“We con­sider the com­pu­ta­tion of the vol­ume of the union of high-​​dimensional geo­met­ric objects. While show­ing that this prob­lem is #P-​​hard already for very sim­ple bod­ies (i.e., axis-​​parallel boxes), we give a fast FPRAS for all objects where one can: (1) test whether a given point lies inside the object, (2) sam­ple a point uni­formly, (3) cal­cu­late the vol­ume of the object in poly­no­mial time. All three ora­cles can be weak, that is, just approx­i­mate. This implies that Klee’s mea­sure prob­lem and the hyper­vol­ume indi­ca­tor can be approx­i­mated effi­ciently even though they are #P-​​hard and hence can­not be solved exactly in time poly­no­mial in the num­ber of dimen­sions unless P=NP. Our algo­rithm also allows to approx­i­mate effi­ciently the vol­ume of the union of con­vex bod­ies given by weak mem­ber­ship oracles. ”

“Those that are mas­ter­ing alloca­tive and cre­ative advan­tage, in con­trast, are learn­ing to cre­ate thick value: authen­tic eco­nomic value, that’s mean­ing­ful to humans. That’s why alloca­tive and cre­ative advan­tage are the equiv­a­lent of eco­nomic super­weapons. They are let­ting today’s rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies stun, stag­ger, and vapor­ize rivals, no mat­ter how big, bad, or historic.

And that’s never mat­tered more. An econ­omy built on extrac­tive and pro­tec­tive advan­tage is a giant, end­less Ponz­i­con­omy. Value is trans­ferred from one party to the next — but lit­tle is cre­ated anew. That’s what we’re find­ing out the hard way. Only through cre­ative and alloca­tive advan­tage can we rebuild a more mean­ing­ful economy.”

“Over the next sev­eral years, we fol­low the career of Anakinn as he falls in love with Irish princess Paðéma after killing her father at the Bat­tle of Con­fey, and his men­tor Víga-​​Óbívan con­tin­ues to encour­age him to betray Fal­faðinn, the King of Kóruskant­borg.… How­ever, Anakinn is loyal to his oaths to King Fal­faðinn and remains with him in Kóruskant­borg, where he rises to great honor in the ser­vice of the king and is the recip­i­ent of many good gifts. He also begins the plan­ning of the con­struc­tion of the great ship Dauðast­jarna, which when com­pleted will be the crown jewel of Falfaðinn’s fleet, and will hold a crew large enough to sack a city single-​​handedly. Because of his great skill in hunt­ing, Anakinn is now known to most as Veiðari-​​Anakinn, “hunter-​​Anakinn,” or often sim­ply Veiðari.”

“cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Mac OS X appli­ca­tion intended pri­mar­ily for the design and mod­el­ing of antennas.

cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Uni­ver­sal Binary Cocoa based appli­ca­tion. It runs natively on both Intel based and Pow­erPC based Mac­in­tosh com­put­ers that use Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or newer.

The appli­ca­tion is free and it can be down­loaded from the Down­load tab but­ton at the top of this page.

Online tuto­ri­als, ref­er­ence man­u­als and exam­ple files for the appli­ca­tion are avail­able through the User’s Man­ual tab but­ton. The What’s New page lists fea­tures that have changed since the pre­vi­ously released ver­sion of cocoaNEC 2.0. ”

“So I like to write a lot of music. I have not really released any­thing for a few years as I have been very busy free­lanc­ing in Lon­don on var­i­ous web projects; and my music web­site was last updated before I started learn­ing JavaScript.

I want to get back into writ­ing music over the next year or two and started to think about how to make my site a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. One of my ideas was to use a dial styled like an elec­tronic key­board to con­trol my page through AJAX, so I set about cre­at­ing the dial you see to your left.

As you can prob­a­bly see, the dial has lights as point-​​markers which flash to the Beast Per Minute so when peo­ple click on my tunes, I can update the BPM on the UI Dial to add some depth to the user experience.”

awe­some

“Please join us on March 24 for Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace Day is an inter­na­tional day of blog­ging (vide­olog­ging, pod­cast­ing, comic draw­ing etc.!) to draw atten­tion to the achieve­ments of women in tech­nol­ogy and sci­ence.
Women’s con­tri­bu­tions often go unac­knowl­edged, their inno­va­tions sel­dom men­tioned, their faces rarely recog­nised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung hero­ines, what­ever they do. It doesn’t mat­ter how new or old your blog is, what gen­der you are, what lan­guage you blog in, or what you nor­mally blog about – every­one is invited. Just sign the pledge below (click ‘pledge’ after you have com­pleted the reCaptcha) and pub­lish your blog post any time on Wednes­day 24^th March 2010.”

“Pic­tureIt is a web-​​based ani­ma­tion pro­gram that gives users the sen­sa­tion of turn­ing the pages of dig­i­tized rare mate­ri­als that would be oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult, if not impos­si­ble, to view or obtain. Vol­ume 1 of John James Audubon’s Birds of Amer­ica was selected as the inau­gural Pic­tureIt book for a few rea­sons. Fore­most, the eight vol­ume set has spe­cial mean­ing as the first pur­chase for the Library by the Board of Regents of the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan. As well, the Uni­ver­sity of Pitts­burgh had already dig­i­tized all vol­umes of the Birds of Amer­ica set and was will­ing to share the images with the Library. And finally, the illus­trated plates of this set were intri­cately com­pleted, mak­ing them as much art work as sci­en­tific work. Vol­ume 1 of Audubon’s Birds of Amer­ica was also selected for the first Pic­tureIt book because its com­plex images demon­strate the product’s embed­ded mag­ni­fi­ca­tion tool which allows users to get up-​​close and view the details of each illustration.”

“Map­Tiler is graph­i­cal appli­ca­tion for online map pub­lish­ing. Your map can cre­ate over­lay of stan­dard maps like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft Vir­tualEarth or Open­StreetMap and can be also visu­al­ized in 3D form by Google Earth. Only thing you have to do for pub­lish­ing the map is to upload the auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ated direc­tory with tiles into your webserver.”

“Spritely is a sim­ple plu­gin with only two key meth­ods, sprite() and pan() both of which sim­ply ani­mate the background-​​image css prop­erty of an ele­ment. The dif­fer­ence between the two is that a ‘sprite’ image con­tains two or more ‘frames’ of ani­ma­tion, whereas a ‘pan’ image con­tains a con­tin­u­ous image which pans left or right and then repeats. Typ­i­cally, in either case, you would use a png file (with or with­out trans­parency) for this. You might wish to use a trans­par­ent gif for Inter­net Explorer 6, though it prob­a­bly won’t look as good. Your html ele­ments must already be the cor­rect size you want the sprite to appear, but the back­ground image will typ­i­cally be larger than the html ele­ment, and the spritely meth­ods repo­si­tion the back­ground image within the html element.”