TONGUE TWISTER

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Summary of Chapter 7

Hannay walks to Turnbull’s cottage to look for Scudder’s notebook. He takes a train back to London but gets off to meet the Foreign Office Secretary, Sir Walter. Hannay tells Sir Walter about the German plot, Scudder’s secret code and his own story. Sir Walter tells Hannay that he knows who he really is and that the police are not looking for him any more. Hannay and Sir Walter work on Scudder’s code and they are shocked to hear that Karolides has been killed.

Summary of Chapter 1 to 4

Scudder is chased by German spies so he stops at Hannay’s flat and asks him for help, since he needs to a place to hide. Scudder tells Hannay that these spies are running after him because he knows about their plot to murder Primer Minister Karolides, who is coming to London on June 15th. Hannay lets Scudder hide in his flat for several days and Scudder warns him about two

dangerous German spies, Julia and an old man. Scudder asks Hannay to continue the fight if something happens to him. The following day, Hannay finds Scudder dead.

Hannay decides to continue Scudder’s work, but he needs to run away to Scotland before Scudder’s enemies, the German spies catch him. So he leaves his flat dressed up as a milkman. He then gets on a train to Galloway taking with him Scudder’s little book.

 While Hannay travels by train to Galloway, he reads Scudder’s notes and discovers that he used a special code. The next day, on a train to Dumfries, he reads the newspaper and finds out that the London police have discovered Scudder’s body and that they were looking for him, so he decides to get off the train. Hannay runs towards the river and up the hills and sees a plane flying around the place. He realises that the German spies are after him. He walks until he reaches an inn. The Young innkeeper is a writer, so Hannay decides to tell him his story but asks him not to do anything before June 15th. The German spies come to the inn looking for Hannay, but he manages to escape.

Hannay drives away in a stolen car. Now that he has learnt how to read Scudder’s code, he knows that the Germans are planning to kill Karolides to have an excuse to start the war. The words “thirty-nine steps” are everywhere in Scudder’s notebook but he does not understand what they mean. He realises that the local police and the German plane are chasing him so he jumps out of the car and lets it fall into a river. Hannay is lucky to be helped by a young man, Sir Harry, who happens to be the nephew of the Foreign Office Secretary, so Hannay tells him his story. Sir Harry decides to help Hannay by

sending a letter to his uncle to schedule a meeting with him before June 15th.

Facebook’s Plans to Bring Flying Internet to Everyone Aren’t Going So Well

What goes up doesn’t necessarily come down in one piece. That’s what Facebook seems to be finding out during its tests of prototype systems designed to get the world online.

The social network cooed when its stratospheric Internet-spewing drone, Aquila, took to the skies for the first time back in July. But while the test flight lasted three times longer than planned, it didn’t end so well. Facebook engineers noted at the time that the aircraft suffered a “structural failure” during the flight. But according to Bloomberg, the National Transportation Safety Board has been investigating the incident, and now says that the aircraft experienced “substantial” damage.

It’s the second big setback for Facebook’s plans to bathe the planet in Internet access. Back in September, a SpaceX rocket containing the Amos 6 communications satellite exploded on the launchpad. A large chunk of the satellite’s spectrum was reserved for use by Facebook as part of its plan to roll out wireless broadband across the globe. The explosion has since been found to be the result of a fueling problem, but that’s no consolation to Mark Zuckerberg, who at the time said that “the problem isn’t the money; it’s that now it may take longer to connect people.”

Clearly, Zuckerberg is feeling the frustration that comes with testing exotic hardware. (It’s almost as if it’s more difficult than building a website.)

Still, it’s understandable: two-thirds of the company’s three-part plan to connect the world is now mired in technical issues. The third route to providing a global Internet, by the way, is a new breed of wireless networks. At least they don’t need to be airborne.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602957/facebooks-plans-to-bring-flying-internet-to-everyone-arent-going-so-well/?utm_campaign=internal&utm_medium=homepage&utm_source=channel_1

Want to Understand AI? Try Sketching a Duck for a Neural Network

They include Quick, Draw!, a game in which an algorithm tries to guess what you’re sketching, A.I. Duet, which lets you compose pieces of music with a creative computer, and ways to visualize how neural networks represent information and see the world.

The projects show off some new AI features Google has built into an overhauled cloud computing platform. But they also help make AI less mysterious, and hint at ways in which the technology may become more accessible to all of us.

