Computing

Useful Things

catdynamics — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 23:36:57 +0000

Useful Things

Because I must trim browser tabs, here is a current short list of things that might be useful:

Threebody

ASCL - Astrophysics Source Code Library - Open Source Code
Visible Spectra of the Elements - Except Astatine :-(
Astronomy Simulators - small web simulators for elementary concepts.
Some quite nifty.
From University of Nebraska.
All the Kepler 2 Campaign 0 data - with some tools to play with it

catdynamics Mon, 02/02/2015 - 18:36

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astro

astrophysics

Computing

toys

Very nice, especially Threebody; thanks for the heads up.

Spiffy New Digs, Suggestions Wanted

drorzel — Wed, 23 May 2012 07:12:55 +0000

Spiffy New Digs, Suggestions Wanted

So, as you may or may not have noticed, ScienceBlogs has gotten a makeover. If you read via RSS, you might not notice anything, but if you come to the blog itself, you'll see a new look. The previous three-column layout is gone, and posts on the front page now show only short excerpts and "featured" images. This makes us look more like the blogs at National Geographic, the new Corporate Masters (for a good while now, actually, but they only just did the redesign). On the back end, we've changed from Movable Type to WordPress, which will take a little getting used to, but which lots of people think is an improvement.

All in all, I'm reasonably happy with it, but for one thing: The new front-page layout defaults to putting a user picture next to every post, over on the left. This is a little silly for a single-author blog like this one, where there really isn't any question about who wrote the posts. As a result, when I look at the front page, I see a big collection of mini-me's staring back at me, and I find it a little creepy.

I'm not sure what the best option would be, though. But I know there are people reading this with better aesthetic sense than I have, so, I throw this to you: What should I replace that little picture of me with? Or, on the technical side, does anybody know enough about WordPRess to know if I can rotate those images somehow, so it's not always the same picture? That'd be kind of LiveJournal, I know, but if there's a way to change the picture to something appropriate for the subject of the post that doesn't require an inordinate amount of work on my part (that is, something I can do without needing to log out of WordPress and back in as a different fake user, which is the only thing that occurs to me), that might be cool.

Anyway, as I said, suggestions are welcome in the comments. Which will also let me figure out if the comments are working properly...

drorzel Wed, 05/23/2012 - 03:12

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I suppose you could leave it blank and simply say it is the latest Hubble view of dark matter.

Is there really no way to tell how many comments a post has from the front page?

Second Kate's suggestion about number of comments. That was a handy way of knowing whether there were any new comments on a post since my last visit/comment. The old "Recent Comments" listing helped somewhat, but the new incarnation lists only about half as many "Recent Comments" as the old one, so they are more likely to fall off the end of the stack.

There's a lot of feedback about the new layout over on Respectful Insolence (by Orac) by a number of his long-time commenters.

While poking around on the main ScienceBlogs page, I realized that the main "Recent Activity" box (with the usual two out of three links to to the prolific Pharyngula) actually takes you to a Facebook login page, rather than the specific articles the links appear to take you to. I don't like Facebook tracking me, so I won't be using that at all.

Also, the main-page links under Channel Surfing are only moderately correctly categorized (not sure if it's some automated system, or a manual thing) - your pointer to the NYT review of How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is under "Physical Science" and your "we've moved" article is under Humanities.

Any way to lengthen the short excerpts before the cut? Four lines doesn't give enough space to tell if the post is going to match my interests. Since clicking on "read the whole post" takes you into a separate page for the post and comments, and doesn't just expand out the post in the context of the main page, it then either requires a back button to get back to scrolling through the front page, or opening in a new tab that I then have to click through. This makes it feel like I'm expending a lot of effort to scan the blog.

The lack of a comment link is also annoying.

One thing I miss about the old version is the longer post previews. I check the blog every day, but I admit that I only click the "Read More" button if it's a post I think sounds interesting (most of them are!). The current preview size hardly gives me an idea of what the post will be like. Not that I think an extra click is a lot more work, it's just that with the current state doesn't really tell me much. See the "Republican Brain by Chris Mooney" preview for what I'm talking about. The old version told me so much more!

P.S. - The longer previews also greatly helped me to see from the main page if I wanted to click on some of your links-dump links. The way it is now I might just skip those.

. . . you might also pass on that the "recent comments" sidebar also would be a lot more helpful if visited links changed color. Which is web design 101 and basic accessibility, as well.

The "Last 24 hours" link is inoperative now, too. It takes one to the ScienceBlogs home page.

What RBH said - the Last 24 Hours link is always the first thing I head for, and now it's not working.

With RBH and Flora, I have always used the "Last 24 Hours" link -- in fact, it had a dedicated tab in Firefox for me. I'd like it back.

I do approve of what seems to be a larger default font for posts.

You need a height scale behind you in your photo to complete the sense that it is a mug shot.

One more vote for the 24h channel. It seems to have returned from death, but at this moment are only two posts. Hopefully that isn't a built-in limitation.

This is not a comment on you, but just in general. Science blogs has been going downhill for some time. Giving it a new look won't change the content: there used to be a lot more science, and I was sorry to see that slip.

I used to visit daily and look at the "Last 24 hours" listing so I could see what's been posted since I last visited, but today, that button doesn't even work!

