Tag Archives: books

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  • Altaeros Ener­gies Releases Demo Video of Their Fly­ing Wind Tur­bine — Core77

    “What you saw there was a scaled pro­to­type, 35 feet in diam­e­ter. Dur­ing the test run it arrived on-​​site in a dock attached to a trailer, then deployed, acti­vated the tur­bine, and returned to the ground—all auto­mat­i­cally. At its high­est alti­tude of 350 feet, it suc­cess­fully got the tur­bine to gen­er­ate twice as much juice than it gets at tower height. We’d say Altaeros is one to watch.”

    wind-​​power pro­to­type engineering-​​design sus­tain­abil­ity energy

  • More on DRM and ebooks — Charlie’s Diary

    “There is a per­va­sive assump­tion that ebooks are dis­pos­able lit­er­a­ture. But to the vora­cious read­ers, this is not the case. Cur­rently it’s hard for many peo­ple to build up col­lec­tions of books due to space con­straints — nev­er­the­less I know many SF fans (of the kind who read 50–150 books a year) who have turned their homes into libraries. They will be the tip of an ice­berg once ebooks become main­stream; why dis­card an ebook when you can file it and come back to it in 10 years’ time and it takes up no space? For such peo­ple, fil­ing and tag­ging their col­lec­tions is a major issue. And so is porta­bil­ity. It’s true that if they own an iPad they can have an iBooks app full of books pur­chased from Apple, and a Kin­dle app full of books from Ama­zon, and a Nook app full of books from B&N. But those apps are, thanks to DRM, data silos — you can’t cross-​​check to see if you bought book 3 in a series from Apple and book 5 from Ama­zon with­out a lot of fid­dling around.”

    business-​​opportunity col­lect­ing nerds-​​as-​​camel-​​nose my-​​people vague-​​press

  • Avería – The Aver­age Font

    “I am not a type designer. This is the story of the cre­ation of a new font, Avería: the aver­age of all the fonts on my com­puter. The field of typog­ra­phy has long fas­ci­nated me, and I love play­ing with cre­ative pro­gram­ming ideas, so it was per­haps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of “gen­er­a­tive typog­ra­phy”. A Google on the sub­ject brought up lit­tle, and I put the idea to the back of my mind until it occurred to me that per­haps the process of aver­ag­ing, or inter­po­lat­ing, exist­ing fonts might bring up inter­est­ing results. Luck­ily at this point I didn’t do any more web search­ing – instead I grabbed my lap­top and came up with an ini­tial idea for find­ing what the aver­age of all my fonts might look like – by over­lay­ing each let­ter at low opac­ity. The results can be seen in the below image.”

    typog­ra­phy type-​​design type­face generative-​​art design graphic-​​design

  • Phillip Rhodes’ Weblog

    “In short, it’s time for a res­ur­rec­tion of the crypto-​​anarchist /​ techno-​​libertarian /​ cypher­punk move­ment and it’s asso­ci­ated val­ues, activ­i­ties and aes­thetic. Those of us who care about these issues can’t just lurk in the shad­ows and act like noth­ing is hap­pen­ing. It’s time to start telling peo­ple about public-​​key encryp­tion, host­ing key-​​signing par­ties, devel­op­ing new tech­nolo­gies for bypass­ing Inter­net cen­sor­ship, devel­op­ing tools for bypass­ing State and Cor­po­ra­tion con­trolled mes­sag­ing chan­nels, and tak­ing a stand for freedom.”

    cryp­tog­ra­phy nrrrrds cultural-​​assumptions cultural-​​dynamics diver­sity

  • No, physi­cians don’t under­stand screen­ing sta­tis­tics | The Inci­den­tal Economist

    “So basically,when it comes to sav­ing lives, docs are three times more likely to rec­om­mend a screen­ing test based on irrel­e­vant data than they are to rec­om­mend it based on rel­e­vant data. I’m brac­ing myself for the hate mail, but this is part of the rea­son why I’m skep­ti­cal that just pro­vid­ing docs with more evi­dence will change the way they prac­tice. Most docs just aren’t trained to under­stand this stuff.”

