These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
[1112.6209] Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning
We consider the problem of building detectors for high-level concepts using only unsupervised feature learning. For example, we would like to understand if it is possible to learn a face detector using only unlabeled images downloaded from the internet. To answer this question, we trained a simple feature learning algorithm on a large dataset of images (10 million images, each image is 200×200). The simulation is performed on a cluster of 1000 machines with fast network hardware for one week. Extensive experimental results reveal surprising evidence that such high-level concepts can indeed be learned using only unlabeled data and a simple learning algorithm.[1105.0158] Detecting emergent processes in cellular automata with excess information
Many natural processes occur over characteristic spatial and temporal scales. This paper presents tools for (i) flexibly and scalably coarse-graining cellular automata and (ii) identifying which coarse-grainings express an automaton’s dynamics well, and which express its dynamics badly. We apply the tools to investigate a range of examples in Conway’s Game of Life and Hopfield networks and demonstrate that they capture some basic intuitions about emergent processes. Finally, we formalize the notion that a process is emergent if it is better expressed at a coarser granularity.[1110.4876] REBOUND: An open-source multi-purpose N-body code for collisional dynamics
REBOUND is a new multi-purpose N-body code which is freely available under an open-source license. It was designed for collisional dynamics such as planetary rings but can also solve the classical N-body problem. It is highly modular and can be customized easily to work on a wide variety of different problems in astrophysics and beyond.These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
Living and Working in the 1099 Economy | Newgeography.com
“Regardless of how one classifies these workers, they remain largely invisible to policy makers and to economic and workforce developers. That needs to change. In addition to recognizing the importance of this part of the workforce, we also need to develop a more nuanced understanding of their concerns and needs. At a minimum, providing a stronger safety net—as suggested by the Freelancer’s Union and others—makes sense. It also makes sense to develop work spaces that support the 1099ers. Here, the recent growth in co-work spaces is a positive trend. Finally, we need new kinds of support and services for the 1099ers. These might include traditional training in business development, but other supports, such as networking or peer-to-peer lending or on-line tools to find customers and partners should also be part of the mix. It’s time to recognize that the 1099 economy is here to stay and will be an important part of every community’s workforce for decades to come.”Eurozine — Bad for artists? — Leonhard Dobusch On digitization, remuneration and copyright
“According to recent research, it is not illegal copying that is threatening the livelihood of artists, as record companies tell us, but an inequality built into the existing copyright system itself. Leonhard Dobusch on why, in a winner-takes-all culture, stronger copyright protection only benefits the few.”ginandtacos.com » Blog Archive » NPF: WHY WE FIGHT
“Wilde said that most of us live lives of quiet desperation. It’s a good observation, and in my opinion it’s the best reason to do whatever it is we choose to do with our lives. You spend so much time on the job you hate, listening to the boss who treats you like shit, and wondering why you bother to get out of bed anymore. So if you want to spend your time writing the great American novel, building birdhouses, attending Star Trek conventions in animal-themed S&M gear, or touring the country in a van with a band no one has ever heard of to play before tiny audiences, so be it. There are always risks, ranging from simple embarrassment to bodily harm depending on the nature of your pursuits. Hell, having any pursuits at all is a risk. Why not get a second job or work harder at your first one instead of wasting your time telling jokes at the Comedy Pouch in Possum Ridge, AR or playing math rock at the 4th Street Vomit Bucket in the worst neighborhood in Newark? Well, not only are some things more important than being practical, but what could be more practical than doing whatever is necessary to make yourself feel like your life is worthwhile? It’s OK to remind yourself that you’re not quite as worthless as the world makes you feel, even if there are considerable risks and opportunity costs involved.”The Battle Beneath the Battle: Do Gay People Exist? | Sexuality/Gender | Religion Dispatches
“What I feel like we are still fighting for, in the places where our freedom is still contested, is neither rights nor freedoms nor any particular bundle of privileges, but some more fundamental, and fundamentally religious, human right that has only begun to be articulated: the right to self-definition, to say that I exist—and to be believed.”If You Haven’t Read the Article About German Moms Vacating the Workforce | The Hairpin