It's becoming harder to find any benefit in visiting science blogs. Yes, a blogger can blog whatever they want, but unless they're blogging primarily about science, I don't see why they would want to blog at a site specifically called Science blogs!

Within certain limits, I really don't care how a site looks - I care about content. That's what makes me come back - or drives me away.

Add me to the list of people who used to head for the "24 hours" page first. I miss it, and I probably won't read ScienceBlogs if I can't get to it easily.

Does WordPress have a mobile-friendly interface? I would be a happy,happy reader if you'd implement it, especially on the "24 hours" view.

The RSS feed doesn't work for me. The links look OK, but clicking one takes me back to the ScienceBlogs home page.

One more vote - list of activity by date on 24 Hr page was how I entered science blogs. Site is much less user friendly without that.

I also am a last 24hrs user. I think it was the best interface that I have used. Please bring it back/

They have already been mentioned here, and on various other scienceblogs, but I thought I'd reinforce 3 major missing features.

1) Numbering of comments. I just came back to a thread I was following lastnight and had to hunt for the last comment I read, rather than think "The last comment I read was ~42".

2) The number of comments should be visible on the front page.

3) It would be nice to have some way to preview your post before posting.

Add me to the list of those who find the "last 24 hours" feature essential.

Having to click open a new page to read beyond the first few lines is terrible. I really like this blog, but most likely I will hardly read it in the future. Not out of protest, but having to open a new page for each post is way too unpleasant. Might not be so bad if it just expanded the same page, like Andrew Sullivan's blog. I'm really sorry to see this happen.

I'd like join in with the others that say the preview snippet is way too short. It's incredibly annoying to have to go to a new page just to read the most recent posts.

I will pass these comments and requests on to the Corporate Masters, as will several other bloggers, I'm sure.

The Last 24 Hours thing is probably related to the breaking of all the RSS feeds, as I think it was cobbled together from RSS stuff. That will probably get fixed in the near-ish future. When they do get that sorted, the RSS feeds look like they'll be full-text, so if you don't like the tiny little excerpts, you can always use RSS to get around it.

Right at the moment, I can't even reliably get to the back end to moderate comments-- three out of every four attempts to do something throw an error-- and I'm sufficiently annoyed at this that I'm declaring an early start to the weekend. I'm not going to attempt to post anything new or tweak the look of the site (within my limited ability to do so) until next Monday at the earliest. I'll continue to (try to) free comments held for moderation, though I can't promise it'll happen all that quickly.

If numbers help, I'll n'th the requests to make the comments font darker, fix the Last 24 Hours page, and make the preview size/length flexible. Also, in the right-hand bar on the main page, I currently have no entries under either Archives or Categories. I'm guessing that's related to the update, but just in case. Firefox 7, in case it matters.

"Last 34 Hrs" link still, as of 1830hrs 05/24, just goes to main page. That, and either the posts aren't showing up on the main page or there are few posts. A few have popped up but few, very few.

This is putting a crimp in my internet habits. If this keeps up I may be forced to interact with neighbors and family.

Also, the main-page links under Channel Surfing are only moderately correctly categorized (not sure if it’s some automated system, or a manual thing)

Check out the earlier entry under the orange "Jobs" tag. I don't think that's what the semantics are actually supposed to be.

On a typical visit to sciblogs, I would peruse the summaries of the latest posts and read those that caught my interest. As other commenters have noted, the last 24 hour feature no longer work and the summaries are too short to be useful. That was the perfect layout for capturing a quick snapshot of activity since the last visit.. I hope your corporate masters re-instate that.

Wasn't there a "Most Read" and/or "Most Emailed" section, before? Or maybe that's the "Last 24 Hours" thing that other commenters are missing -- I don't pay super-close attention. But I used to like that as a place to find other science blogs to visit on a one-time basis. I'd prefer having that back over the very long list of categories.

I miss having the chance to preview comments, too. It's my last chance to scan for typographical errors, which I care about.

Not to sound creepy or anything, but I think your picture is fine as is

Is the Canon ad supposed to appear as an unreadable vertical red-brown smear that obscures some of the text in the first 2 paras of your post?

The RSS seems to be working again. The last 11 posts showed up in my Google reader.

This Week's Reading in the Church of the Larger Hilbert Space

drorzel — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 11:24:17 +0000

This Week's Reading in the Church of the Larger Hilbert Space

1 And the LORD looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.

2 And the LORD said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.

3 Make thee an ark, and this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred qubits, the breadth of it fifty qubits, and the height of it thirty qubits.

4 And Noah asked the LORD, What is a qubit?

5 And the LORD replied unto Noah, A qubit is a two-level quantum system, that may be found in either the state which thou shalt term 0 or the state which thou shalt term 1.

6 Or, verily, it may be found in any arbitrary linear superposition of those two states.

7 And Noah said unto the LORD, Oh, right. And what am I supposed to make these of, gopher wood?

8 The LORD replied, I hear trapped ions are good for this sort of thing.

9 And error correction shalt thou make in thine ark, placing it within a decoherence-free subspace.

10 And thou shalt take into thine ark all of the numbers, that you may make use of them for efficient finding of prime factors. And thou shalt--

11 Not all of the numbers, Noah interrupted the LORD.

12 And the LORD said unto Noah, What do you mean?

13 Well, Noah replied, if the ark is to be 300 by 50 by 30 qubits, then the maximum number to be stored within it must be no greater than 2⁴⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰.

