Alison Cichowlas
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Friends, our classical music education app for iPhone and iPad was released yesterday and everything is free for about two weeks. Please take a look if you are curious. Apple was nice enough to have us do a presentation at their Boston and Lincoln Center New York stores. Have fun playing your instrument with a real orchestra that follows your performance. It records your performance as well.
Cadenza - The orchestra that listens to you.
itunes.apple.com
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Spaceteam, a cooperative shouting game! It's fantastic and hilarious, and you should play it: http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/spaceteam/ (requires smartphone or tablet, plus 1-3 friends with same) (plus maybe a place where you can shout without getting funny looks? depending on how you feel about funny looks?)
It's free, but if you love it, the creator's got a Kickstarter ending this week...
It's free, but if you love it, the creator's got a Kickstarter ending this week...
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Launched today! Check out the evolution of music genres across the decades, and other neat Google visualizations.
https://research.google.com/bigpicture
https://research.google.com/bigpicture/music
https://research.google.com/bigpicture
https://research.google.com/bigpicture/music
Big Picture: Google Visualization Research
research.google.com
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Shiny new ngram features!
What noun most often follows "Queen" in English fiction?
Today, the Google Research Blog announces the release of three new features of the Google Books Ngram Viewer (http://goo.gl/tue3A), the tool launched in 2010 that allows one to search for the occurrence of words and phrases, in multiple languages, from millions of scanned books from the past several centuries.
The new features include wildcard searches, the ability to search for different grammatical forms of the same word, and case-insensitive searching, with the hopes of expanding the Ngram Viewer as an even more useful tool for casual exploration as well as serious linguistic research.
Google hopes that these new features will foster the discovery of interesting trends in language use and yielding insights of how culture has changed over time. To learn more, including the answer to the title of this post, head over on the Google Research Blog (linked below), and share your own linguistic research by commenting here!
Today, the Google Research Blog announces the release of three new features of the Google Books Ngram Viewer (http://goo.gl/tue3A), the tool launched in 2010 that allows one to search for the occurrence of words and phrases, in multiple languages, from millions of scanned books from the past several centuries.
The new features include wildcard searches, the ability to search for different grammatical forms of the same word, and case-insensitive searching, with the hopes of expanding the Ngram Viewer as an even more useful tool for casual exploration as well as serious linguistic research.
Google hopes that these new features will foster the discovery of interesting trends in language use and yielding insights of how culture has changed over time. To learn more, including the answer to the title of this post, head over on the Google Research Blog (linked below), and share your own linguistic research by commenting here!
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Excellent outdoor theater in the park - Much Ado About Nothing, and they're doing one more show here tonight at 6:30.
https://www.facebook.com/FiascoProds
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fiascoprods/much-ado-about-nothing-free-public-theater
https://www.facebook.com/FiascoProds
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fiascoprods/much-ado-about-nothing-free-public-theater
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The Malevolence Lego Star Wars set came in the mail from Pley yesterday, which pretty much set the agenda for being snowed in today. Plan was nearly foiled by some missing minis in the box :( but fortunately, we were able to improvise with supplies on hand...
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A coworker gave me permission to reshare this to the public.
The Microarchitecture of Crochet
The Crochet processor presents a simple yet intriguing model of computation. At heart, a hardware implementation of Crochet centers around a single functional unit (called the "hook") whose sole primitive operation consists of drawing a single bit of data (stored as a loop of yarn) through the space enclosed by an existing loop.
This simple operation (denoted "CH") is variously compounded to form a more expressive instruction set consisting of such operations as SC, HDC, DC, TC, and a variety of directional slip-stitch instructions. The hook acts as a kind of accumulator, in that all instructions implicitly act on the hook. A typical Crochet computation is bootstrapped from a single pre-computed loop loaded onto the hook at startup time by the operator.
The Crochet memory model is analogous to a Turing machine's tape, save that instead of being a single unbounded row it is organized into a grid or cylindrical configuration (depending upon implementation) with an unbounded number of rows. The units of storage are called "stitches" instead of "cells", however, and with a few notable exceptions (see below) the hook only ever advances away from the origin.
Although the Crochet processor may read any previously-written location (at a lookup cost proportional to the row distance and offset back from the PC), writes may generally occur only at the PC—i.e., the hook's current location. Some implementations support special instructions (e.g., FPxC and BPxC) that may write values explicitly tied to stitches in previous rows, but these are uncommon in most workloads. And, in any case, it is not possible to write to any given cell without first writing values to some constant fraction of all the cells closer to the origin, typically in some regular pattern. While it is possible to re-write arbitrary earlier cells, most implementations find this annoying to do, since it requires that all the subsequent stitches be recomputed.
