"events" entries

Four short links: 16 February 2016

Four short links: 16 February 2016

Full-on Maker, Robot Recap, Decoding Mandarin, and Sequencing Birds

  1. Washers and Screws (YouTube) — this chap is making his own clock from scratch, and here he is making his own washers and screws. Sometimes another person’s obsession can be calming. (via Greg Sadetsky)
  2. ROScon 2015 Recap with Videos (Robohub) — Shuttleworth suggests that robotics developers really need two things at this point: a robust Internet of Things infrastructure, followed by the addition of dynamic mobility that robots represent. However, software is a much more realistic business proposition for a robotics startup, especially if you leverage open source to create a developer community around your product and let others innovate through what you’ve built.
  3. Getting Deep Speech to Work in Mandarin (Baidu SVAIL) — TIL that some of the preprocessing traditionally used in speech-to-text systems throws away pitch information necessary to decode tonal languages like Mandarin. Deep Speech doesn’t use specialized features like MFCCs. We train directly from the spectrogram of the input audio signal. The spectrogram is a fairly general representation of an audio signal. The neural network is able to learn directly which information is relevant from the input, so we didn’t need to change anything about the features to move from English speech recognition to Mandarin speech recognition. Their model works better than humans at decoding short text such as queries.
  4. Sequencing Genomes of All Known Kakapo — TIL there’s a project to sequence genomes of 10,000 bird species and that there’s this crowdfunded science project to sequence the kakapo genome. There are only 125 left, and conservationists expect to use the sequenced genomes to ensure rare genes are preserved. Every genome in this species could be sequenced … I’m boggling. (via Duke)
Four short links: 26 August 2015

Four short links: 26 August 2015

World SF, Digital Currency Scholarships, Project Management, and Glass 3D Printing

  1. The Apex Book of World SF 4 (Amazon) — if SF invents the future by shaping and directing our imagination, and if you believe that non-American cultures will ascend over time, then it behooves you to sample this collection of SF from beyond the usual. (via Cory Doctorow)
  2. Diversity Scholarships Available — to Digital Consensus 2015, a conference on digital currency. Apply or tell someone who is eligible.
  3. Making Huge Projects Work (Amy Hoy) — the description of her workflow for modest and monster projects was useful to me, and may be to you as well. I think the real question is “where do we get an Alex of our own?” [Note: swearing]
  4. Additive Manufacturing of Optically Transparent Glass (PDF) — yes, a 3D printer that emits glass. Check out the videos on IFL Science.
Four short links: 14 July 2014

Four short links: 14 July 2014

Scanner Malware, Cognitive Biases, Deep Learning, and Community Metrics

  1. Handheld Scanners Attack — shipping and logistics operations compromised by handheld scanners running malware-infested Windows XP.
  2. Adventures in Cognitive Biases (MIT) — web adventure to build your cognitive defences against biases.
  3. Quoc Le’s Lectures on Deep Learning — Machine Learning Summer School videos (4k!) of the deep learning lectures by Google Brain team member Quoc Le.
  4. FLOSS Community Metrics Talks — upcoming event at Puppet Labs in Portland. I hope they publish slides and video!
Four short links: 5 March 2014

Four short links: 5 March 2014

Cheap Gesture Sensor, Ignorance as Strength, Android Malware Resistance, and Security Talks

  1. $1 Gesture-Recognizing Device (GigaOm) — the AllSee is the size of a quarter, harvests RF for power, and detects the variations in signal strength caused by gestures.
  2. A Conversation with Sydney BrennerThe thing is to have no discipline at all. Biology got its main success by the importation of physicists that came into the field not knowing any biology and I think today that’s very important. I strongly believe that the only way to encourage innovation is to give it to the young. The young have a great advantage in that they are ignorant. Because I think ignorance in science is very important. If you’re like me and you know too much you can’t try new things. I always work in fields of which I’m totally ignorant.
  3. Android Almost Impenetrable to Malware — multiple layers of defence, including signatures of known-bad systems found in the wild, necessary to retain an “open” marketplace vs Apple’s lock-down.
  4. TrustyCon (YouTube) — video of the speakers at the conference that was set up by speakers who withdrew from the RSA conference. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 30 December 2013

Four short links: 30 December 2013

Pattern Recognition, MicroSD Vulnerability, Security Talks, and IoT List

  1. tooldiaga collection of methods for statistical pattern recognition. Implemented in C.
  2. Hacking MicroSD Cards (Bunnie Huang) — In my explorations of the electronics markets in China, I’ve seen shop keepers burning firmware on cards that “expand” the capacity of the card — in other words, they load a firmware that reports the capacity of a card is much larger than the actual available storage. The fact that this is possible at the point of sale means that most likely, the update mechanism is not secured. MicroSD cards come with embedded microcontrollers whose firmware can be exploited.
  3. 30c3 — recordings from the 30th Chaos Communication Congress.
  4. IOT Companies, Products, Devices, and Software by Sector (Mike Nicholls) — astonishing amount of work in the space, especially given this list is inevitably incomplete.
Four short links: 7 November 2013