14 While verily that is a large number, still it is finite. And thus it is not possible for the ark to contain all of the numbers.

15 That is even before we implement error correction, further reducing the number of available qubits.

16 And the LORD replied, I say unto thee, 2⁴⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰ is greater than 10¹³⁵⁴⁶³, which is greater than the grains of sand in the desert, or stars in the sky.

17 Yea, verily, it is greater by far than the number of protons in the visible universe which I have made.

18 Is this not close enough to infinite for all practical purposes, thou ungrateful wretch?

19 And Noah replied, Yes, oh great LORD, it is a magnificiently large number. Verily.

20 But even so, must we be restricted solely to positive integers?

21 For truly, the number of reals is greater by far than the number of integers, to say nothing of 2⁴⁵⁰⁰⁰⁰. And then--

22 And the LORD said, Speak not to me of the square root of negative one, lest I become wroth with thee, and start smiting things.

23 But Noah spoke on, saying, How then shall we keep track of the phase of the wavefunction?

24 For is not the Schrödinger Equation explicitly complex?

25 And the LORD said, Look, this was obviously a terrible idea. Forget I said anything.

26 And Noah held his tongue. Though he did continue to wonder for many days afterwards, what use hath the LORD for a quantum computer?

------------

(A silly idea, inspired by yet more rain and flooding in New York, which lodged in my head and wouldn't go away until I typed it out. Apologies to Peter Shor, Bill Cosby, and God.)

drorzel Thu, 09/08/2011 - 07:24

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Yes, it needs to be done in this voice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bputeFGXEjA

Love the hat tip to Bill Cosby (hearkening back to when he was funny).

Wrong Ark. It's was Moseses that was used as a communication device with aliensG-d.

Apologies to Peter Shor, Bill Cosby, and God.)

What? No Ayn Rand?

Obviously. Things became just a bit too complex... ;-)

That made my morning, and nearly made coffee come out my nose. Thanks Chad.

What, you went that far without bringing up the (set theoretic) independence of the Continuum Hypothesis and its bearing on the cardinality of the reals? And why not do QM with p-adics anyway? At least then you can get the abstract complex i in a constructive fashion, starting with the p-adic integers as a limit of finite fields. Sheeeesh, they are both a couple of morons. Noah should have pointed out that the grains of sand in HIS, ie. Noah's, universe were not the grains of sand in some other guy's.

Oh, my. That is most excellently well done, indeed.

in Hilbert Space, no one can hear you scream.

Happy Valentine's Day from Your Computer

cevans — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Happy Valentine's Day from Your Computer

In 2007, my friends at m ss ng peces and I started work on a new Internet-television show called RESET, for the Sundance Channel. The idea was to make a show designed for computers to watch, that could teach them what it was like to be human -- a show that, while ostensibly made for human beings, would also nourish our computers' circuit boards with generous descriptions of the richness of human experience. Obviously this is just an artistic conceit, and not, as far as I know, a practicable reality, but it does raise a lot of interesting questions. You probably spend your entire day within arm's reach of warm and buzzing little laptop; if you could teach it anything about yourself, what would it be? Does it matter? If we're diving headlong into a post-Singularity future, wouldn't it be reassuring to know the computers knew what it felt like to dance, to smell, or -- most appropriate today -- to fall in love?

To celebrate the project, we made some valentines for you and your computer to share. After all, you do spend all day staring at each other.

You can watch episodes on the Sundance Channel site or on the RESET Tumblr, where I'll be posting endlessly interesting ephemera about the increasingly intimate and complex relationship we have with our technology. Please come visit, follow along, and join the conversation -- I'm talking to you, microchips!

Still from RESET: Sound

Meanwhile, an IBM computer trounces human contestants on Jeopardy! and a robot quietly orders a scone from a Mountain View coffee shop. This, apparently, is the world we live in.

P.S. Oh, and you can also Like RESET on Facebook here.

cevans Mon, 02/14/2011 - 02:00

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Experiments in Art & Technology

cevans — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:22:00 +0000

Experiments in Art & Technology

To prepare for a "Book Sprint" I'm participating in at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie-Mellon University next week, I've been doing lots of research about notable historical interactions between art, science, and technology. In suit, Universe fringe benefits!

First, I'd like to tell you about "9 Evenings," organized in 1966 by a very interesting engineer named Billy KlÃ¼ver with the help of the great American artist, Robert Rauschenberg.

KlÃ¼ver is a fascinating character, a brilliant engineer who saw the potential in the integration of art and technology, and noticed an absence of people who might be competent enough to bridge the chasm between these disciplines. In part inspired by the Aristotelian idea of Techne -- systematic use of knowledge for intelligent human action -- KlÃ¼ver dreamt of equal participation between artist and engineer in creating pieces of art. He saw artists as visionaries, and technology as an inseparable part of contemporary life; he famously sought out "new means of expressions for artists...and to find out where they stood in relation to the society that was sending men to the moon."

Anyway, KlÃ¼ver and Rauschenberg, who'd already collaborated on several sculptures, organized 9 Evenings, an epic art salon, attended by over 10,000 people, at the 69th Regiment Armory building in New York. The event paired ten artists including Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, and Yvonne Rainier with over 30 engineers from Bell Laboratories. The engineers, headed by KlÃ¼ver, helped the artists with complex technical components to their pieces ("miles of cable"), creating performances, installations, and dances that blended technology with fine art to somewhat legendary effect.