    medical-​​culture health­care sta­tis­tics probability-​​theory plan­ning

  • reveal.js


    slides pre­sen­ta­tion library javascript sim­ple

  • Fancy HTML5 Slides with knitr and pan­doc | Yihui Xie

    “Karthik Ram gave an Intro­duc­tion to R a cou­ple of weeks ago, and I strongly rec­om­mend you to take a look at his cool HTML5 slides. I started try­ing HTML5 slides last year, and now it is dif­fi­cult for me to go back to beamer, which I have used for a few years for my pre­se­n­a­tions. It is hor­ri­ble to see beamer slides every­where at aca­d­e­mic con­fer­ences (espe­cially the clas­sic blue themes).”

    slides pre­sen­ta­tion library javascript mark­down

  • An algo­rithm is just an algo­rithm | Gene Expres­sion | Dis­cover Magazine

    “Another illus­tra­tion that knowl­edge comes not through blind adher­ence to meth­ods, but human reflection.”

    algo­rithms sta­tis­tics sto­ry­telling i-​​need-​​the-​​name-​​for-​​this

  • Cap­tur­ing dealer descrip­tions in our online cat­a­log — Yale Law Library — Rare Books Blog

    “Attrac­tive and rare set of decrees con­cern­ing the func­tion­ing of the judi­ciary in the papal city of Bologna. These city statutes were pro­mul­gated by the Pope’s legate, Car­di­nal Benedetto Gius­tini­ani (1554−1621). Despite the issu­ing author­ity, the con­sti­tu­tions (a word indi­cat­ing leg­is­la­tion of the high­est level) are entirely non-​​religious in con­tent, relat­ing to civil law jus­tice in the city. They shed con­sid­er­able light into how courts worked in Bologna. Included are instruc­tions on cases involv­ing poor peo­ple; rules for notaries; the keep­ing of reg­is­ters; seizures of prop­erty; tak­ing of sus­pects; pay­ment of offi­cers; expert wit­nesses; and the gov­ern­ing of appeals. Pages 192–198 com­prise papal edicts on the salaries of Bolog­nese judges and notaries.” — Leo Cado­gan Rare Books (Dec. 2011)

    books cat­a­log nanohis­tory librar­i­ans meta­data

Items of some interest:

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These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Pro­gres­sives and the Ron Paul fal­lac­ies — Salon​.com

    The fal­lacy in this rea­son­ing is glar­ing. The can­di­date sup­ported by pro­gres­sives — Pres­i­dent Obama — him­self holds heinous views on a slew of crit­i­cal issues and him­self has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaugh­tered civil­ians — Mus­lim chil­dren by the dozens — not once or twice, but con­tin­u­ously in numer­ous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to over­turn a global ban on clus­ter bombs. He has insti­tu­tion­al­ized the power of Pres­i­dents — in secret and with no checks — to tar­get Amer­i­can cit­i­zens for assassination-​​by-​​CIA, far from any bat­tle­field. He has waged an unprece­dented war against whistle­blow­ers, the pro­tec­tion of which was once a lib­eral shib­bo­leth. He ren­dered per­ma­nently irrel­e­vant the War Pow­ers Res­o­lu­tion, a crown jewel in the list of post-​​Vietnam lib­eral accom­plish­ments, and thus enshrined the power of Pres­i­dents to wage war even in the face of a Con­gres­sional vote against it. His obses­sion with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laugh­able in its man­i­fes­ta­tions, and he even worked to amend the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act (another crown jewel of lib­eral leg­isla­tive suc­cesses) when com­pli­ance became inconvenient.

    pol­i­tics party-​​politics-​​in-​​particular cognitive-​​dissonance cultural-​​assumptions dialog-it-ain’t

  • A mod­est pro­posal to give Free Soft­ware equal legal stand­ing as pro­pri­etary. | Carlo Piana :: Law is Freedom ::

    Laws are more often than not an annoy­ance, despite their aim to improve the legal frame­work in any given field. Free Soft­ware (AKA “Open Source”) has thrieved despite the absence of any legal recog­ni­tion by the law, if not in spite of rules that clearly are shaped around pro­pri­etary soft­ware. In many juris­dic­tions it has passed the enforce­abil­ity test. So, no laws seem nec­es­sary to make it work. Yet, can some legal prin­ci­ple be put for­ward, and included in some laws, to help?