“The German one sounds a lot more ominous, though, because it’s all “Nazis chaining women to their stoves,” instead of the Dutch piece, which was more “look at those lucky ladies, zipping around on their bicycles on their way to flower arranging class.””The single mother’s manifesto | J.K. Rowling — Times Online
“I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles. A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.”Rubik’s cubes of any size can now be solved — physics-math — 30 June 2011 — New Scientist
“Suppose someone takes a solved 20×20×20 Rubik’s cube and makes five moves — can you figure out [from that scrambled state] what those five moves were?” he asks. In other words, can you solve it in five moves? He suspects that you cannot, but has yet to prove it. “We don’t know.”Boehner’s Economic Terrorism — The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan — The Daily Beast
“For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only massive spending cuts and no revenue enhancement is therefore the clearest sign yet of their abandonment of the last shreds of a conservative disposition. A conservative does not risk the entire economic system to score an ideological victory. That is what a fanatic does.”Am I a science journalist? | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine
“And I think that all of this makes it one of the most exciting times to be a science journalist. It means a more diverse array of science journalism. The new approach doesn’t replace the old (that’s a straw man) but it does complement and enhance it. I call it to the Cambrian explosion of science journalism. I actually think that most people in this field get this and are excited by it.”Pandoc — Pandoc User’s Guide
“There is, however, one respect in which pandoc’s aims are different from the original aims of markdown. Whereas markdown was originally designed with HTML generation in mind, pandoc is designed for multiple output formats. Thus, while pandoc allows the embedding of raw HTML, it discourages it, and provides other, non-HTMLish ways of representing important document elements like definition lists, tables, mathematics, and footnotes.”Link languages for navigating through a landscape of words — Vacuum
“An advantage of recognizing this as a command language and not just a syntax for easy linking is that you can avoid the naive assumption that everyone who reads the language interprets it the same way. The language describes links between two parts of an flexibly articulated wordscape, but it’s up to the reader to resolve that link into something concrete. The modern web software fails to live up to the promise of understanding just how many variant interpretations there might be of one specific phrase, trading ease of linking for richness in expression.”Lunch Roulette: Random Social Networking in the Office | Code for America
“To counter this trend, and to encourage collaboration in the workplace, we built an internal tool called Lunch Roulette that selects random pairs of Fellows to join each other on impromptu lunch dates.…”A Day in the life of Cheap Impostor
“This weekend I decided I wanted to learn about the new stuff in Java 1.5. Generics, auto-boxing/unboxing, etc. This is the kind of reading that works best for me in a printed book. Fortunately for me (and for Cheap Impostor), Sun’s official Java Language Specification is available as a free PDF file, with license given to each user to print one copy.”The TeX Catalogue OnLine, Entry for flowfram, Ctan Edition
“The flowfram package enables you to create frames in a document such that the contents of the document environment flow from one frame to the next in the order in which they were defined. This is useful for creating posters or magazines, indeed any form of document that does not conform to the standard one or two column layout.”A Camera That Could Care Less About Focus: Introducing Lytro
The basic premise of Lytro’s technology is pretty simple: the camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels — and presuming you’re using a device with a 3-D ready screen — even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. (I got a demonstration of the camera’s 3-D photos on a laptop earlier today, and was blown away.)OCC Gives Banks Another Blow Job « naked capitalism
Mr Levin said: “It is past time for the president to nominate new leadership at the OCC to protect American families and businesses from the excesses of Wall Street.”These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
A VC: Investing In The Cultural Revolution
“In the middle east, we’ve seen the power of the Internet in the Arab Spring. I believe we are in for a lot more of that sort of thing and that it will not be limited to repressive governments, but to all large institutions that seek to control people and their free will. This is the cultural revolution that I referred to in my talk with Erick at Disrupt. I think investors should be aware of what is coming and seek to invest in it where it is investable. I’m curious what the AVC community thinks of this investment thesis and where we should be looking for opportunities that fit into this thesis.”Weighty Matters: Is sodium a dietary red herring for the effects of processed foods?