For example, Rauschenberg produced a piece for 9 Evenings called "Open Score," in which the artist Frank Stella and his tennis partner played a game of "wired" tennis on a giant court in the Armory Building. As they played, tiny crystal-controlled FM transmitters embedded in their tennis rackets transmitted the vibrations of the racket strings to an FM radio receiver, which amplified the sound and also, one after the other, turned off the 39 lights in the Armory ceiling. By the end of the match, the giant room (and the audience) was in utter darkness.

As the darkness fell on the room, some 500 people shuffled in and were suddenly lit by infra-red sensitive cameras. This massive group was invisible to the audience save via projections of infrared television on large screens; Rauschenberg, in his notes for the piece, wrote "the conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one except through reproduction is the sort of double exposure of action." One could argue that the "conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one" is essentially the basis of what drives us to do science. The world is full of invisible actions that niggle us to the point of distraction and building mile-long particle accelerators underground.

Also for 9 Evenings, John Cage performed Variations VII, in which he used communications media (radio and telephone) to amplify phenomena already present in the Armory, as well as modulating the amplitude of his on-stage collaborators' brain waves. Stage lights placed next to photoelectric cells both lit the performance area and triggered sounds as passers-by and performers walked past them. As a visual component, the shadows produced were cast onto two large canvases.

On top of it all, Cage set up 10 telephone lines in various New York locations -- from the Bronx Zoo aviary, to the 14th Street Con-Edison electric power station and Merce Cunningham's dance studio -- which picked up ambient sound and were re-broadcast during the performance.

The end result was particularly unlistenable.

This kind of tech-driven performance is fairly common in the age of populist technologies like Arduino, Max/MSP, and Twitter (not to mention the Maker movement) but the large-scale, technically complex performances of 9 Evenings would have been impossible in 1966 without the involvement of engineers who knew their stuff. And the collaboration was fruitful in both directions, too: the transmitter in the "Open Score" rackets was designed by Bill Kaminski, who was working in wireless radio transmission at Bell Labs. Later, that technology was developed into the wireless microphone.

9 Evenings birthed a great many things, not least the wireless microphone; it launched the career of John Cage, and led KlÃ¼ver to found "Experiments in Art & Technology," a kind of matchmaking service designed to connect artists with willing engineers, facilitating the creation of art unconstrained by technological limitations.

Additional Resources:

DVDs of 9 Evenings performances are available through Microcinema

Or through Amazon

Tons of 9 Evenings resources at the Fondation Henri Langlois

9 Evenings Reconsidered by Catherine Morris, Jane Farver, Clarisse Bardiot, and Michelle Kuo

cevans Tue, 02/08/2011 - 04:22

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Experiments in Art and Technology

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Unlistenable? It's beautiful!

Claire, the following two articles relate to the co-mingling of art and "hard" science. "Artwork inspired by bubble chambers", http://www.bnl.gov/60th/houshmand.asp and "Brookhaven Facilities at the Frontiers of Scienceâ¦and Art",
http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news2/news.asp?a=1456&t=today . It's not performance art of the type described in your post but interesteing nonetheless.

Gary, thanks for these links! Super interesting.

Industrial pop music was never this cool!

Please keep us posted about the outcome of the "book-sprint". I read about it on stereogum in a rather decent article about YACHT, and I have to say it piqued my interest in the band and what you two are doing in general to say the least. I wish I couldve been there at CMU!

Control A Computer with Your Brain, And Look Good Doing It

cevans — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 12:49:23 +0000

Control A Computer with Your Brain, And Look Good Doing It

A few months ago, I attended Cyborg Camp in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Cyborg Camp is an "unconference," basically a room full of cyberpunks, mega-nerds, and aspirational coders that gather in an office building to talk about the "future of the relationship between humans and technology." This event deserves a separate entry, but for now I'd like to recall a particularly evocative thing: that the most heartbreaking thing I saw at Cyborg Camp was an adult man hopelessly tangled in a web of cables.

It was his own off-the-shelf wearable computing system, a gordian thing connecting his outdated Windows smartphone to a pair of personal video glasses via an unwieldy battery pack in his shorts. He was trying to show it off an audience eager to learn about "DIY Wearable Computing." Unfortunately, it was like watching a third-grader thread his mittens through his winter jacket sleeves.

"Talk about first world problems," I heard him mutter.

His computer system-cum-outfit was shitty. It was shitty in the way that most things light-years ahead of their time are shitty, because the rush to make them into reality precludes aesthetics. People dedicated to developing new technolgies are largely interested in them working -- they can worry about looking good later. As a rule, technology is born ugly, then gets refined: compare the first Apple computers to the blemish-less glass of an iPad screen.

Wearable headset computers don't really exist to anyone but the people who actively wish for them; those people take matters into their own hands with Sharper Image and Made-in-China techno-junk. Such tangled-cable DIY cyborg hacks are entirely about function, and usually have no concern for design. That blind adherence to pragmatism may even be the defining characteristic of geek fashion. Technical sandals, video glasses, and LED-rigged shoelaces are functional and hideous, whereas fashion ("real" fashion, whatever that means) is beautiful and useless.