Take Quick, Draw!, for example. You have 20 seconds to draw six simple objects, and a computer tries to guess what you’re working on in the allotted time. Under the hood, the game runs a learning system that Google uses for character recognition. The system analyzes not only the shape, but also the strokes you used to draw it. It’s a neat way to understand a machine-learning approach that’s used by millions on their smartphones. It’s also quite addictive, even if it always seems to mistake my ducks for potatoes.

In in A.I. Duets, you get to make music with an algorithm. Through an effort called Project Magenta, Google researchers are exploring ways of using neural networks to mimic human creativity. The results are fascinating, especially because how musical creativity works remains rather mysterious. Part of the motivation for Google's project, indeed, is exploring human intelligence by copying its musicality.

Among the projects aimed at elucidating the inner workings of neural networks is one called Visualizing High Dimensional Space. Created by several experts in data visualization, this effort shows how a large neural network stores and draws connections between different pieces of data.

The results are often beautiful, but they also highlight one way that we might be able to understand powerful machine-learning systems that would normally be inscrutable.

This could be pretty important for everyone. Imagine, for example, an algorithm that just flagged an apparently healthy patient as likely to develop a particular disease. The ability to inspect a network's inner connections could make that decision less difficult to understand, and make treatment easier to justify.

So if you want to understand the revolution in machine intelligence that’s upending just about every industry, Google's online AI laboratory is well worth a visit.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602941/want-to-understand-ai-try-sketching-a-duck-for-a-neural-network/?utm_campaign=internal&utm_medium=homepage&utm_source=grid_1

Zuckerberg: Fake news on Facebook affected election? That's 'crazy'

After Donald Trump won the US presidential election on Tuesday, some commentators argued that fake news circulating on Facebook helped the real estate mogul turned reality TV personality win.

There was, for example, this story from the nonexistent Denver Guardian about an FBI agent associated with Hillary Clinton's email leaks being found dead in a murder suicide. Or this one about the Pope endorsing Trump.

Even President Barack Obama called out Facebook by name the day before Tuesday's election. "As long as it's on Facebook, and people can see it, as long as it's on social media, people start believing it," Obama said at a Michigan rally. "And it creates this dust cloud of nonsense."

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't buy that fake stories played a role in the election outcome.

"Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook -- it's a very small amount of the content -- to think it influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea," Facebook's CEO said Thursday at the Techonomy conference in Half Moon Bay, California.

Instead, he thinks some people are shocked and still trying to understand the results of the election. "It takes a profound lack of empathy to think that someone voted some way because of a fake news story," Zuckerberg said.

The discussion comes days after the US presidential election. Trump won the office in an upset victory, which blindsided many people -- including pollsters and pundits -- who believed Clinton, the Democratic nominee, would become the next president.

To add to the disorientation, Facebook suffered what looks to be an oddly timed glitch on Friday, in which the site thought many of its users were dead. Lots of those very-much-alive users posted screenshots of memorial banners over their Facebook pages.

"For a brief period today, a message meant for memorialized profiles was mistakenly posted to other accounts. This was a terrible error that we have now fixed," said Facebook in a statement. "We are very sorry that this happened and we worked as quickly as possible to fix it."

Facebook, the news source

Facebook, with its 1.79 billion users, is playing a major role in society as more people look to the social network to get their news. Over 40 percent of American adults get their news from Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center and Knight Foundation.

Earlier on Thursday, Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management at Facebook, said in a statement that "there's so much more we need to do," to fight the spread of misinformation on the social network.

In the aftermath of the election, critics of the service have also blamed Facebook for the unexpected election result, arguing that the social network promotes tunnel vision because people are supposedly only exposed to viewpoints aligned with their own. Your Facebook feed is made up of posts from only the people you choose to populate it. So, the argument goes, there's a Facebook that liberals see and one that conservatives see, depending on the political views of your friends on the site.

Plus, Facebook relies on an algorithm that decides exactly what you see on your News Feed. Generally, it learns from what you've clicked on or Liked in the past and shows you more of what fits your interests. That is, it shows you what it thinks you want to see.


Even though the algorithm learns from your cues, Facebook still has an awesome amount of control over potentially shaping someone's worldview. Zuckerberg denied that Facebook is an echo chamber, arguing that Facebook actually exposes you to more viewpoints because everyone has at least a small number of friends who hold opposing opinions.

