiga, the Macintosh, and Atari ST. Now, these
guys were with us from the late 80’s all the way into the 2000’s and apparently will even
be used in the future to store robots’ brains. “I downloaded his brain. Everything that is
Bender is right here: His mind, his memories.” It’s basically the same technology just in
a smaller, more durable casing, with a write protect tab that can be moved on or off so
you don’t have to use a piece of tape. So many of you may have heard that the US military
still uses old floppy disks in some of their specialized computers, like for controlling
nuclear missiles and things like that. Well, is that a problem? Not necessarily, you see
those drives and disks were actually extremely reliable back in the 70’s and 80’s. Of course,
they also used to be expensive. A box of 10 floppy disks could actually set you back.
In the 90’s they started making them cheaper and cheaper and the reliability suffered.
And by the 2000’s when the last batches were being produced, they were total junk. The
last few boxes of disks that I’ve bought, probably around 2005, probably some of the last ones
you’d find in a computer store, they were actually Sony brand, a brand that you might
think would be of high quality. And they were total junk. In fact, 3 or 4 disks out of each
box of 10 didn’t work right. “One of the things I think that people don’t realize now is just
how much floppy disks actually cost back then. You know, you can go now to the store and
you can buy like a spindle of 50 CDs or DVDs for like $10. Which, I know they’re also on
their way out. But, you know, back when I was a kid and I was using computers like in the
late 80’s and the late 90’s, you could easily drop $20 on, like a 10-pack of floppy disks. And really
by that time, the price had already come down, before that they were even higher. And it
was expensive enough that I actually had to ask for a box of disks for Christmas.” I think
because floppy drives and the disks had become so unreliable towards the end of the era,
I think a lot of people remember them that way, even though they were actually pretty
darn reliable back in their heyday. In fact, I have plenty of disks that are like, over 35 years
old and they still work just fine. “I’ve got some floppy disks that have survived since
the late 1979 from Heathkit systems and they’re still fine. On the other hand, I’ve got floppies
from 1999 and they didn’t last until like 2003 and they were done. Toast. And I lost
a bunch of cool stuff. But, that’s how it goes. That’s kind of a thing that’s unfair
to floppy disks. I think if you take care of them really well, at least from the ones
I’ve got in my collection, they tend to last for a really long time.” “As a retro computer
collector in 2016, let me just tell you that dealing with these aging floppy disks is a
huge pain in the butt. However, there are solutions like floppy drive emulators now
that make working with these machines a lot easier. But I have to say there is something
comforting, and nostalgic about hearing. [FLOPPY DRIVE CLICKS] That sound.” And if you want to really appreciate
floppies, just compare them to tape drives, or even worse, to these old punch-tape reels
that were incredibly noisy. Of course, floppy disks were eventually replaced by optical
media such as CD-ROM, which is a tale for another episode some other time. But one thing
I can say for sure is that the track/sector concept we talked about earlier lives on today
in magnetic hard drives only the data is so much more densely packed. Now, I suspect in
another 5 to 10 years, everything is going to be solid state and think moving disks,
like hard disks and stuff like that are going to be obsolete forever. Edited and improved by: OPGuyK
From the skies in swelling echoes
Come the cheers that tell the tale… And if the tale we tell about Purdue is true,
Then at any given moment – Any slice of time –
You should see the fingerprints of our pioneers in all corners of the globe,
Witness hard work in progress across campus, And catch glimpses of a future that promises
to move the world forward. But above all else,
You should find stories of dreamers-and doers-who are being granted opportunity.
So how about…now. In 1869, John Purdue gave the state of Indiana
a gift: $150,000 and 100 acres where the Wabash spreads
its valley. A single act of generosity that gave birth
to a premier learning institution Rooted in agriculture and the mechanic arts
Research and engagement But growing beyond John Purdue’s wildest imagination 100 years after Purdue was founded
A Boilermaker would make human history. At 2:56 Coordinated Universal Time,
Neil Alden Armstrong become the first person to walk on the moon.