The point of this meandering introduction is that we are rapidly approaching an age where this general rule is no longer rock-solid. Consider the Emotiv EPOC. This is an actual, purchasable product: a "neuro-signal acquisition and processing wireless neuroheadset." When donned atop your dome, the headset's sensors tune into electric signals produced by your brain, effectively detecting your thoughts, feelings and expressions and allowing you to control a computer with your mind.

[Pause for effect]

This is the first commercially-available device of its kind. It is insanely ahead of its time. Have you ever even heard the word "neuroheadset" before?

And yet, the Emotiv EPOC neuroheadset is pretty beautiful. It's not an insane mess of multi-colored wires and scary-looking electrodes; it doesn't even have any wires at all -- it connects wirelessly to your computer via a USB dongle. All things considered, it looks more like an expensive pair of headphones than a device that can read your mind.

The EPOC has three different ways of sensing your mental intent. The simplest is that it can monitor facial expressions. This means you can smile and your computer will automatically insert a smiley-face into your chat, for example. It has a gyroscope in the headpiece as well, so you can move your cursor by moving your head. Lastly, it can sense brainwaves -- but to do that, you have to map the device to your particular mind by using crazy biofeedback software, concentrating on the idea of "left," "right," or "forward" (etc.) while looking at an orange 3D cube on your screen, while the EPOC analyzes your brain activity for each command. After this mapping is finished, EPOC users can ostensibly play Pong or Tetris telepathically.

As it turns out, however, the EPOC doesn't upset the beautiful-ugly, functional-useless dialectic much: the amount more beautiful it is than most first-generation technologies is about even with the amount less that it is functional. It's getting tepid reviews from realists, who argue that the EPOC is not the "mass market device for people looking for a turnkey telekinesis solution" that everyone hoped it might be. Rather, "it's an expensive toy for people to experiment with" and -- despite being totally cool -- is basically useless.

Regardless, the EPOC is catnip for nerds. If there had been one at Cyborg Camp, it would certainly have been the star of the show -- regardless of whether or not it was a nice-looking object. After all, sitting in the conference room at Cyborg Camp, my most prevalent thought wasn't about the disproportionate presence of dorky video glasses and technical sandals, but one of slightly apprehensive wonder: "shit, these people are the future of everything." In my mind, the clout of the future is not wealth, but ability to navigate an increasingly digital world (as Douglas Rushkoff says, "program or be programmed").

We'll probably all be wearing computers in five years. And just as Luxxotica is making personal 3D glasses for rich people and even Karl Lagerfeld compares Facebook to Brancusi, there will be high-end neuroheadsets being made and modeled at Paris Fashion Week by athletic models in circuit board stilettos.

Talk about first world problems, right?

cevans Wed, 11/17/2010 - 07:49

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Hey quit making fun of the Five Fingers. Barefoot/minimalist running is the bomb. The headset would be fun but I am still holding out for my flying car.

Read the Internet, Speak English

cevans — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Read the Internet, Speak English

In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.

If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself idiomatic English as well as educating itself in human affairs. Paging Vernor Vinge, right?

NELL reads the Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week, learning language like a human would -- cumulatively, over a long period of time. It parses text on the Internet for ontological categories, like "plants," "music" and "sports teams," then uses contextual clues to sort out what things belong in which categories, like "Nirvana is a grunge band" (see below) and "Peyton Manning plays for the Indianapolis Colts."

Amazing.

In its self-taught exploration of Internet English, NELL is 87 percent correct. And the more it learns, the more accurate it will become. According to a paper called "Toward an Architecture for Never-Ending Language Learning," NELL has two tasks: to read, and to learn from that reading -- to "learn to read better each day than the day before...go[ing] back to yesterday's text sources and extract[ing] more information more accurately."

Like the premise of a dystopian sci-fi story, Read the Web is wonderful-terrifying. Wonderful, because we've designed a computer to teach itself, because it's a case study in life-long learning, and because the results will certainly be useful. Terrifying because it's difficult to look at a massive computer coming up accurate pronouncements like "bliss is an emotion" without feeling a shudder of horrible gravitas. That said, I am shuttering my fearmongering sci-fi mind and embracing NELL's mission, just one in a fascinating new field of research aimed at helping computers understand human language, using the Web as a key linguistic resource. The idea of a "Semantic Web," an Internet as comprehensible to computers as it is to humans, has been in the computer science and AI discourse for years, with good old Sir Tim Berners-Lee carrying the leading torch. In a 2001 article for Scientific American, Berners-Lee wrote that "this structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together."

Upon discovering this project, I had tons of questions about NELL: could it read other languages? Who gets the data in the end? Does it have parental controls on? So I did what I always do in such cases, which is immediately write to the people in charge and flash my ScienceBlogs credentials in the hopes of gleaning some information from them. In suit, here is a brief interview with the very gracious Professor Tom Mitchell, chair of the Machine Learning Department of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Burr Settles, a Carnegie Mellon postdoctoral fellow working on the project.

UNIVERSE Q&A WITH TOM MITCHELL AND BURR SETTLES OF CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY

Universe: At the moment, NELL is learning language and semantic categories in English, which would mean that its learning is limited to the output of the English-speaking world. Are there any plans to expand the program to different languages?