    via:Glyn-Moody licens­ing law con­tracts modest-​​proposals

  • 2011 in Review


    to-​​read to-​​keep-​​in-​​mind lists movies books comix

  • Best and Worst Sci­ence Fiction/​Fantasy Movies of 2011


    to-​​keep-​​in-​​mind movies lists

  • [1109.3248] Recon­struc­tion of sequen­tial data with den­sity models

    We intro­duce the prob­lem of recon­struct­ing a sequence of mul­ti­di­men­sional real vec­tors where some of the data are miss­ing. This prob­lem con­tains regres­sion and map­ping inver­sion as par­tic­u­lar cases where the pat­tern of miss­ing data is inde­pen­dent of the sequence index. The prob­lem is hard because it involves pos­si­bly mul­ti­val­ued map­pings at each vec­tor in the sequence, where the miss­ing vari­ables can take more than one value given the present vari­ables; and the set of miss­ing vari­ables can vary from one vec­tor to the next. To solve this prob­lem, we pro­pose an algo­rithm based on two redun­dancy assump­tions: vec­tor redun­dancy (the data live in a low-​​dimensional man­i­fold), so that the present vari­ables con­strain the miss­ing ones; and sequence redun­dancy (e.g. con­ti­nu­ity), so that con­sec­u­tive vec­tors con­strain each other. We cap­ture the low-​​dimensional nature of the data in a prob­a­bilis­tic way with a joint den­sity model, here the gen­er­a­tive topo­graphic map­ping, which results in a Gauss­ian mix­ture. Can­di­date recon­struc­tions at each vec­tor are obtained as all the modes of the con­di­tional dis­tri­b­u­tion of miss­ing vari­ables given present vari­ables. The recon­structed sequence is obtained by min­imis­ing a global con­straint, here the sequence length, by dynamic pro­gram­ming. We present exper­i­men­tal results for a toy prob­lem and for inverse kine­mat­ics of a robot arm.

    inverse-​​problems sta­tis­tics algo­rithms learning-​​from-​​data nudge-​​targets

  • [1110.5063] Recov­er­ing a Clipped Sig­nal in Sparseland

    In many data acqui­si­tion sys­tems it is com­mon to observe sig­nals whose ampli­tudes have been clipped. We present two new algo­rithms for recov­er­ing a clipped sig­nal by lever­ag­ing the model assump­tion that the under­ly­ing sig­nal is sparse in the fre­quency domain. Both algo­rithms employ ideas com­monly used in the field of Com­pres­sive Sens­ing; the first is a mod­i­fied ver­sion of Reweighted $ell_​1$ min­i­miza­tion, and the sec­ond is a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of a sim­ple greedy algo­rithm known as Triv­ial Pur­suit. An empir­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion shows that both approaches can recover sig­nals with sig­nif­i­cant lev­els of clipping

    signal-​​processing infer­ence compressive-​​sensing algo­rithms nudge-​​targets

  • [1112.2316] Complexity-​​entropy causal­ity plane: a use­ful approach for dis­tin­guish­ing songs

    Nowa­days we are often faced with huge data­bases result­ing from the rapid growth of data stor­age tech­nolo­gies. This is par­tic­u­larly true when deal­ing with music data­bases. In this con­text, it is essen­tial to have tech­niques and tools able to dis­crim­i­nate prop­er­ties from these mas­sive sets. In this work, we report on a sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of more than ten thou­sand songs aim­ing to obtain a com­plex­ity hier­ar­chy. Our approach is based on the esti­ma­tion of the per­mu­ta­tion entropy com­bined with an inten­sive com­plex­ity mea­sure, build­ing up the complexity-​​entropy causal­ity plane. The results obtained indi­cate that this rep­re­sen­ta­tion space is very promis­ing to dis­crim­i­nate songs as well as to allow a rel­a­tive quan­ti­ta­tive com­par­i­son among songs. Addi­tion­ally, we believe that the here-​​reported method may be applied in prac­ti­cal sit­u­a­tions since it is sim­ple, robust and has a fast numer­i­cal implementation.

