"The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext."

"If the university teaches us primarily how to be in debt, how to waste our labor power, how to fall prey to petty anxieties, it thereby teaches us how to be consumers. Education is a commodity like everything else that we want without caring for. It is a thing, and it makes its purchasers into things. One’s future position in the system, one’s relation to others, is purchased first with money and then with the demonstration of obedience."

"Orchestra provides an instrumentation API for Ruby."

"In statistics and machine learning, "model selection" is the problem of picking among different mathematical models which all purport to describe the same data set. This notebook will not (for now) give advice on it; as usual, it's more of a place to organize my thoughts and references…"

"Yet, the co-training algorithm in this paper also makes the same assumptions (as it too has underlying naive Bayes clas- sifiers), but does not suffer from the violations. Thus we hypothesize that the co-training algorithm succeeds in part because it is more robust to the assumptions made by its underlying classifiers. This can be understood by looking at the differences in how EM and co-training use the underly- ing assumptions."

"We are pleased to announce the publication of the third edition of our text, Introduction to Computer Simulation Methods by Harvey Gould, Jan Tobochnik, and Wolfgang Christian, Addison-Wesley (2006). The text introduces Java programming by example in the context of learning physics. It contains many novel applications, is accessible to a wide range of readers, develops good programming habits, and encourages student experimentation. Our goal is to teach students enough tools so that they can use computer simulations as a method of discovery in physics."

"WOB combines a database of bifurcation problems with a tutorial on nonlinear phenomena.

WOB is designed to be part of a virtual university. The approach is example-oriented and experimental. The emphasis is on examples that are application-oriented."

"Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just require “http://my-host/my-lib.rb” in ruby?
Now You Can! Using our “http_require” gem!"

""Just yesterday, somebody asked me about my last temp job," Braxton said. "It ended in May, but I told them it ended in June. See, after it ended, I took about a month off and just kind of dicked around, traveling around Europe until my money ran out. I knew not to mention that to people who won't be able to do anything like that until they're 65.""

"This paper has two aspects. First, it describes the use of genetic programming to automatically synthesize a solution to the challenge problem posed at an international competition held every four years in the field of optical design. In 2002, the competition at the International Optical Design Conference attracted 42 entries from 39 well-known optical designers, commercial consultants, and patent holders from many of the field's most prominent companies, universities, and research institutions. The 39 human contestants spent an average of 34.1 hours working on their entries. Virtually all entries were considered good solutions to the challenge problem. Genetic programming automatically synthesized a design "from scratch" – that is, without starting from a pre-existing human-created design and without pre-specifying the number of lenses, the physical layout of the lenses, or the numerical or non-numerical parameters of the lenses…."

KOJAC is a set of Java classes implementing optical elements and optics laws in order to build and simulate optical systems. KOJAC is also aimed at being a demonstrator of optics for educational purposes. It has been developed at the IMT by Olivier Scherler during a training period.

"Create an image manipulation class that uses Core Image
Integrate this new class into attachment_fu, by writing a new attachment_fu processor module
Optionally, update attachment_fu’s automatic image processing list, or rely on using the :processor directive in our has_attachment model definitions."

"“37signals will lead the new global movement filled with imaginary assumptions on growth and monetization potential,” he continued. “We’re excited to roll out a list of unconfirmed revenue possibilities that involve crowdsourcing, a robust set of widget creation tools, 3G, augmented reality, social stuff, and an app store. Also, everything we make will include a compass.”"

"In this paper, we will present a novel R-tree based algorithm, which adopts a depth- first search technique. In the algorithm, we also developed a “forward checking” tech- nique based on a “region dominance” relation to reduce space complexity. We can show that the new algorithm is I/O optimal and requires a logarithmic space in the worst case in the 2D space if there are not many overlapping in R-tree. Further, our experiment demonstrated that the new algorithm requires a much smaller space than the existing I/O optimal techniques, and is progressive in a way sensitive to user’s requirements."

"… Rtree is designed to be a specialized, highly-reusable Python interface to an industrial-strength library. It doesn't do formats. It doesn't do projections. It's not a CGI program. It's a building block that does one thing well and otherwise stays out of your way. It indexes spatial data and provides query mechanisms, and that's all it does."

"By the time we tell you the right answer, it'll be too late."

"I’m in the future camp. It seems to me that greatness was never achieved by focusing on today. We celebrate “visionaries” for good reason. I’m not one of them but I sense their presence. If you’re one of those guys, keep it up. But remember, you’ve got to get through today to get to tomorrow."

"But Republicans are playing a dangerous game. They are benefitting from all this anger in the short term, but they have tapped into something deep and ugly that they can’t control. Calling the president a communist or even Hitler is something far beyond simple incivility or street theater—it is an accusation that intentionally stirs the crazy pot. It is ultimately an incitement to violence."

"I get the feeling that both of these unfortunate practices came into play yesterday, when NBC News made the decision to edit out a shocking, inflammatory, and thoroughly revealing comment made by one of the protesters attending the 9/12 Teabagger rally in DC. NBC Nightly News on Saturday evening ran a news package that contained a shot of a woman saying, "We are losing our country, we think the Muslims are moving in and taking over." But when the story was posted online, that comment was edited out and replaced with the infinitely less insane and racist, "I'm scared to death for my country. I believe Obama is running this country into the ground.""