The Crochet processor is equipped with a finite but unbounded reservoir of input loops (called the "skein") and is equivalent in expressive power to a linear-bounded automaton. However, in practice the expressiveness of the ISA—as well as the quality of its output—depends greatly upon the specific implementation of the processor, and how good the processor's control unit is at keeping track of details.
The Microarchitecture of Crochet
The Crochet processor presents a simple yet intriguing model of computation. At heart, a hardware implementation of Crochet centers around a single functional unit (called the "hook") whose sole primitive operation consists of drawing a single bit of data (stored as a loop of yarn) through the space enclosed by an existing loop.
This simple operation (denoted "CH") is variously compounded to form a more expressive instruction set consisting of such operations as SC, HDC, DC, TC, and a variety of directional slip-stitch instructions. The hook acts as a kind of accumulator, in that all instructions implicitly act on the hook. A typical Crochet computation is bootstrapped from a single pre-computed loop loaded onto the hook at startup time by the operator.
The Crochet memory model is analogous to a Turing machine's tape, save that instead of being a single unbounded row it is organized into a grid or cylindrical configuration (depending upon implementation) with an unbounded number of rows. The units of storage are called "stitches" instead of "cells", however, and with a few notable exceptions (see below) the hook only ever advances away from the origin.
Although the Crochet processor may read any previously-written location (at a lookup cost proportional to the row distance and offset back from the PC), writes may generally occur only at the PC—i.e., the hook's current location. Some implementations support special instructions (e.g., FPxC and BPxC) that may write values explicitly tied to stitches in previous rows, but these are uncommon in most workloads. And, in any case, it is not possible to write to any given cell without first writing values to some constant fraction of all the cells closer to the origin, typically in some regular pattern. While it is possible to re-write arbitrary earlier cells, most implementations find this annoying to do, since it requires that all the subsequent stitches be recomputed.
The Crochet processor is equipped with a finite but unbounded reservoir of input loops (called the "skein") and is equivalent in expressive power to a linear-bounded automaton. However, in practice the expressiveness of the ISA—as well as the quality of its output—depends greatly upon the specific implementation of the processor, and how good the processor's control unit is at keeping track of details.
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2013-10-27
3 Photos - View album
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"Blaming everyone — Congress, both sides, Washington — is simply the path of least resistance for today's political reporters. It's a way of avoiding conflict rather than taking the risk that the public — or their editors — will accuse them of being unprofessionally partisan.
"But making a political judgment through triangulation — trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice."
"But making a political judgment through triangulation — trying to stake out a safe middle ground between the two political parties — is still making a political judgment. It is often just not a very good one. And in this case, as in many others, it is doing the country a grave disservice."
❝ holding the entire government hostage while demanding the de facto repeal of a president's signature legislation and not even bothering to negotiate is by any reasonable standard an extreme political act. It is an attempt to make an end run around the normal legislative process. There is no historical precedent for it. The last shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, were not the product of unilateral demands to scrap existing law; they took place during a period of give-and-take budget negotiations. ❞
I remember talking to my Iranian friends, and they would tell me how the only way they could find out what was going on in their country was by reading the foreign news. Now here we are in America, and the only places I can find accurate reporting about what's going on in America are in the Guardian and Al Jazeera. The articles are written by Americans, but the only places that will print them are foreign newspapers.
I remember talking to my Iranian friends, and they would tell me how the only way they could find out what was going on in their country was by reading the foreign news. Now here we are in America, and the only places I can find accurate reporting about what's going on in America are in the Guardian and Al Jazeera. The articles are written by Americans, but the only places that will print them are foreign newspapers.
Shutdown coverage fails Americans | Al Jazeera America
america.aljazeera.com
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Google has been engaged in a massive, concerted, expensive effort to protect user data from the NSA. And +Eric Grosse is finally talking about it in public. Google is treating dragnet surveillance by Government as a threat akin to advanced, persistent threats by cyber criminals.
The article notes that this is not perfect security and it does nothing for Google's legal requirement to comply with legal warrants (including National Security Letters). But it raises the bar and raises the cost of illegal or unwarranted surveillance. As it should.
I don't know how to stop the NSA from destroying what little credibility is left in the US Government. But I'm proud to be working at a place that's at least trying to slow them down.
The article notes that this is not perfect security and it does nothing for Google's legal requirement to comply with legal warrants (including National Security Letters). But it raises the bar and raises the cost of illegal or unwarranted surveillance. As it should.
I don't know how to stop the NSA from destroying what little credibility is left in the US Government. But I'm proud to be working at a place that's at least trying to slow them down.
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