New technology from Xerox can sort photos not just by their content but also according to their aesthetic qualities, such as which portraits are close-in and well-lit, or which wildlife shots are least cluttered.
The determinations are made using machine learning applied to highly rated online photos of the same subjects. Essentially, Xerox is crowd-sourcing their algorithm across the Internet. Pretty clever, but we'll see how it works out.
A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.
I didn't even know the U.S. government had $7.7 trillion to lend. This story disgusts me with the effort the banks and the Federal Reserve went to prevent disclosure of these deals.
As more and more of our online public discourse takes place on a select set of private content platforms and communication networks, and these providers turn to complex algorithms to manage, curate, and organize these massive collections, there is an important tension emerging between what we expect these algorithms to be, and what they in fact are. Not only must we recognize that these algorithms are not neutral, and that they encode political choices, and that they frame information in a particular way. We must also understand what it means that we are coming to rely on these algorithms, that we want them to be neutral, we want them to be reliable, we want them to be the effective ways in which we come to know what is most important.
Broad scrapes of huge data, like Twitter Trends, are in some ways meant to show us what we know to be true, and to show us what we are unable to perceive as true because of our limited scope. And we can never really tell which it is showing us, or failing to show us.
An interesting look at how the algorithms around us can subtly change the way we see reality as well as give us interesting insight into the limitations of our emotional understanding in an algorithmic world.
Some really clever stuff in here if you're the kind of person who has to write terrible code to keep their job:
Let's start off with probably the most fiendish technique ever devised: Compile the code to an executable. If it works, then just make one or two small little changes in the source code...in each module. But don't bother recompiling these.
Never use i for the innermost loop variable. Use anything but. Use i liberally for any other purpose especially for non-int variables. Similarly, use n as a loop index.
Document only the details of what a program does, not what it is attempting to accomplish. That way, if there is a bug, the fixer will have no clue what the code should be doing.
If a module in a library needs an array to hold an image, just define a static array. Nobody will ever have an image bigger than 512 x 512, so a fixed-size array is OK.
Use three dimensional arrays.
Smuggle octal literals into a list of decimal numbers.
Ensure it only works in debug mode with "#if TESTING==1".
Reverse the usual definitions of true and false. Then force the program to do comparisons like "if ( var == TRUE )" and "if ( var != FALSE )" Or even consider using values 1 and 2 or -1 and 0.
So funny, but it makes me really thankful that most people in the world like maintainable code.
The Smithsonian's Air & Space Magazine chronicles the work of Elon Musk's company SpaceX, which hopes to bring the cost of orbital space flight down to $100/pound. They're currently at $2,500, which significantly undercuts NASA, other U.S. launch companies, and China's low-cost Long March rocket.
Spiraling student loan debt that sometimes is never repaid leaves taxpayers on the hook for defaulted federal education loans. The article presents several good ideas that apply to all schools, not just law schools, including more transparency about the financial success of graduates over the long term (and thus the worth of the degree), a partial tuition rebate for quitting school at the end of the first year, and the most intriguing one to me:
Oblige law schools to lend money directly to students - so that defaults hurt the school's bottom line rather than taxpayers'.
This assumes that the schools would wave the debt in the case of students' bankruptcy, which would only happen if the school was confident that the majority of students would not default. This would provide incentive for the school to produce better-educated students to ensure fewer defaults. Schools that did not wave the debt would be sending a distinct signal to interested students.
The method exploits a feature meant to aid typing on small touchscreens: magnified keys. iSpy can identify text typed on a touchscreen from video footage of the screen or even its reflection in windows or sunglasses. Video from an ordinary mobile phone camera can be used to spy on a person from 3 metres away. And a snoop with a digital SLR camera that shoots HD video could read a screen up to 60 metres away.
"We were surprised at how well [this idea] worked."
Bonus points for the fact that one of the researchers is a former Hopkins professor and for a quote from a current Hopkins professor.
Accusing Facebook of engaging in "unfair and deceptive" practices, the federal government on Tuesday announced a broad settlement that requires the company to respect the privacy wishes of its users and subjects it to regular privacy audits for the next 20 years.
First Google, now Facebook. Guess Microsoft was really ahead of the curve on the whole 'judicial oversight' thing.
The symbol on every Apple command key to this day — a stylized castle seen from above — was commonly used in Swedish campgrounds to denote an interesting sightseeing destination.
— The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face
Oskar the Blind Kitten vs Hair Dryer - Epic Cat Battle (via Youtube)
So cute.