In one single moment A giant leap forward for mankind,
And together we share in one of the greatest achievements of the modern era Purdue is reaching to solve real world problems
Championing research and innovation Empowering scientists like Dr. Gebisa Ejeta
To create new strains of crops that are more resistant to drought
And protect the security of food for 100 million people in Sub Saharan Africa We are imagining spaces across campus that
are unlike anything seen before, Where biological and nano fabrication cleanrooms
can share common boundaries, Blurring the line between disciplines,
Elevating the possibilities for collaboration And giving nearly half of our undergrads,
and counting, at least one research experience during their
time at Purdue We are placing students first,
Investing in programs and facilities that spur them to think broadly and lead boldly,
Ensuring that men and women at Purdue have the resources to succeed,
Doubling student support so even more bright minds reach graduation –
job-ready, career-ready, world-ready. We are committed to remaining affordable and
accessible for students from Indiana and around the world
All the while building on our strengths and cultivating a place
Where records are broken for patents and startups Where a class uses its supply-chain savvy
to get clean water to thirsty people on the other side of the globe
A pilot can deepen his understanding of human-machine interaction – and go on to calmly land
an Airbus A320 on the Hudson River Or a woman can boldly dream to fly around
the world We are Purdue
The cradle of astronauts and quarterbacks An institution marked by the legacy of our
Old Gold and Black United today, with women and men who are committed
to education and discovery Always building one brick higher
Focused on using their talents to move our world forward
And with the support of our entire Purdue family
Ever grateful Ever true
We will capitalize on the momentum of the present
Because our moment Is now
Pop quiz: What can we add to education to engage students reduce dropout rates, improve problem-solving skills
and boost test scores? Answer: Arts Education! It’s a magic ingredient for engaging young hearts and minds. The arts teach
persistence, critical thinking, teamwork and the ability to look at things in new
ways. Adding the arts at school leads to
powerful outcomes. Arts education enhances academic achievement in
subjects like math, reading and science. Students who take four years of art and
music classes score 93 points higher on their SATs and low-income students who
study the arts stay in school at a rate of five times their peers and are more
likely to graduate college. Too many kids miss out on arts education when budgets
get tight. 29 states have cut education spending hitting rural schools and
low-income neighborhoods the hardest. Give every child the advantage of a
creative education. Visit NAASA -ARTS.ORG/ACTNOW to learn how you can show your support for the arts!
The Division of Continuing Studies took
a Rutgers building that was somewhat old and tired and created a whole new
lifelong learning space. At the Rutgers Lifelong Learning Center, there is a
one-stop shop that meets all faculty needs: Teaching and Learning with
Technology. We have our instructional designers here who work with faculty to
design and develop online and hybrid courses. Enhancing our instructional
design services, the Lifelong Learning Center also includes a multimedia studio
to produce professional quality video for use in your classes. If you are
interested in incorporating gamification elements with your courses, our Game
Research and Immersive Design group is here to assist from ideation through
production. At long last, you can enjoy the convenience of finding solutions for
all your instructional technology needs in one facility. The strategic plan talks
about envisioning the University of tomorrow. I think we have created that
here today.
When I found out JPMorgan Chase
was hiring veterans, it was an out-of-body experience
for me. My name is Ubong Samuel Akpan. I was an E4 Specialist with
the United States Army. And now I’m a software engineer
at JPMorgan Chase. After 5 years with the Army, transitioning into the
real world was difficult. I was an electronic technician, and that’s not what I wanted
to do. I was stuck in a career where
I didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. I had better goals and visions
for myself. Over 200,000 veterans leave
our military service every year. JPMorgan Chase is really
focused around how do we help those veterans
transition? I taught myself to code at home. But it was difficult to just
transition into a position that required
professional experience. So I was stuck. It’s like the chicken and egg
question where, “How do I get this experience
if I’m not given a chance?” JPMorgan Chase stepped in and
snapped a finger and my fate changed. – Yes.
– The port could change… Tech Apprenticeship Program is
where we select military veterans to go through
a software engineering bootcamp. And for one year, they come and
learn on the job as software engineer
apprentices. When I found out I was going to
be working for JPMorgan Chase, it was unreal. They didn’t require you to have
the job experience. It only required that you were
willing to put in the work. Coral: As long as you have
the aptitude and passion, you can be admitted
to the program. Ubong: Being around veterans
in the workplace is like working with
your family. [blocks clanking,
woman screaming] You have people who know
where you’re coming from, and people who are going in
the same direction that you are going. It is awesome. [cheering] So we are actively bringing
veterans in because of all of the experiential diversity
that they bring. They think outside of the box. It’s the can-do attitude,
it’s the strong work ethic. It’s the right thing to
give them a chance, but it’s also good for business. It is definitely a win-win
for everyone. My job is awesome. You’re given time to acclimatize
and grow in the field, and then you’re allowed
to express yourself. We are the cash cows. This is the greatest team
in the world. [laughter] Ubong: I learned from them and
they learned from me. When I start designing, it just feels like I should be
doing this. The apprenticeship program
is not the end. It is the beginning.
Articles, Blog
IU School of Education faculty member implements BioSim technology in classroom
December 5, 2019
In K-12 systems, there is really a dearth of things for science education and early childhood. And so we really sought to reexamine that landscape and think about things that are naturally interesting to young children. And so we went to bees and we went to ants, and other biological systems, and we tried to unlock a whole world of possibility about what biologists actually do and learn. The BioSim System is really a set of electronically-enhanced puppets that the kids get to wear and travel around the room. They go to flowers, they go to different places to find food or nectar, and bring it back to the community or to the hive. And so, deep inside those puppets are a whole bunch of custom-made electronics, and we even had to invent some new technologies to make this possible. From here, we’re making high-quality curriculum tool-kits for teachers to be able to take those into their classrooms. And we’re hoping to refine those so that we are not just doing biological insects, but we will actually be able to simulate other kinds of biological systems. You can imagine being a blood cell and traveling throughout the body and picking up oxygen, and all sorts of other systems, as well.
