“Using total vari­a­tion based energy min­imi­sa­tion we address the recov­ery of a blurred (con­vo­luted) one dimen­sional (1D) bar­code. We con­sider func­tion­als defined over all pos­si­ble bar­codes with fidelity to a con­vo­luted sig­nal of a bar­code, and reg­u­larised by total vari­a­tion. Our fidelity terms con­sist of the L^2 dis­tance either directly to the mea­sured sig­nal or pre­ceded by decon­vo­lu­tion. Key length scales and para­me­ters are the X-​​dimension of the under­ly­ing bar­code, the size of the sup­ports of the con­vo­lu­tion and decon­vo­lu­tion ker­nels, and the fidelity para­me­ter. For all func­tion­als, we estab­lish regimes (suf­fi­cient con­di­tions) wherein the under­ly­ing bar­code is the unique min­imiser. We also present some numer­i­cal exper­i­ments sug­gest­ing that these suf­fi­cient con­di­tions are not opti­mal and the energy meth­ods are quite robust for sig­nif­i­cant blurring.”

“The YouTube Non­profit Pro­gram pro­vides for extra ben­e­fits like brand­ing capa­bil­i­ties, increased upload­ing capac­ity, and call-​​to-​​action over­lays. Non-​​profits can use the call-​​to-​​action fea­ture to drive sign-​​ups, dona­tions, web­site traf­fic, and any other response in which users take action. This fea­ture was effec­tively used by the World Food Pro­gramme to raise $36,000 on World Food Day with this video.…”

“Often­times, you’ll want to fit a line to a bunch of data points to make it eas­ier to spot pat­terns or rela­tion­ships. It might be obser­va­tions over time or it might be two vari­ables that are pos­si­bly related. In either case, a scat­ter plot just might not be enough to see any­thing use­ful. This tuto­r­ial will show you how to graph a fit­ted line, or loess curve, to such a scat­ter plot.”

“The study of high-​​dimensional dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions is chal­leng­ing and dif­fi­cult due to the ana­lyt­i­cal and com­pu­ta­tional intractabil­ity. Here, we sig­nif­i­cantly improve the speed of wave­form relax­ation (WR), a method to sim­u­late high-​​dimensional differential-​​algebraic equa­tions. This new method termed adap­tive wave­form relax­ation (AWR) is tested on a com­mu­ni­ca­tion net­work exam­ple. Fur­ther we ana­lyze dif­fer­ent heuris­tics for com­put­ing graph par­ti­tions tai­lored to adap­tive wave­form relaxation.”

“In a nine-​​month study, four fic­ti­tious com­pa­nies invented by the account­abil­ity office also sought Ener­gyS­tar sta­tus for some con­ven­tional devices like dehu­mid­i­fiers and heat pump mod­els that existed only on paper. The fake com­pa­nies sub­mit­ted data indi­cat­ing that the mod­els con­sumed 20 per­cent less energy than even the most effi­cient ones on the mar­ket. Yet those appli­ca­tions were mostly approved with­out a chal­lenge or even ques­tions, the report said.”

“Copy­right for Librar­i­ans is a joint project of the Berk­man Cen­ter for Inter­net & Soci­ety and Elec­tronic Infor­ma­tion for Libraries (eIFL), a con­sor­tium of libraries from 50 coun­tries in Africa, Asia and Europe. The goal of the project is to pro­vide librar­i­ans in devel­op­ing and tran­si­tional coun­tries infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing copy­right law. More specif­i­cally, it aspires to inform librar­i­ans con­cern­ing:
copy­right law in gen­eral
the aspects of copy­right law that most affect libraries
how librar­i­ans in the future could most effec­tively par­tic­i­pate in the processes by which copy­right law is inter­preted and shaped.”

“Go there, read it, and under­stand why (just like news­pa­per report­ing and books) web con­tent costs money and must be paid for or sub­si­dized. Either that or it must serve some sec­ondary ben­e­fit that brings in the bucks: for instance, a free web design blog might lead to pay­ing web design gigs for its author, or so they say.

Then read Part Two: Pay­ing For It, where Kissane con­sid­ers each of these meth­ods of sub­si­diz­ing con­tent “and how they relate to our work as con­tent and edi­to­r­ial strategists.””

“The require­ments for build­ing R vary, depend­ing whether the build machine is an Intel-​​based or PowerPC-​​based Mac and whether uni­ver­sal build is desired. The fol­low­ing descrip­tion shows the min­i­mum require­ments for build­ing R.…”

“But if any­body starts telling you now how much they’ve beaten the S&P 500 by over the past 10 years, then before invest­ing with them it’s def­i­nitely worth ask­ing to see their mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als in the inter­ven­ing years. It’s pretty impor­tant that they always used the S&P 500, and not just when it made them look good. Oth­er­wise, Richard Ferri is right that the com­par­i­son is down­right mis­lead­ing, and not the kind of behav­ior one would expect from a fiduciary.”

“The recent hap­pi­ness lit­er­a­ture sug­gests that inter­per­sonal util­ity com­par­isons are to some extent pos­si­ble. Yet this does not under­mine the basic philo­soph­i­cal crit­i­cism of util­i­tar­i­an­ism (or, more gen­er­ally, of sub­jec­tive wel­farism). A focus on sub­jec­tive util­ity may lead to a rel­a­tive neglect of the real con­di­tions of life. More­over, valu­ing a life is a reáec­tive activ­ity that should not be reduced to the eval­u­a­tion of hedo­nic states. In fact, the psy­cho­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture has also argued that ìutil­i­tyîis a mul­ti­di­men­sional phe­nom­e­non and that it is cru­cial to dis­tin­guish a§ects and cog­ni­tion. There­fore it appears unlikely that we should wit­ness a revival of prim­i­tive util­i­tar­i­an­ism in the near future. At the same time, how­ever, the empir­i­cal work on hap­pi­ness has drawn atten­tion to the impor­tance of the non-​​material dimen­sions of life ó a wel­come shift away from the exclu­sive focus on mate­r­ial consumption.”