Professor Tom Mitchell: Interestingly, NELL's learning methods can apply equally well to other western languages as they do to English (as long as the language uses the same character set as English). We started with English because, well, we speak English. And also because that is the most-used language on the web, and we wanted NELL to have access to lots of text.

Burr Settles: In principle, the technology driving NELL is language-independent, so there is reason to believe that, given a corpus of Spanish or Chinese, it could learn equally as well. In fact, I suspect there are some languages it would perform even better with; for example syntax and orthography are generally more consistent in Spanish than in English, so the Spanish NELL might learn much more quickly and accurately.

Universe: Could an advanced NELL-like computer teach itself another language?

Burr Settles: Quite possibly. For example, imagine that NELL learns a lot about The French Revolution from English-language documents, and also knows (because we say so, or maybe because it read so!) that Wikipedia pages have corresponding translations in other languages. If NELL assumes the facts available on the English- and French-language Wikipedia pages for The French Revolution are roughly equivalent, then it could use its Knowledge to start to infer patterns, rules, word morphologies, etc. in French, and then start reading other French-language documents.

This isn't unlike the way humans can easily pick up certain words (concrete nouns, prepositions) when traveling in foreign-language countries. I know, because I just got back from two weeks in Spain, which is why I'm absent from that fabulous New York Times photo!

Universe: When will NELL stop running?

Professor Tom Mitchell: We have absolutely no intention of stopping it from running. NELL stands for "Never Ending Language Learner." We mean it, though of course we need to make research progress if we want to give it the ability to continue learning in useful ways.

Universe: Is NELL reading the web indiscriminately, or have you set it loose on particular corners of the Internet that are more conducive to language-learning (say, Wikipedia)?

Professor Tom Mitchell: NELL primarily uses a collection of 500,000,000 web pages that represent the most broadly popular, highly referenced pages on the web. But it also uses Google's search engine to search for additional pages when it is looking for targeted information (e.g., for pages that will teach it more about sports teams). So it's not in some corner of the web, but all over it.

Burr Settles: Currently, NELL reads indiscriminately. Of course, it tends to learn about proteins and cell lines mostly from biomedical documents, celebrities from news sites and gossip forums, and so on. In future versions of NELL, we hope it can decide its own learning agenda, e.g., "I've not read much about musical acts from the 1940s... maybe I'll focus on those kinds of documents today!" Or, alternatively, we could say we need it to focus on a particular document. Previous successes in "machine reading" research have in fact relied on a narrow scope of knowledge (e.g., only articles about sports, or terrorism, or biomedical research) in order to learn anything. The fact that NELL learns to read reasonably well across all of these domains is actually a big step forward.

It has been interesting to hear the public's response to NELL. There are many jokes about what will happen when it comes across 4chan or LOLcats, for example. But the reality is, those texts are already available to NELL, and it is largely ignoring them because they are so ill-formed and inconsistent.

Universe: Say NELL learns the English language well enough to be a Shakespearean scholar. What happens to the data then -- do Google and Yahoo and DARPA get access to it?

Professor Tom Mitchell: Yes, and so will everybody. Already we have put NELL's growing knowledge base up on the web. You can browse it, and also download the whole thing if you like. Furthermore, I am committed to sticking to this policy of making NELL's extracted knowledge base available for free to anybody who wants to use it for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, for the life of this research project.

Universe: Lastly, the name NELL is a joke about the Jodie Foster movie, right?

Professor Tom Mitchell: Well, no. I didn't really know about that movie...but I just took a look at NELL's knowledge base, and it appears to
know about it. Take a look. There, the light grey items are low confidence hypotheses that NELL is considering but not yet committing to. The dark black items are higher confidence beliefs. So it is considering that NELL might be a movie, a disease, and/or a writer, but it's pretty confident that Jodie Foster starred in the movie...

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Additional Resources:

NELL's mind-blowing Twitter feed

Nell (the movie)

Book: Semantic Web For Dummies

Book: A Semantic Web Primer, 2nd Edition (MIT Press)

Book: Programming the Semantic Web (O'Reilly)

Tim Berners-Lee on The Semantic Web, from Scientific American (PDF)

Populating the Semantic Web by Macro-Reading Internet Text, from Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference (PDF)

Toward an Architecture for Never Ending Language Learning (PDF)

Frequently Asked Questions about the Semantic Web, from W3C

The Semantic Web Revisited, from IEEE Intelligent Systems

cevans Fri, 10/08/2010 - 09:00

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87% correct makes it considerably more factually accurate than most Tea Party supporters.

The really wonderfully scary part is that they are getting that level of accuracy from a first generation version. Presumably, not only will NELL continue to advance, but the software that drives it will also be constantly updated and refined as the developers continue to study the effectiveness of NELL's learning algorithms.

SkyNet is NELL 2.0!

And upon becoming self-aware, NELL muttered one simple phrase "I can haz cheezburger?". It was truly a bad day for computer science.

And one day NELL finds the page about itself, self-references, and enters a never-ending loop.

NELL has a fundamental misunderstanding in regards to "female". Many of its criteria for that term are really more appropriate for "celebrity" or "movie star", with no distinctions at all between the genders.

What we mostly need is a tool which can translate the garbage found on the Internet - and especially that which has been through Speakwrites without having been proof-read - into coherent English. Sadly, I suspect this problem is genuinely intractable.