    signal-​​processing clas­si­fi­ca­tion data-​​analysis clus­ter­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion music nudge-​​targets

  • [1112.6178] A gen­eral frame­work for online audio source separation

    We con­sider the prob­lem of online audio source sep­a­ra­tion. Exist­ing algo­rithms adopt either a slid­ing block approach or a sto­chas­tic gra­di­ent approach, which is faster but less accu­rate. Also, they rely either on spa­tial cues or on spec­tral cues and can­not sep­a­rate cer­tain mix­tures. In this paper, we design a gen­eral online audio source sep­a­ra­tion frame­work that com­bines both approaches and both types of cues. The model para­me­ters are esti­mated in the Max­i­mum Like­li­hood (ML) sense using a Gen­er­alised Expec­ta­tion Max­imi­sa­tion (GEM) algo­rithm with mul­ti­plica­tive updates. The sep­a­ra­tion per­for­mance is eval­u­ated as a func­tion of the block size and the step size and com­pared to that of an offline algorithm.

    signal-​​processing audio-​​segmentation sta­tis­tics algo­rithms meta­heuris­tics nudge-​​targets

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Deus Ex Mal­con­tent: Quote of the Day

    “Again, there’s a point to be made that it’s a waste of time and copy-​​space to give Paul’s ram­blings any more cre­dence than those of the recently released Belle­vue patient who’s now staked out a soap­box in the mid­dle of Cen­tral Park. For Christ’s sake, in 1977 Jimmy Carter implored this coun­try to make the tiny sac­ri­fice of drop­ping the ther­mo­stat a few degrees and wear­ing a sweater — and he was pub­licly cas­ti­gated for it. You think Amer­i­cans are gonna go for the aban­don­ment of entire swaths of the coun­try and its peo­ple every time a dis­as­ter like a mon­ster hur­ri­cane hits? You’re even more of a lunatic than Ron Paul — and that’s not easy.”

    lib­er­tar­i­an­ism pol­i­tics amusing-​​pseudorationalists-​​at-​​the-​​gate Thun­der­domes

  • The Exile Bib­lio­phile: Books: Own­ing them, Lov­ing them

    “So, I recently dis­cov­ered Stacked Up: Writ­ers Show off their Shelves, which is exactly what it sounds like. Short inter­views with writ­ers and some of their books. Just won­der­ful, though a bit too NYCen­tric to be truly invig­o­rat­ing. I just don’t get that worked up over THE BIG DEAL that is NYC. Give me space, keep your crowds! But, NYC is where a LOT of writ­ers live, so I can’t be too cranky about it. Hope­fully the Stacked Up folks will one day be able to get off the lit­tle island and out into the real world. Any­way, go enjoy these things Book Folk– you’re not alone.”

    books bib­lio­ma­nia book­shelves another-​​tag-​​involving-​​the-​​word-​​books author­ship writing-​​culture video

  • Cre­ative Com­mons Is Not Pub­lic Domain | Com­pound Eye, Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can Blog Network

    “Again, I do not know that the blog­gers didn’t write the pho­tog­ra­phers to obtain commercial-​​use per­mis­sion. But I doubt it. My judge­ment is borne from per­sonal expe­ri­ence. I see my images pop­ping up on com­mer­cial blogs all the time, and fewer than one in ten asks my per­mis­sion. I don’t mean to sin­gle out WIRED, either. I’m only pick­ing on them for the recent ant exam­ple. In real­ity, many com­mer­cial blog net­works show ram­pant dis­re­gard for the rights of artists, pho­tog­ra­phers, and musi­cians. They may not have been caught, yet, but they could incur sub­stan­tial legal lia­bil­ity when a copy­right owner decides to seek dam­ages. After all, using an image beyond the bounds of the license is break­ing the law. The bot­tom line is this: if some­one else’s cre­ative work is help­ing you make money, you have a moral and a legal oblig­a­tion to reach an agree­ment with that per­son about the terms of use. Cre­ative Com­mons is sup­posed to make this eas­ier, but it only works if the con­tent con­sumers treat CC as a con­tract and not a blan­ket license for free use. Cre­ative Com­mons is not pub­lic domain.”

    creative-​​commons intellectual-​​property copy­right cultural-​​assumptions