"In conjunction with the API release, Collecta is launching a developer’s challenge with ChallengePost.com.

Dubbed “The AppMaster Challenge,” the contest will help drive the development of creative and powerful applications. From now through October 8th, developers can submit their Collecta-powered plug-in, webapp or application and the Collecta team will select the one that best exemplifies what real-time results can do. The winner will be announced on October 15th, and will receive both a featured spot as AppMaster Champion and a new 15″ MacBook Pro. There will be weekly prizes as well, and developers are encouraged to submit early and often."

"Today I believe some people are getting upset about the wrong thing at the wrong time. As Samwick noted, during a recession the deficits will increase – from falling tax revenues, automatic stabilizers and stimulus spending. Maybe some people disagree with the stimulus package, but that isn't going to change (except additions like extending unemployment benefits again).

Eliminating the recessionary deficit requires the economy to recover, and unfortunately the recovery will most likely be choppy and sluggish, but eventually a recovery will happen. Eliminating the structural deficit will be much more difficult and will require hard choices, but now is not the time."

"Section Eight Design was selected as the winner for their partnership with Teton Valley Community School, a non-profit, independent school in Victor, Idaho. The proposal, pictured above, focuses on scalability and a connection to the outdoors, taking advantage of the school's location at the base of the Teton Mountain Range. In addition to classrooms and meeting spaces that the school will build incrementally as they raise funds, gardens, farm animals, and local, drought-resistant flora will be integrated into the school's fabric to promote community, environmental responsibility and a "sense of place.""

"Starting from the long-popular design ethos of looking to nature for the best solutions, the Morphogenesis tool set works by proposing optimized 3D structures to the CAD user, based on a defined external envelope and a set of loads and constraints. By hacking away at the envelope until only the minimum of needed material is left, the tool produces some thoroughly odd, organic shapes, often reminiscent of bones or sponges. The shapes can be saved as STL or other 3D data and used as an underlay for exploring alternate designs."

"Recognize that there is a demand for certification. The agile community needs to put together a decent certification program, something that the Scrum Alliance has clearly failed at doing. My article Coming Soon: Agile Certification provides some thoughts as to what we need to do. The good news is that people such as Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson, and others, are putting together a developer certification program. The really good news is that these are the right people to do this. The really bad news is that they’re doing it under the aegis of the Scrum Alliance, so whatever they accomplish will unfortunately be tainted by the fallout of the CSM debacle."

"The service supports multiple GitHub repos and Tracker projects, so you can run a single service that integrates multiple projects. The service will figure out which commits go to which projects based on a config file on the server that associates a GitHub repo URL (make sure to use the http version of the URL, not https), to a Tracker project ID. For example:"

"Synchronize user stories in Pivotal Tracker with Cucumber features."

"The L3C is a low-profit limited liability company (LLC), that functions via a business modality that is a hybrid legal structure combining the financial advantages of the limited liability company, an LLC, with the social advantages of a non-profit entity. An L3C runs like a regular business and is profitable. However, unlike a for-profit business, the primary focus of the L3C is not to make money, but to achieve socially beneficial aims, with profit making as a secondary goal. The L3C thus occupies a niche between the for-profit and charitable sectors.
As of September, 2009, an L3C can only be formed in the states of Michigan[1] ,Vermont, Wyoming, Utah, the Crow Indian Nation and the Oglala Sioux Tribe. On August 4, 2009, Gov. Pat Quinn signed Illinois' L3C Bill SBO239 and the law will take effect on January 1, 2010."

"I just read the most plausible of law review papers suggesting the potential for protection of a private space within social network sites (SNS). Fellow UNC grad student Woodrow Hartzog proposes the use of Promissory Estoppel as a means to protect self-disclosure in online communities. It would create a type of contract or agreement between users of a site whereby a protection would exist for information disclosed in that community or site. If someone else shares the disclosed, private information, with a few caveats, they can be held accountable."

"rssCloud is meant to carry more frequent traffic and more content than the original RSS and Atom. It maintains an XML format (making it relatively verbose for SMS, although Winer tries to separate out the rich, enhanced data). Perhaps because of the increased traffic it would cause, it's less decentralized than RSS, storing updates in Amazon S2."

"How do you name step files? What to put in each step? What not to put in steps? Here are some guidelines that will lead to better scenarios. If you are new to steps and the general syntax, please read Feature Introduction first."

"That attitude carried on to seduce academic libraries and graduate English courses, where students were made to believe that Hugo and Dostoevsky, Maugham and Conrad had not written crime and spy novels. The virus still flourishes in our schools and cultural institutions; our self-appointed guardians of culture still leave genre writers off the literary tea guest lists. She writes mysteries, my dear, she'll show up reeking of gin. Or you get: He writes thrillers? How crass. It's so American.

"Popular fiction" has become a term of vulgar connotation, but it reeks of ironic paradox: obviously we sobersided Canadians ought to be reading unpopular fiction. (As an aside, reflecting an antithetical American attitude, I once got a rejection from a publisher down there who complained a manuscript was "too literary for the genre.")"