And, given that pages devoted to conspiracy theories and penis-enlargement products vastly outnumber factual pages on the Web, what kind of world view is this project likely to end up with?

I'm not sure exactly what "87% accurate" means (there are many, many possible definitions of "error" in natural language technologies), but I have to point out that if that's a per-word error rate, it works out to 2-3 errors per sentence on average. I mean, it's a high number, but way way below what we're used to in our daily interactions with people.

Some of it's hits (albiet grey) are hilarious.

Look up pluto (planet) for example.

OB SF REF: " 'Rabbits,' the calculator said."

I should explain what I remember about that for younger readers. In the SF tale, the main character (I think his name is Professor Granius) has invented a colloidal calculator and hooked it up to the local news channel in order to let it build a knowledge base. He is working on it with his nephew Bruce when aliens led by the Khafis Ghan arrive in a fleet of spaceships and take over Earth.

The rest you can discover on your own.

I think, English is necessary when you are on internet. because without you can't understand what that thing is.

Yes Karen I agree with you I think English is must for internet with out English its difficult for us to survive on internet.

I think we could say we need it to focus on a particular document. Previous successes in "machine reading" research have in fact relied on a narrow scope of knowledge.

GÃ¼neyAfrika, Almanya 3 Ã¼lke birleÅerek filmi yapmÄ±ÅtÄ±r.
Filmde Erotik gerilim ve korku sahneleri yer alÄ±yor.

I also think that this new founding is wonderful-terrifying. Wonderful â because itâs amazing to see a computerized object learns something from reading it itself and categorizing it and terrifying- because itâs crazy to think that a computer can read our language and understand it. When I read that part about how the NELL can decide the categories of things that it reads and understand the internet (English) world it reminded me of the movie âIRobotâ. It got me thinking that weâre that far from inventing robots that could do what we say or even have co-workers that may be robots. This article made me realize how far technology has come and how advanced computers will be in the future. The article also mentioned that the NELL will be able to read other languages that use similar characters as English and Iâm looking forward to seeing that NELL software be available. Next thing you know, the NELL might be teaching us something new; kind of insane when you think about it. I think weâll be seeing and hearing more about the NELL since itâs something new that has been discovered.

After I read this article I was just surprised and astonished. The computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is just outstanding because of all the things that it is capable of doing. It is like a computer human or something of that sort. The reason I called it a computer human is because it is able to read English and understand it like us humans. It is able to read and comprehend other languages too. This particular asset of this computer software can help us interact with people who speak different languages and it will reduce tensions between countries. Also, it learns like humans by reading and understanding information from websites and it is able to categorize them. That is amazing! Technology is getting far more advanced than what I had thought it had. This computer software has great potential of doing many things. For example, it can come with with cures for diseases, think of ways to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and many other things that can help make our lives much better and easier. This software will make a difference and this invention is just fantastic.

I think just one in a fascinating new field of research aimed at helping computers understand human language, using the Web as a key linguistic resource.

NELL is incredible. I canât believe a computer system can teach itself. This is completely and utterly mind boggling. It should change the definition of life. I think that despite the fact that NELL is a computer system it should be considered a life form because it can teach itself. Hypothetically speaking, we could cryogenically freeze everyone and time the freezers to let us out in 100 years. Then, we could see what NELL has come up with. A cure for cancer? No more world hunger? The possibilities are endless. Hypothetically speaking of course.

Google Chrome on Opensuse 11.2

j7uy5 — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 06:31:27 +0000

Google Chrome on Opensuse 11.2

I decided to try using Google Chrome as a web browser. The reason is that it is supposed to be faster, particularly for sites that make heavy use of Flash. It turns out that installing it is a hassle if you do it the obvious way, because Flash does not work without fiddling around. That sort of defeats the purpose.

The easier way is to use the one-click install at:

http://software.opensuse.org/ymp/ope...2/chromium.ymp.

This adds the necessary repositories, downloads the application, and configures it so that flash works right away.

It seems to work pretty well. It remains to be seen, however, if Chrome has any chance of becoming my main browser. After all, the first browser I used was NCSA Mosaic, which morphed into Netscape Navigator, which went through several iterations, then became the basis for Firefox. I just followed along. After 17 years, it might be hard to change.

j7uy5 Sat, 01/30/2010 - 01:31

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How'd you like OpenSUSE 11.2?

Zenph Studios now hiring music analyst and technology coordinator for "re-performances"

terrasig — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:49:26 +0000

Zenph Studios now hiring music analyst and technology coordinator for "re-performances"

Audio documentarian, local hero, and Pharmboy family friend, Richard Ziglar, let us know over the weekend of some employment opportunities for music and tech-minded folks at Zenph Studios in Research Triangle Park.

What is Zenph, you ask? Zenph takes classic piano recordings, often from long-departed performers, dissects them digitally to capture nuances of the live performance, and then "re-performs" them live in a recital hall on legendary Steinways driven by the software. These are *not* digital remasterings but recordings of an actual replaying of the original work.

Listen to this example of a 1926 performance by Alfred Cortot of Chopin's prelude #3 in G major from the original 78 rpm record and the 2005 re-performance.

Richard has had the opportunity to meet co-founder and chief technology officer, Dr. John Q. Walker, and thought very highly of him, recommended that interested parties very seriously consider one of these positions.