Four short links: 7 November 2013

Help Searching, Offline First, AWS Tips, and Awesome Fonts

  1. Learn to Search — cheeky but spot-on help for people running conferences.
  2. Offline Firstno, the mobile connectivity/bandwidth issue isn’t just going to solve itself on a global level anywhere in the near future. THIS!
  3. 10 Things You Should Know About AWS — lots of specialist tips for hardcore AWS users.
  4. The League of Moveable Type — AWESOME FONTS. Me gusta.
Four short links: 14 October 2013

Four short links: 14 October 2013

Recognising Hand Gestures, Drone Conference, Stubbornly Open Codes, and Remote Mobile Display

  1. An Interactive Machine Learning System for Recognizing Hand Gestures (Greg Borenstein) — a mixed-initiative interactive machine learning system for recognizing hand gestures. It attempts to give the user visibility into the classifier’s prediction confidence and control of the conditions under which the system actively requests labeled gestures when its predictions are uncertain. (an exercise for his MIT class)
  2. First Drone Conference Takes Off (Makezine) — forgive them the puns, Lord, for they know not what they do … uble intendre. Write-up fascinating beyond the headline. Dr. Vijay Kumar of the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering spoke about socially positive uses for aerial robotics, such as emergency first responders. Dr. Kumar’s work focuses on micro aerial vehicles. He explains that, “size does matter.” As robots get smaller, mass and inertial is reduced. If you halve the mass, the acceleration doubles and the angular acceleration quadruples. This makes for a robot that is fast and responsive, ideal for operating indoors or out, and perfect for search and rescue missions in collapsed buildings or around other hazards.
  3. Standing Up to Mississippi (Carl Malamud) — yesterday we received a Certified Letter from the Attorney General’s Special Assistant Attorney General demanding that we remove these materials from the Internet and all other electronic or non-electronic media. There was no email address, so I proceeded to prepare a 67-page return reply with Exhibits A-L. I thought folks might be interested in the 7 steps of the production process. Give to his Kickstarter project, folks!
  4. Open Project (PDF) — A lightweight framework for remote sharing of mobile applications. Sounds like malware but is Google Research project.

From BASIC to HyperTalk to JavaScript to Rails to Erlang

Every programming experience teaches

I’ve never formally trained to be a programmer, outside of occasional conference workshops and a week of XSL tutorials. In some ways, that’s terrible, because it’s taken me about thirty years to learn what some friends of mine appear to have learned in four. I’ve written some code that goes way beyond spaghetti, though fortunately the worst of it was probably when I was 15.

On the bright side, when I look past my many mistakes, I can see what I learned from a large number of various different experiences, and the pieces they helped me see. It’s a little easier to tell this story through the parts than it might be through a formal curriculum.

My parents’ FORTRAN books
I was reading computer books—dry ones—before I even got to play. I have vague memories about program structure, but mostly I learned that knowledge sticks better if it includes hands-on work, and not just a book.
Sinclair ZX81
1K of memory! The sheer thrill of seeing my creations on screen was amazing. I had just enough logic to get things done, and leave myself puzzled. The Sinclair community seemed focused on making great small things. I learned simple logic in BASIC and that sometimes it takes a hack to get things done.
Applesoft BASIC
After Sinclair BASIC, Applesoft seemed vast. Much of what I did was transfer what I’d done on the Sinclair (itself a lesson in platform-shifting). As I settled, I started writing larger and larger programs, eventually forcing myself to restructure everything into subroutines…with global variables, of course.
6502 Assembly
I knew there was more than BASIC. My early adventures with assembly language were mostly about graphics, and didn’t work all that well, but I picked up two key things: recursion and the importance of registers.

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HTML 5 Geolocation, SharePoint Tech, Strangeloop, and More

Tech events you don't want to miss.

Each Monday, we round up upcoming event highlights from the programming and technology spaces. Have an event to share? Send us a note.

Intro to Raspberry Pi : Ed Snajder explains what a Raspberry Pi is, how it differs from an Arduino and shows attendees some cool things you can do with a Raspberry Pi. Register for this free webcast.

Date: 10 a.m. PT, June 25 Location: Online webcast

Graphlab Workshop on Large Scale Machine Learning: This workshop is a meeting place for both academia and industry to discuss upcoming challenges of large scale machine learning and solution methods. The main goal for this year’s workshop is to bring together top researchers from academia as well as top data scientists from the industry, with the special focus of large-scale machine learning on sparse graphs. For more information and to register, visit the event page.

Date: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. PT, July 1 Location: San Francisco, CA

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Intro to Raspberry Pi, Wharton Web Conference, Agile 2013, and More

Tech events you don't want to miss

Each Monday, we round up upcoming event highlights from the programming and technology spaces. Have an event to share? Send us a note.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised webcast: Jonathan Stark discusses the coming wireless wave and how it will profoundly affect every aspect of society—the iPhone will look like a fax machine compared to what’s coming next. Register for this free webcast.
Date: 10 a.m. PT, June 20 Location: Online webcast

Intro to Raspberry Pi : Ed Snajder explains what a Raspberry Pi is, how it differs from an Arduino and shows attendees some cool things you can do with a Raspberry Pi. Register for this free webcast.
Date: 10 a.m. PT, June 25 Location: Online webcast

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