"language" entries

Four short links: 7 March 2016

Four short links: 7 March 2016

Trajectory Data Mining, Manipulating Search Rankings, Open Source Data Exploration, and a Linter for Prose.

  1. Trajectory Data Mining: An Overview (Paper a Day) — This is the data created by a moving object, as a sequence of locations, often with uncertainty around the exact location at each point. This could be GPS trajectories created by people or vehicles, spatial trajectories obtained via cell phone tower IDs and corresponding transmission times, the moving trajectories of animals (e.g. birds) fitted with trackers, or even data concerning natural phenomena such as hurricanes and ocean currents. It turns out, there’s a lot to learn about working with such data!
  2. Search Engine Manipulation Effect (PNAS) — Internet search rankings have a significant impact on consumer choices, mainly because users trust and choose higher-ranked results more than lower-ranked results. Given the apparent power of search rankings, we asked whether they could be manipulated to alter the preferences of undecided voters in democratic elections. They could. Read the article for their methodology. (via Aeon)
  3. Keshif — open source interactive data explorer.
  4. proselint — analyse text for sins of usage and abusage.
Four short links: 7 September 2015

Four short links: 7 September 2015

Nanoscale Motors, Language of Betrayal, Messaging, and Handing Off Culture

  1. Nanoscale Motors (Nature) — “We’ve made 50 or 60 different motors,” says Ben Feringa, a chemist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “I’m less interested in making another motor than actually using it.” An interesting summary of the progress made in nanoscale engineering.
  2. Linguistics Signs of Betrayal — as found by studying Diplomacy players. Betrayers suddenly become more positive, possibly attempting to hide their duplicity. Betrayers suddenly become less polite, after having kept up a façade of politeness, during which the victims were significantly less polite. A reversal of imbalance occurs right before the betrayal. Victims plan more. Making a lot of plans can put pressure on the relationship and hasten betrayal, and, at the same time, if the betrayer’s mind is made up, there is no point for him to plan.
  3. NATS — open source (MIT-licensed) messaging system that shares the best name in the world.
  4. Building a Culture and Handing it Off (Kellan Elliott-McCrea) — Successfully building a culture ensures when you leave you can hand your work off to people you trust and they will run the thing without you and make it better than you could have imagined.
Four short links: 22 July 2014

Four short links: 22 July 2014

English lint, Scalable Replicated Datastore, There's People in my Software, and Sci-Fi for Ethics

  1. write-gooda naive `lint’ for English prose.
  2. cockroachdba scalable, geo-replicated, transactional datastore from a team that includes the person who built Spanner for Google. Spanner requires atomic clocks, cockroach does not (which has corresponding performance consequences). (via Wired)
  3. The Deep Convergence of Networks, Software, and Peopleas we wire up our digital products increasingly with interconnected networks, their nature is increasingly a product of the responses that come back from those networks. The experience cannot be wholly represented in mock prototypes that are coded to respond in predictable ways, or even using a set of preset random responses. The power of the application is seeing the emergent behaviour of the system, and recognizing that you are a participant in that emergent behaviour. (via Tim O’Reilly)
  4. An Ethics Class for Inventors, via Sci-Fi“Reading science fiction is kind of like ethics class for inventors,” says Brueckner. Traditionally, technology schools ask ‘how do we build it?’ This class asks a different question: ‘should we?’

Clojure's advantage: Immediate feedback with REPL

Chas Emerick on how Clojure can make a difference to developers.

REPL is built into Clojure, and you can connect to any running Clojure process and modify and execute code. In this interview, "Clojure Programming" co-author Chas Emerick discusses the possibilities this introduces for Clojure developers.

Visualization of the Week: Anachronistic language in “Mad Men”

A look at the historical accuracy of "Mad Men's" dialogue.

"Mad Men" is praised for its precise attention to historical visuals, but how does its dialogue stack up against text from the 1960s? Ben Schmidt's new visualization explores that question.

Visualization of the Week: Anachronistic language in "Mad Men"

A look at the historical accuracy of "Mad Men's" dialogue.

"Mad Men" is praised for its precise attention to historical visuals, but how does its dialogue stack up against text from the 1960s? Ben Schmidt's new visualization explores that question.

Four short links: 23 March 2012

Four short links: 23 March 2012

Caching Pages, Node NLP, Digital Native are Clueless, and Wal-Mart Loves Your Calendar

  1. Cache Them If You Can (Steve Souders) — the percentage of resources that are cacheable has increased 4% during the past year. Over that same time the number of requests per page has increased 12% and total transfer size has increased 24%.
  2. Natural — MIT-licensed general natural language facility for nodejs. Tokenizing, stemming, classification, phonetics, tf-idf, WordNet, string similarity, and some inflection are currently supported. (via Javascript Weekly)
  3. How Millennials SearchStatistically significant findings suggest that millennial generation Web searchers proceed erratically through an information search process, make only a limited attempt to evaluate the quality or validity of information gathered, and may perform some level of ‘backfilling’ or adding sources to a research project before final submission of the work. Never let old people tell you that “digital natives” actually know what they’re doing.
  4. Walmart Buys A Facebook App for Calendar Access (Ars Technica) — The Social Calendar app and its file of 110 million birthdays and other events, acquired from Newput Corp., will give Walmart the ability to expand its efforts to dig deeper into the lives of customers. Interesting to think that by buying a well-loved app, a company could get access to your Facebook details whether you Like them or not.
Four short links: 13 March 2012

Four short links: 13 March 2012

RoboTranslation, Basketball Visualization, Distributed Datasets, and UW's Open 3D Printing Lab Reopens

  1. Microsoft Universal Voice Translator — the promise is that it converts your voice into another language, but the effect is more that it converts your voice into that of Darth You in another language. Still, that’s like complaining that the first Wright Brothers flight didn’t serve peanuts. (via Hacker News)
  2. Geography of the Basketball Court — fascinating analytics of where NBA shooters make their shots from. Pretty pictures and sweet summaries even if you don’t follow basketball. (via Flowing Data)
  3. Spark Research — a programming model (“resilient distributed datasets”) for applications that reuse an intermediate result in multiple parallel operations. (via Ben Lorica)
  4. Opening Up — earlier I covered the problems that University of Washington’s 3D printing lab had with the university’s new IP policy, which prevented them from being as open as they had been. They’ve been granted the ability to distribute their work under Creative Commons license and are taking their place again as a hub of the emerging 3D printing world. (via BoingBoing)

Visualization of the Week: Anachronistic language in “Downton Abbey”

A look at the historical accuracy of "Downton Abbey's" language.

Ben Schmidt ran the script of the "Downton Abbey" season two finale through Google Ngrams to see how the show's language matches up with history.

Visualization of the Week: Anachronistic language in "Downton Abbey"

A look at the historical accuracy of "Downton Abbey's" language.

Ben Schmidt ran the script of the "Downton Abbey" season two finale through Google Ngrams to see how the show's language matches up with history.