-
BK-Trees, or Burkhard-Keller Trees are a tree-based data structure engineered for quickly finding near-matches to a string, for example, as used by a spelling checker, or when doing a 'fuzzy' search for a term. The aim is to return, for example, "seek" and "peek" if I search for "aeek".
-
We make splitting tasks for people easy.
No more passing around millions of emails.
Great for:
* Deciding who to bring what food and beverages to a party.
* Starting a new project and splitting up big tasks for team members.
* Pairing people up. -
If you're a guy, you'll see that Schiphol's bathrooms sports a feature many do not — urinals, with flies on them, as pictured right. Stare for a minute and you'll notice that the fly doesn't move. Look around, and you'll note that the flies are everywhere — one per urinal, all the way down the row.
The fly is a peel-and-paste decal, and it's not there for decoration or, even, to keep real flies away. It's a target, plain and simple. Something for customers to aim at as they urinate.
-
auto-antonyms in English — that is, words which in and of themselves have two or more generally accepted meanings in the English language that directly or generally contradict each other. Such words are also known as antagonyms, contronyms, and words having self-contradictions. Many such contradefinitions arise from slang usage. Others develop as a result of their frequent use in sarcasm.
links for 2010-07-29
Posted in delicious on July 30, 2010 by blarneyfellowlinks for 2010-07-28
Posted in delicious on July 29, 2010 by blarneyfellow-
The function of these images in illuminated manuscripts has no small bearing on the hypertext analogy. These “miniatures” (so named not because they were small—often they were not—but because they used red ink, or vermillion, the Latin word for which is minium) did not generally function as illustrations of something in the written text, but in reference to something beyond it. The patron of the volume might be shown receiving the completed book or supervising its writing. Or, a scene related to a saint might accompany a biblical text read on that saint’s day in the liturgical calendar without otherwise having anything to do with the scripture passage. Of particular delight to us today, much of the marginalia in illuminated books expressed the opinions and feelings of the illuminator about all manner of things—his demanding wife, the debauched monks in his neighborhood, or his own bacchanalian exploits.
-
The Superstar Corollary
Being the best in a field makes you disproportionately impressive to the outside world. This effect holds even if the field is not crowded, competitive, or well-known.consider the details Michael's story. Starting as a freshman, he focused all of his extracurricular energies on a serial string of environmental sustainability projects. He started by submitting a model of a green house to a competition. This led him to discover that a local energy company offered a grant program for local high school students. He won a modest grant, and used it, with the help of a retired engineer from his hometown, to retrofit a golf cart to run on biofuels. Leveraging this success, he earned another grant which he used to install solar panels on his school's maintenance shed. This earned him press coverage, and the resulting Superstar Effect helped wow the Stanford admissions department into overlooking his borderline scores.
-
if we have a certain amount of "free will", then, subject to certain assumptions, so must some elementary particles.
1. Fin: There is a maximum speed for propagation of information (not necessarily the speed of light). This assumption rests upon causality.
(1*. Min: two experimenters separated in a space-like way can make choices of measurements independently of each other. Not all information must travel finitely fast; only the particular information about choices of measurements.)
2. Spin: The squared spin component of certain elementary particles of spin one, taken in three orthogonal directions, will be a permutation of (1,1,0).
3. Twin: It is possible to "entangle" two elementary particles, and separate them by a significant distance, so that they have the same squared spin results if measured in parallel directions. This is a consequence of (but more limited than) quantum entanglement.The spin and twin axioms can be verified experimentally.
-
Imagine a two-dimensional spatial array of detectors temporally driven via an unknown number of mutually overlapping, unknown patterns. One at a time, these patterns are randomly, partially, sparsely and repeatedly presented, superimposed with omnipresent noise. The challenge is to design a scheme for detecting and recalling these patterns in an unsupervised, online and computationally efficient fashion. As our main contribution, we propose a network of spiking neurons consisting of two reciprocally connected layers. The bottom layer receives stimulus from the detector array and serves as input/output. The top layer encodes, detects and recalls specific patterns. Feedforward projections are data-driven, bottom-up, and analytic, while feedback projections are model-driven, top-down, and synthetic.
-
HTTP Latencies
-
(not quite my book… but close. And I am not so much anti-Platonic: I am mostly against “Platonicity” which is being a sucker for a Platonic form, at the cost of using the wrong form. Forms are not that accessible to us: I call this Opacity)
Keywords: Knowledge without cause, historia, empiricisme érudit. Di-chotomy: phronesis v/s techne (Aristotle), techne v/s episteme (later), rationalism v/s (ancient) empiricism (ancient medicine), Platonicity v/s anti-Platonicity (me), metis v/s nerdiness, heuristics v/s reasoning (psychologists), Fat Tony v/s Dr John (me), bricolage (Levi-Strauss) v/s scholarly epistemologies, stochastic tinkering v/s directed research, top down v/s bottom up, MIT v/s Brooklyn, quants v/s traders, ecological intelligence v/s logical rigor, “know how” v/s “know what” (Gilbert Ryle), implicit v/s explicit knowledge (Polanyi), procedural v/s propositional knowledge, etc. [ Note 79 provides the background.]
links for 2010-07-27
Posted in delicious on July 28, 2010 by blarneyfellow-
Twisted music inspired by genomes and proteomes
-
an easy-to-use, scalable, standards-based, wireless, local, do-it-yourself, telephone company toolkit
links for 2010-07-26
Posted in delicious on July 27, 2010 by blarneyfellow-
THE ART OF EDUCATED GUESSING AND OPPORTUNISTIC PROBLEM SOLVING
links for 2010-07-25
Posted in delicious on July 26, 2010 by blarneyfellowlinks for 2010-07-24
Posted in delicious on July 25, 2010 by blarneyfellowlinks for 2010-07-22
Posted in delicious on July 23, 2010 by blarneyfellow-
Evolutionary theory predicts that if you are a mammal growing up in a harsh, unpredictable environment where you are susceptible to disease and might die young, then you should follow a "fast" reproductive strategy – grow up quickly, and have offspring early and close together so you can ensure leaving some viable progeny before you become ill or die. For a range of animal species there is evidence that this does happen. Now research suggests that humans are no exception.
Certainly the theory holds up in comparisons between people in rich and poor countries. Bobbi Low and her colleagues at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor compared information from nations across the world to see if the age at which women have children changes according to their life expectancy (Cross-Cultural Research, vol 42, p 201). "We found that the human data fit the general mammalian pattern," says Low. "The shorter life expectancy was, the earlier women had their first child."
-
Information cascades are important. They explain many of the big problems we currently face. Here's how an information cascade works:
1) An event occurs or a problem surfaces.
2) A person who is perceived to have good data/insight into the event or problem makes a decision.
3) Other people, observing the first person's decision, opt to avoid original analysis/discovery and copy the earlier decision.
4) The more people that copy the earlier decisions, the less likely any new discovery or analysis is done. -
We establish concrete mathematical criteria to distinguish between different kinds of written storytelling, fictional and non-fictional. Specifically, we constructed a semantic network from both novels and news stories, with $N$ independent words as vertices or nodes, and edges or links allotted to words occurring within $m$ places of a given vertex; we call $m$ the word distance. We then used measures from complex network theory to distinguish between news and fiction, studying the minimal text length needed as well as the optimized word distance $m$.
links for 2010-07-21
Posted in delicious on July 22, 2010 by blarneyfellow-
This wiki is a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker. Topics that can be explored here include MemoryTechniques, MentalMath, CriticalThinking, BrainStorming, ShorthandSystems, NotebookSystems, and SmartDrugs. Other relevant topics are also welcome.
