ENTRIES TAGGED "contests"

Four short links: 17 September 2010

Four short links: 17 September 2010

BBC Machine Learning, Wikipedia for History, Nuggets from Websites, and Lawbreaking Robots

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 17, 2010
  1. BBC Jobs — looking for someone to devise advanced machine intelligence techniques to infer high level classification metadata of audio and video content from low-level features extracted from it. (via mattb on Delicious)
  2. A History of the Iraq War Through Wikipedia Changelogs — printed and bound volumes of the Wikipedia changelogs during the Iraq war. This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification. And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future. (via Flowing Data)
  3. Nuggetize — pulls highlights out of a page before you visit it. (via titine on Delicious)
  4. Antimov — SparkFun running contest where a robot violates one of Asimov’s three laws (not the one about hurting people though). I am in LOVE with the logo, check it out.
Comment: 1 |
Four short links: 8 September 2010

Four short links: 8 September 2010

Mozilla Updated License Draft, Government Problems, T3h Internets, and Online Voting System

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 8, 2010
  1. Alpha Draft of Mozilla Public License v2 Out — The highlight of this release is new patent language, modeled on Apache’s. We believe that this language should give better protection to MPL-using communities, make it possible for MPL-licensed projects to use Apache code, and be simpler to understand. (via webmink on Twitter)
  2. Challenge.gov — contest-like environment for solving problems. Not all are glowing examples of government innovation: $12,000 for healthy recipes for kids–this is not a previously-unsolved problem. More relevant: NASA Centennial Challenge to build an aircraft that can fly 200 miles in less than two hours using the energy equivalent of less than 1 gallon of gas per occupant. (via scilib on Twitter)
  3. A Virtual Counter-Revolution (The Economist) — It is still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into “internets”, but there is a danger that it may splinter along geographical and commercial boundaries. (via mgeist on Twitter)
  4. Selectricity — open source system to run online votes, from Benjamin Mako Hill.
Comment: 1 |
Four short links: 3 Sep 2010

Four short links: 3 Sep 2010

Design Principles, Mario AI, Open Source Wave, and 3D Google Earth Sound

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 3, 2010
  1. Arranging Things: The Rhetoric of Object Placement (Amazon) — [...] the underlying principles that govern how Western designers arrange things in three-dimensional compositions. Inspired by Greek and Roman notions of rhetoric [...] Koren elucidates the elements of arranging rhetoric that all designers instinctively use in everything from floral compositions to interior decorating. (via Elaine Wherry)
  2. 2010 Mario AI Championship — three tracks: Gameplay, Learning, and Level Generation. Found via Ben Weber’s account of his Level Generation entry. My submission utilizes a multi-pass approach to level generation in which the system iterates through the level several times, placing different types of objects during each pass. During each pass through the level, a subset of each object type has a specific probability of being added to the level. The result is a computationally efficient approach to generating a large space of randomized levels.
  3. Wave in a Box — Google to flesh out existing open source Wave client and server into full “Wave in a Box” app status.
  4. 3D Sound in Google Earth (YouTube) — wow. (via Planet In Action)
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Four short links: 3 August 2010

Four short links: 3 August 2010

Structured Data, Graph Tools, Photo Lives, Prize Theory

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 3, 2010
  1. OpenStructs — an education and distribution site dedicated to open source software for converting, managing, viewing and manipulating structured data.
  2. TinkerPop — many (often open source) tools for graph data.
  3. Polaroid a Day — a moving human story told in photographs.
  4. Prizes (PDF) — White House memorandum to government agencies explaining how prizes are to be used. The first part, the why and how of contests and prizes, is something to add to your “here, read this” arsenal.
Comments: 2 |