Zuckerberg emphasized that Facebook does show people stories they may not agree with, but that sometimes people just tune them out. "It's not that the diverse information isn't there," he said. "We haven't gotten people to engage with it in higher proportions."

This isn't the first time Facebook has been scrutinized for what it does or doesn't show us. It drew ire earlier this year after reports claimed Facebook encouraged its editorial contractors to suppress conservative news in its "trending stories" feature. Soon after that, the feature was redesigned to be more robotic, without human-written descriptions or curation.

Zuckerberg was also asked about his thoughts on the election results in general. In the past, he's been critical of Trump. In April, he took a thinly-veiled shot at then-candidate Trump onstage at F8, Facebook's most important conference of the year. Without referring to Trump by name, he talked about the dangers of "building walls," a nod to Trump's promise to build a wall along the Mexican-American border.

Trump has previously attacked Zuckerberg, too, calling the tech CEO's push for more immigration through his public interest group Fwd.us a bad move for American workers.

On Thursday, Zuckerberg was more diplomatic. "Well we have a lot of work to do," he said. "But that would have been true either way."

In big data, industrialization is innovation

“We need to innovate” is a common refrain. And in the world of information, there is often a mistaken belief that innovation today is purely about analytics. However, the reality is that sort of fashionista-based innovation rarely delivers sustainable results. Back in 2010, MIT and Capgemini looked at what it really took for companies to be successful with digital. Their report had a very interesting finding: Companies that take a more governed and managed approach to digital deliver more sustained benefits on their journey. Those that pursue technology- and point-driven approaches deliver less value.

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise: History has shown us that some of the greatest innovations in business come from industrializing and standardizing what others had previously done. Henry Ford famously created the first large-scale production line to manufacture his cars, an innovation that enabled him to not only make cars faster, but to make them to a higher and more consistent quality. By enabling certain people to specialize in specific tasks, it meant they could gain higher skill levels and in turn innovate within their new area of expertise.

The key is that Ford industrialized something that hadn’t been industrialized, and today in big data we find ourselves at a similar place in the journey. We are moving from the building of bespoke smaller-scale solutions to replacing a whole data substrate across an organization. This shift from cottage industry to core capability is why companies need to industrialize to gain advantage over their competition. If we look at the key life cycle stages of ingest, store and distill, all of these are ripe for Industrialization.

Today ask yourself this: “How long does it take for me to get data available for use?” If the answer is “How long is a piece of string?” or an internal groan, then time is clearly being wasted in areas that do not directly add business value.This is where you need to think like Henry Ford and consider what your production line for information should be. The "drivers" in this scenario are the people writing reports, the data scientists doing analytics, the developers building new data-centric applications and the integrators delivering information back into operational systems.  Those drivers however don’t need choice on how the information gets to them, to borrow the quote attributed to Henry Ford, “They can have it any color they want, as long as it’s black”.

The point here is that having a digital information platform is a huge innovation over the siloes and low-velocity information projects of today. Too often, CIOs become fixated on point efforts and the power of analytics instead of considering what it truly requires to become a digital business. When looking at investments and return, it’s important to remember that the ability to more rapidly deliver value is at the beating heart of a digital business that can adapt to the market.

Industrialization is the main big data innovation that every CIO should focus on in 2017, because without industrialization, 2018 and beyond will remain cottage industries. To provide the foundations for business innovation, you must provide a new information landscape that enables you to rapidly deliver a multitude of different analytics at high velocity, high reliability and at a predictable business cost. Industrialization is the only way to go.

Glosario

Microsoft Unveils Its First Desktop PC

Microsoft is trying to light a creative spark under the struggling personal computer industry.

On Wednesday, the company, which is based in Redmond, Wash., unveiled a desktop personal computer that turns into a digital drafting table. Surface Studio, as the new device is called, is the company’s first desktop PC, and a reminder of Microsoft’s growing presence in the hardware side of the industry that it once left entirely to its partners.

At an event in New York, Microsoft also announced an update to its Windows 10 operating system that is designed to make creating, manipulating and viewing 3-D objects easier.

