The Amazon Echo is much more than just a connected speaker. Paired with its Alexa voice-enabled assistant, the cylinder of sound is a new platform on which people can access cutting edge products and services like Uber and Spotify. But like most tech, you only get out of the Echo it what you put into it. These 10 Echo "skills" (Amazon's name for Echo apps) will turn your Echo from a headline-reading automaton into a true digital assistant, capable of informing, entertaining, informing, and even challenging you. You can add them to your Echo via Amazon's Alexa companion smartphone app.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday April 11 2007 In the article below, the "whirring tapes" of IBM's latest computer in 1949 were an anachronism. Magnetic tape was first used to record computer data in 1951. In the mid-1950s, John Backus, who has died aged 82, led a team at IBM that created a revolutionary new way to communicate with early electronic computers. They invented Fortran, the first true programming language, and in doing so laid the foundations of today's multi-billion dollar software industry. During a long career at IBM, Backus continued to seek better methods of computer programming, but his enduring legacy is Fortran, the language that is still used today to solve complex scientific problems such as weather forecasting and aircraft design.

Cast: Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, Brendan Gleeson, William Hurt It's the late 21st Century and the world is no longer our own. The oceans have risen up and taken over the land. New York, once the summit of man's achievements, is submerged, its skyscrapers barely peeking above the surface of the water, its amusement parks drowned like tacky Antlantises. Man has moved on though, and discovered a new achievement: life. Buildings are easy – bricks and mortar moulded into an appropriate shape.

"How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover'? This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001." Perhaps it was the psychedelic movement of the late 1960's that saved Stanley Kubrick's tale of first contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligence from being buried in oblivion. The initial response to the film was extremely polarised if not hostile, and at the box office it wasn't a hit either. Rumour has it MGM, ready to pull the movie after a few weeks, was told by theater owners there's more people coming to the shows at last but those people were somewhat different -- a young crowd, smoking pot before the screenings.

Machine learning (ML) is all the rage, riding tight on the coattails of the "big data" wave. Like most technology hype, the enthusiasm far exceeds the realization of actual products. Arguably, not since Google's tremendous innovations in the late '90s/early 2000s has algorithmic technology led to a product that has permeated the popular culture. That's not to say there haven't been great ML wins since, but none have as been as impactful or had computational algorithms at their core. Netflix may use recommendation technology, but Netflix is still Netflix without it.

It is important to divide the overall understanding process into manageable pieces.

When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s initially on automobile assembly lines computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements. But according to Rodney Brooks, who last year left a tenured position as MIT s Panasonic Professor of Robotics to focus on his latest company, that may not be true for much longer. Brooks s lips are sealed, as The Economist put it last week, about what exactly he and Heartland Robotics are up to in a converted warehouse in South Boston s Innovation District. But venture capitalists have already gambled $32 million on the premise that whatever it is they produce, it s going to set a whole new direction in the field. Brooks, now the chairman and chief technology officer of Heartland Robotics, spoke at MIT on April 20, addressing a recently formed student entrepreneurship group called do.it@MIT.

Aeroplanes will be too afraid to crash, yoghurts will wish you good morning before being eaten and human consciousness will be stored on supercomputers, promising immortality for all - though it will help to be rich. These fantastic claims are not made by a science fiction writer or a crystal ball-gazing lunatic. They are the deadly earnest predictions of Ian Pearson, head of the futurology unit at BT. 'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it.

The HoMT workshop at the University of Pennsylvania is a place for presenting work in progress, and this is such work. In the text below, I have omitted references, and mention of "the handout" doesn't mean anything here, except that I have linked to things on the handout that exist on the Web. If you'd like to correspond about the topic and correct or inform me about the use of print-based interfaces, please contact me: nickm at this domain. Update, 1 March 2004: I made several changes, thanks to comments from Tom Van Vleck, whose work I cite in my talk. Update, 20 August 2004: Further work on this topic has resulted in "Continuous Paper: Print Interfaces and Early Computer Writing," a talk given at ISEA. My topic today is what some call "electronic writing," although "computer writing" is also a reasonable term for it. "Electronic writing" makes this sound a bit like a quadraphonic hi-fi, while "computer writing" is something you might expect to find in PC Magazine -- the helpful advice column about defragmenting your hard disk and such.

In 2008, four students at the MIT Sloan School of Management developed a system for captioning online video that was far more efficient than traditional methods, which involve pausing a video frequently to write text and mark time codes. The system used automated speech-recognition software to produce "rough-draft" transcripts, displayed on a simple interface, that could easily be edited. Landing a gig to caption videos from five MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) classes, the students were able to caption 100 hours of content in a fraction the time of manual captioning. This marked the beginning of captioning-service company 3Play Media, which now boasts more than 1,000 clients and an equal number of contracted editors processing hundreds of hours of content per day. Clients include academic institutions, government agencies, and big-name companies -- such as Netflix, Viacom, and Time Warner Cable -- as well as many users of video-sharing websites.