“The chal­lenges are still sig­nif­i­cant. The first is prov­ing that the tech­nol­ogy is ready for the pun­ish­ment of the open water, where many wave and tidal pro­to­types have met their match. For exam­ple, the fiber­glass rotors on early tidal tur­bine pro­to­types installed in New York City’s East River in 2007 were frac­tured by unex­pected tur­bu­lence. The fol­low­ing year, Pelamis Wave Power pulled its snake-​​like 750-​​kilowatt gen­er­a­tors out of Por­tuguese waters amid tech­ni­cal difficulties.”

“Cre­ated by Cristóbal Vila, this video man­ages to explain how every­thing, from snails to flow­ers, is built accord­ing to pre­dictable math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples. Num­bers have never been more sublime.”

“The goals of this chal­lenge are to (1) learn the rel­a­tive strengths and weak­nesses of the dif­fer­ent clas­si­fi­ca­tion algo­rithms, (2) use the results to improve clas­si­fi­ca­tion algo­rithms, and (3) under­stand what spec­tro­scop­i­cally con­firmed sub-​​sets are needed to prop­erly train these algo­rithms. The chal­lenge is avail­able at www​.hep​.anl​.gov/​S​N​c​h​a​l​l​e​nge, and the due date for clas­si­fi­ca­tions is May 1, 2010.”

“The “Break­able Actor” class is a con­ve­nience fea­ture that allows you to spawn par­ti­cle effects when an object gets destroyed with­out set­ting up com­plex kismet sequences.”

“…We can also con­sider what hap­pens when instead of only con­sid­er­ing a sin­gle type of shuf­fling we con­sider com­bin­ing the j! dif­fer­ent shuf­fling rules that come from all the pos­si­ble rearrange­ments of the order­ing of the labels. And of course, per­haps the most impor­tant thing miss­ing right now is a good magic trick that can be per­formed using this shuf­fling rule, which was the orig­i­nal moti­va­tion of Larry Carter and J.-C. Reyes who first sug­gested this problem!”

“…In addi­tion, we demon­strate a novel trans­port mech­a­nism whereby we con­vey cold atoms con­fined in arrays of video­tape mag­netic micro-​​traps over dis­tances as large as ~ 1 cm par­al­lel to the chip sur­face. This con­vey­ing mech­a­nism enables us to sur­vey the sur­face of the chip and observe potential-​​roughness effects across dif­fer­ent regions.”

“…Finally, an answer to that vex­ing mid­dle step in the busi­ness plan. 1. Start Neato Com­pany. 2. ??? Move to Port­land. 3. PROFIT.”

““David Leung in sailor suit, 1911.” Plat­inum print by Fred Hol­land Day. Another look at the work of this some­what eccen­tric photographer.”

“Well, here we are the next day with NO inter­net. I could not get an IP address AT ALL on our Linksys router. So, I tried another Linksys that I had sit­ting around. AGAIN, no IP address AT ALL. Char­ter told us that since the modem works when plugged directly into the machine that our routers must be bad and we needed to rent one from them. Again, we told them no. I sus­pected that they might have blocked the spec­trum of Linksys MAC addresses, so I cloned my PC’s MAC address to the Linksys and it INSTANTLY con­nected. Our bad, out of date, incom­pat­i­ble Linksys router sud­denly is get­ting the 20mbps speeds that our PC’s were getting.”

“Peo­ple who say they like liv­ing in the sub­urbs are not expect­ing to pay a lot of what it really costs to do it. Fur­ther­more, a lot of them are hav­ing sec­ond thoughts: the fastest-​​growing demo­graphic in Man­hat­tan is now chil­dren: peo­ple who can afford to live any­where they want are increas­ingly decid­ing that a real city is the best place to raise a family.…”

“Yves here. The end game of lend­ing too much money is cred­i­tor losses. The bet­ter path is to accept write­downs and restruc­tur­ings, for the lenders to take their lumps. The record of past finan­cial crises is clear on this mat­ter. Even though it leads a larger ini­tial eco­nomic down­turn, its dura­tion is com­par­a­tively short. Even though US pol­i­cy­mak­ers refuse to lis­ten, the Japan­ese are strongly of the view that their pro­longed slump is mainly the result of the fail­ure to write down bad loans and recap­i­tal­ize its banks, rather than insuf­fi­cient fis­cal and mon­e­tary stim­u­lus. And a defla­tion­ary spi­ral pro­duces the same result, cred­i­tor losses, in this case via default, with more dam­age to the econ­omy and higher costs of repair­ing the finan­cial system.”

“Viacom’s efforts to dis­guise its pro­mo­tional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employ­ees could not keep track of every­thing it was post­ing or leav­ing up on the site. As a result, on count­less occa­sions Via­com demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheep­ishly ask for their rein­state­ment. In fact, some of the very clips that Via­com is suing us over were actu­ally uploaded by Via­com itself.”

“Yowza! Some­where in 2004, the world changed, and we didn’t real­ize it. Employ­ers in the pri­vate sec­tor put a lid on the cost of ben­e­fits (which includes health­care, retire­ment, vaca­tion, and sup­ple­men­tal pay of all sorts). Mean­while the cost of ben­e­fits in state and local govt jobs just kept ris­ing, with barely any break, both before and after the finan­cial bust. This is not good.”