This is another teaching tip from Humber’s
Centre for Teaching and Learning. Student Response Systems. Technology can support learning in many ways. One way to increase interactivity and student
participation in your classes is by using student response systems. A student response system is a method of polling
the class. You may pose questions, gather feedback, and
compare responses in real time. Students can use their own devices to respond
via text, a free App, a web browser, or even Twitter. Poll Everywhere, Mentimeter, Kahoot, Quiz
Socket and Socrative are a few of the free polling systems that are easy to use. The benefits of Student Response Systems (SRS)
are: • An increase of meaningful communication
and feedback from the students in general. • Anonymity allows students to take strong
stances on controversial topics. Quiet students who don’t like the spotlight
are comfortable participating. • A platform for discussion – why are
the poll results the way they are? • Exposure to a useful scientific tool used
every day namely, polling. Students can also discover the strengths and
weaknesses of polling. • An increase in engagement – It’s fun! Students tend to have better attendance in
fun classes. Give Student Response Systems a try.
– [Narrator] IBM, Google, Microsoft, all are making big bets
on cloud computing. That’s for good reason. Research firm Gartner forecasts
cloud computing revenues to exceed $260 billion dollars in 2020. For years Amazon’s AWS led the market. But, that lead is starting to
slip as other firms make moves to bolster their cloud
computing offerings. In October, Microsoft
surprised onlookers when it won the U.S. military’s JEDI cloud contract. It could be worth $10 billion
dollars over 10 years. Some in Washington expect
Amazon to appeal this decision. In July, IBM spent $34 billion
dollars to acquire RedHat and boost it’s cloud business. So, why are tech firms going
to battle for cloud services? To understand, you’ve
got to know the basics. – Well, and like any market that grows it’s strong because it
offers a value proposition to people that they find attractive, and so they shift their spending. – [Narrator] Cloud computing at it’s core, is about changing the way
businesses manage data. Everything done online;
shopping, video, texts, it all takes data. The data is processed in behind the scenes computers called servers. Managing that equipment takes
time, energy, and money. When a business moves to the cloud it’s really just outsourcing. In other words, tech firms like Amazon handle some IT services so businesses can focus
on what they do best. Outsourcing IT can generate savings. For example, Bank of America
adopted hybrid cloud computing and that reduced annual costs
by $2.1 billion dollars. Start-ups who uses a
cloud provider won’t have to spend as much on a custom data center. They can use resources from a third party. In-house IT has to maintain
enough server space to account for peak demand. That can mean that your company
has a bigger data center than it needs on a consistent basis. Instead, cloud computing lets companies pool their resources. The companies use as
many servers as they need and only pay for what they consume. Companies that use the
cloud can benefit from the remote management of data in places like Ashburn, Virginia. Amazon, IBM, and others host
some of their data centers in less populated areas like this. Both energy and land can be cheaper here than say, a city center. That’s why you see groups like Facebook and the NSA opening data
centers in small towns in Utah. There’s potential for lower costs, the views aren’t bad, either. Cloud computing is tougher for
some businesses than others. In the years after the launch of AWS, businesses like Netflix, Lyft,
and Slack launched products with intense IT demands. They were a natural fit
for cloud computing. Some companies who are moving
to the cloud today are bigger, and are in more regulated industries like health and finance. They’re companies like J.P. Morgan which operates under strict standards from regulators like FINRA. In 2017, Dana Deasy was the
chief information officer. At the time, he moved portions of the financial giant’s data to the cloud. His next task will be
even more formidable, do the same for the Defense Department. – So, I’ve mentioned we have a need for an enterprise cloud, so we have massive compute
capability where we can start to store our data in a more common way and make it accessible. – [Narrator] The multi-billion
Joint Enterprise Defense initiative is supposed to centralize the military’s technology
and reap gains in innovation. Getting there will mean untangling years of disparate IT systems. That will take time, money, and expertise, which is why Microsoft’s
potential win is so significant. Amazon is no longer the only
big name in cloud computing. Microsoft’s Azure Cloud service
was announced three years after Amazon AWS took an early lead. More than a decade has passed and AWS still dwarfs Azure in revenues. But, more deals are on the horizon. – The cloud markets are
still relatively small. So, their growth rate naturally
is going to be higher. And we do see that growth
rate coming down slightly over time as the cloud markets get bigger. But, the strong growth rates
are still driven by the fact that people prefer cloud models
over the traditional models for a lot of their work loads. – [Narrator] Which is why you see the largest firms in tech
betting big on the cloud. Billions of dollars hang in the balance.