The new Microsoft machine is a handsome specimen of the all-in-one PC category best exemplified by Apple’s iMac. It has a sleek aluminum body with 28-inch screen that rests on top of a stand. Microsoft also showed a new accessory device called the Surface Dial that augments computer mice, giving users a precise way to zoom in images and perform other actions.

“This is a product that we believe truly brings out the creator in all of us,” said Panos Panay, a Microsoft corporate vice president.

The new Microsoft PC will not be for everyone though, if only because of its $2,999 price tag. It will go on sale in limited quantities this holiday season, Mr. Panay said. Architects, product designers and engineers are among the likely targets for the product.

Surface Studio stands out from others in that its display is touch sensitive, effectively making it a gargantuan tablet that can be manipulated with hands and a stylus. A hinge in its stand allows users to position the screen at an angle so they can write and draw on it more naturally.

J.P. Gownder, an analyst at Forrester Research, thinks the new device allows Microsoft to participate in the high end of the PC market, where profit margins tend to be fatter. During its most recently reported quarter, Microsoft said it had $926 million in Surface revenue, up 38 percent from the same period a year earlier.

But like previous Surface computers from Microsoft, including a laptop and tablet, Surface Studio is also intended to inspire other PC makers, Mr. Gownder said.

“Without the vision that the Surface team has provided, frankly, the PC industry would be in worst shape than it is anyway,” Mr. Gownder said.

Sales in the PC market have been in a long slump. Shipments of new PCs in the third quarter fell 3.9 percent from the previous year, according to IDC, the technology research firm.

Microsoft said a new version of its operating system that would be released early next year, Windows 10 Creators Update, is aimed at responding to the interest in 3-D imagery inspired by new technologies like virtual reality. The company demonstrated how a 3-D image of a sand castle can easily be captured on a smartphone and then edited into a greeting card on Windows 10 with a new application that comes with the software.

The company’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, said Microsoft’s new products were meant for the people who needed more than a regular consumer’s computer.

“We are the company that stands for the builders, the makers, the creators — that’s who we are,” Mr. Nadella said. “Every choice we make is about finding that balance between consumption and creative expression.”

Microsoft also said several hardware companies, including HP, Dell, Lenovo and Asus, would release virtual reality headsets next holiday season that work with Windows 10 PCs. The headsets will start at $299, hundreds of dollars less than comparable headsets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/27/technology/microsoft-unveils-its-first-desktop-pc.html?ref=technology

COMPUTERS TERMS

Now, the VOA Special English program, "Words and Their Stories"

Computer technology has become a major part of people's lives. This technology has its own special words. One example is the word mouse. A computer mouse is not a small animal that lives in buildings and open fields.

It is a small device that you move around on a flat surface in front of a computer. The mouse moves the pointer, or cursor, on the computer screen.

Computer expert Douglas Engelbart developed the idea for the mouse in the early nineteen-sixties. The first computer mouse was a carved block of wood with two metal wheels. It was called a mouse because it had a tail at one end. The tail was the wire that connected it to the computer.

Using a computer takes some training. People who are experts are sometimes called hackers. A hacker is usually a person who writes software programs in a special computer language. But the word hacker is also used to describe a person who tries to steal information from computer systems.

Another well known computer word is Google, spelled g-o-o-g-l-e. It is the name of a popular "search engine" for the Internet. People use the search engine to find information about almost any subject on the Internet. The people who started the company named it Google because in mathematics, googol, spelled g-o-o-g-o-l, is an extremely large number. It is the number one followed by one-hundred zeros.

When you "Google" a subject, you can get a large amount of information about it. Some people like to Google their friends or themselves to see how many times their name appears on the Internet.

If you Google someone, you might find that person's name on a blog. A blog is the shortened name for a Web log. A blog is a personal Web page. It may contain stories, comments, pictures and links to other Web sites. Some people add information to their blogs every day. People who have blogs are called bloggers.

Blogs are not the same as spam. Spam is unwanted sales messages sent to your electronic mailbox. The name is based on a funny joke many years ago on a British television show, "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Some friends are at an eating place that only serves a processed meat product from the United States called SPAM. Every time the friends try to speak, another group of people starts singing the word SPAM very loudly. This interferes with the friends' discussion – just as unwanted sales messages interfere with communication over the Internet.

This VOA Special English program, "Words and their stories", was written by Jill Moss. I'm Faith Lapidus.

Present Perfect