“I think there’s at least one more possibility: 3. Sodium’s isn’t a causal agent of disease but instead given that processed foods are phenomenally high in sodium, is a useful biomarker for the degree of processed foods a person’s consuming, and that it’s the huge volumes of sugar and pulverized flour (that’s more often than not packaged with gobs of sodium) that’s actually causal for cardiovascular disease and death.”Why America’s Pissed: Cornel West, Robert Reich and More — The Daily Beast
“First thing we’ve got to do is tell the truth. We live in an age where lies are just ubiquitous. The biggest lies are that free markets are self-corrective, that individuals are rich because they’re smart, and that somehow America became great because of economic growth as opposed to the moral courage of the citizens of all colors to fight for freedom. We need a democratic awakening. We need organizing, mobilizing. We need to be willing to take a risk to change the world. The Obama moment of hope is over. ”Groklaw — Red Hat Makes History With Patent Settlement — Compatible with GPLv3
“You know what this means? It means that those who claim the GPL isolates itself from standards bodies’ IP pledges are wrong. It *is* possible to come up with language that satisfies the GPL and still acknowledges patents, and this is the proof. That means Microsoft could do it for OOXML if it wanted to. So who is isolating whom? Thank you, Red Hat, for innovating again to protect the FOSS community.”Falkenblog: High Frequency Trading Paper
“The point is that in fast moving markets, one needs something a little better than simple historical moving averages of daily closing prices. This is better, and extending the idea of ‘volume time’ vs. ‘chronological time’ is an intriguing direction. But one can also look at bid-ask spreads directly, or the VIX futures, or its etf, the VXX, and combinations, to gauge intraday volatility as well. Further, one can better estimate ‘buy volume’ using the transaction price relative to the then extant bid-ask spread, rather than if the price was weakly increasing, though this then involves syncing the trade information with quote information, and for academics such data are often hard to come by (further, quote information is often 10 times as large).”Did UCSD breach professor’s academic freedom? — SignOnSanDiego.com
“The same month Elman wrote Biernacki a letter ordering him not to publish his work or discuss it at professional meetings. Doing so, Elman wrote, could result in “written censure, reduction in salary, demotion, suspension or dismissal.“ Elman did not respond to a request for comment. But his concern, according to his letter to Biernacki, was that Biernacki’s research and manuscript “may damage the reputation of a colleague and therefore may be considered harassment.“ The Academic Senate’s Representative Assembly voted overwhelmingly Tuesday in favor of a resolution decrying the situation after hearing a detailed and strongly worded report from its Committee on Academic Freedom.”Paul Graham Offers Some Numbers on the Success of Y Combinator’s Startups
“Graham notes that funding, while easy to measure, isn’t necessarily the best way to gauge the success of the program’s startups. “Getting funded is not success. It’s just something that makes success more likely.” But if the standard measurement for success is value, and if value is measured by exits, then the 6 years of YC’s existence isn’t quite long enough to adequately assess this. Of the 300-plus startups, “just” 25 YC companies have been acquired, 5 of them for over $10 million, and Graham says that he’s estimated the values of the rest of the companies based on these acquisition figures in order to gauge that the average value of companies Y Combinator has funded to be roughly $22 million. But coming up with an adequate measurement for success isn’t really the point, says Graham. “The real lesson here though is how long it takes to measure performance in this business. We’re 6 years in, and we could easily be off by 3x in either direction. Startup outcomes are unpredictable, and the outcomes of their investors doubly so, because it’s hard to say whether the big successes are repeatable, or if the investors just got lucky. Even 6 years in, all we can say is that the numbers look encouraging so far.””Hey, Remember When Newt Gingrich Was Sponsored By a Human Chip-Implant Company? | BNET
“The issue of whether Americans should receive subcutaneous wireless RFID chip implants that can link to their electronic medical records emerged again in Wisconsin this week, where former governor and Bush Administration secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson is considering a run for Senate. Thompson was a former board member of VeriChip, the company that renamed itself PositiveID, and once appeared on CNBC with PositiveID CEO Scott Silverman to advocate that everyone receive a chip from birth…”These are my recent Pinboard.in links:
Designing Incentives for Crowdsourcing Workers | The CrowdFlower Blog
“Why do BTS and punishing workers for disagreement succeed in improving performance significantly where so many of the other incentive schemes failed? The answer hinges on the fact that both conditions tied workers’ payoffs to their ability to think about their peers’ likely responses. (We elaborate on the argument in more detail in the paper.)”