Walker is himself a pianist and software engineer who also co-founded Ganymede Software and, according to his Zenph biography, "was influential in the creation of the IEEE 802 local-area network (LAN) and the 802.11 wireless LAN ("Wi-Fi") standards." His TED talk is here and, as you can see in the comments, Zenph's approach is quite polarizing. Regardless, I find this fascinating.

Here are the positions:

MUSIC ANALYST (PDF)

Strong Computer and Music Skills

Do you have perfect pitch and a superb ear for the nuances of classical and jazz music? Are you a fine, active pianist? Do you read complex music scores readily? Do you have strong, fearless computer skills, especially experience with MIDI? Are you a perfectionist? Do you work efficiently with little supervision?

Join us in inventing the 21st century equivalent of music transcription.

A full-time job, working in the Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina. Could start as part-time.

Excellent pay, stock options, full medical and dental benefits, IRA matching.

Our business turns audio recordings back into the data representing live performances.

Join us on the ground floor of a major revolution in music production!

TECHNOLOGY COORDINATOR (PDF)

Zenph Studios, based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, is looking for a Technology Coordinator to satisfy the following three roles:

The Technology Coordinator reports to the VP of Finance/Operations, and is responsible for directing all internal IT and related activities of the organization.

This individual has three roles. First, this person is accountable for ensuring continuity of computer and peripheral services throughout the organization through planning, technical leadership, and project coordination. Second, this individual is responsible for maintaining the technical aspects of company's music recording facilities. Finally, this person is responsible for creating and executing company's social media strategy.

Job Requirements

Bachelor's degree in IT, engineering, or other technical discipline with a minimum of 5 years experience or Associate's Degree with minimum of 7 years experience in related duties. Minimum of 5 years supervisory experience.

Ability to analyze information related to computer technology to assist in directing company management in the selection of software and hardware to meet the needs of the organization. Sound understanding of current applications and trends in IT.

Ability to analyze information related to recording and audio technology to assist in directing company management in the selection of software and hardware to meet the needs of the organization.

Formal experience in a recording studio, or radio station environment strongly preferred. Fluency with digital audio workstation and video editing hardware and software.

Strong inter-personal skills, good judgment and ability to communicate effectively with a diverse range of individuals.

Experience working with technical aspects of music studios.

Experience with social media.

terrasig Tue, 12/22/2009 - 11:49

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Computing

music

The Old North State

I have had the pleasure of listening to a number of Zenph re-recordings. They are well worth a listen. They have sponsored several Raleigh Chamber Music Guild performances and have had the automated pianos play. If I remember correctly, one pieces was one by Glenn Gould. Another project they worked on was one with Milton Laufer at Peace College on a very old Spanish composer. Dr. Laufer played an almost unrecognizable original and then the piece that was reconstructed using the Zenph Studio software. It was an amazing transformation.
I was impressed. I would be applying if I wasn't already employed.

Tech Tip #8

j7uy5 — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:56:25 +0000

Tech Tip #8

This is a tip for selecting the fastest DNS server. href="http://www.opendns.com/">OpenDNS already has
fans at ScienceBlogs ( href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/08/turkish_ass_shuts_down_a_slice.php">1
href="http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/08/connectile_dysfunction.php">2).
I've been using it for years. But now that href="http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/">Google has
their own free/open DNS service, the question arises: which
is better? Or is there a different one that is better?
OpenDNS is free for anyone to use, but they also offer paid
services to enterprises. Those enterprises have special
needs, which most of you would not want. Google is, well,
Google.

The tip is this: you can download an application which will test
various open dns servers, and tell you which is fastest, on average,
for your particular setup. As it happens, the program is
hosted/sponsored by Google, so you might wonder if it is does a fair
test. Go head and wonder. If you have a way to find
out for yourself, then you don't need the application.

Anyway, you can get the app here: href="http://code.google.com/p/namebench/">namebench.
There are versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/Unix.

When I ran it, it told me the best one was 192.168.0.1, which is, of
course, my router. The router was set to use Google's DNS.
Namebench knew that, of course. It gave me the
recommendation to set Google's DNS as the primary, and OpenDNS as the
secondary. I did that.

For the average user, does this make any difference? I don't
know. I am going to guess that most people would not notice
the improvement, in most circumstances. But some will notice
a significant improvement in their browsing experience. You
are most likely to benefit if you often have the experience of clicking
on a link, then waiting a few seconds before anything happens, or
getting a page not found error that goes away when you try again, or
getting random redirections that take you somewhere strange at first,
but get the page you want when you try again.

How do you change the DNS settings in your system? It
depends. The best way to do it, for most people, is to use
your router's interface. There are too many different routers
and interfaces for me to have any hope of giving instructions here.
So you are on your own if you want to do that.
Google gives instructions href="http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html">here,
but they are fairly generic when it comes to routers. The
instructions appear reasonably good for WIndows and Mac OS X users who
want to change the settings for individual computers, without messing
with the router. But then you have to do the same thing for
each of your computers.

If there is only one computer in the house, then it does not matter how
you do it.

Some people have raised privacy concerns about using Google's DNS.
My opinion is that if you are worried about that, you should
not use the Internet.

(HT: Dangerousmeta)

j7uy5 Fri, 12/11/2009 - 02:56

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