Interactive Video

http://thewildernessdowntown.com

Interesting article on 4Chan

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25997/

A Handy Guide To Knowing Your Muppet Names

This clears up our questions about characters' names, but what about the word "muppet" itself? Though many people assume it's a combination of "marionette" and "puppet," it actually falls in the "silly" category — Jim Henson just made it up.

Send an email to Margaret Hartmann, the author of this post, at margaret@jezebel.com.

Read more: http://jezebel.com/5622561/a-handy-guide-to-knowing-your-muppet-names#ixzz0xoJKjUxb

Man Built a Sanctuary for Homeless Cats

by Rebecca on August 24, 2010

in Animal Pictures,Animal Stories,Cute Animal Pictures

Caboodle Ranch Cat Shelter for Homeless Cats

Craig Grant bought a tree farm far away from the city and turned it into a sanctuary for all the cats he has rescued.
He lives there with the cats and provides lots of love, care and companionship. It’s hard to imagine that once he was not a cat lover and did not want cats until he met his son’s cat Pepper. He also got to experience what it is like raising a litter of kittens.

“Over that time I learned that every cat had its own unique personality and it wasn’t long before the kittens were swinging from my curtains. I didn’t care. Something had changed… I didn’t want to give them up.”
The condo life was not easy for the kitties, so Craig found a tree farm and settled down there for his fur babies.
Over the next several months, he rescued more and more homeless and abandoned cats. The number of new residents kept going up, so Craig expanded the sanctuary to make more room for the animals.
The farm was named Caboodle Ranch and is now a permanent home for all the homeless, rescued cats. Each of them has a sad story of their past, but now they are living in heaven.

“Cats should be able to roam free, and at Caboodle Ranch, that’s what they do.”

Craig has built many beautiful cat houses and decorated the place with vibrant colors and tons of liveliness.
All the cats are spayed and neutered. Don’t forget to visit Caboodle Ranch http://www.caboodleranch.com/Index.html (non profit rescue center) at their website and check them out on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Caboodle-Ranch-Inc/55498031746 .

http://www.animaltalk.us/man-built-a-sanctuary-for-homeless-cats/

Google Realtime

via Tech Crunch

 

"In a move that emphasizes the increasing importance of realtime search, Google has just given their realtime search function a kick in the pants, moving it from the lowly "Updates" sidebar on regular Google search to it's own URL http://google.com/realtime, which was broken this morning but now seems to be redirecting to http://www.google.com/realtime?esrch=RealtimeLaunch::Experiment."

 

 

Analysis: Should Yahoo Buy Into Hulu?

via Media Week:

 

"Just as Yahoo weighs Wall Street advice to buy a significant stake in online video site Hulu, SNL Kagan reported the first-ever subscriber decline for the U.S. TV multichannel industry.

Monday's figures—showing the worst combined subscriber performance of cable, satellite TV and telecom video providers since SNL Kagan started tracking data in the 1980s - suggest the timing is right for the Web titan to make a major bet on consumers canceling their pay TV subscriptions in favor of Web TV offers."

 

read more >>

Red Eye

A visual diary documenting a flight from New York to Berlin (with a layover in London).

Visit: http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/03/red-eye/

Realistic 3D projection on a building

Painting On Water

Microsoft Gets The Tablet Keyboard All Backwards

via FastCompany

"If you've ever tried to type with an iPad's onscreen keyboard for more than just the occasional email, you know how difficult it can be. The keys are scrunched too close together for most hands, while the touchscreen means your fingers can't ever rest on the keyboard. Now Microsoft thinks it may have found a way to go one better than the iPad and turn the tablet game upside-down -- literally."

read more at http://www.fastcompany.com/1680108/please-be-joking-microsoft-unveils-new-backward-tablet-keyboard

What’s ‘Mobile’ Mean? How Apple And The iPad Are Forcing The Debate

via paidcontent.org

 

"Is the iPad a mobile device?

 

The question is no longer just a philosophical one, rather, it is now an important business issue facing content owners and developers—thanks in large part to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), which has begun requiring that all applications work across the iPhone, iPod and iPad. This new policy, which has been mostly overlooked until recently, could allow Apple to delete long-standing iPhone applications that don't comply—meaning that those apps could disappear from iTunes altogether. "

 

read more at http://paidcontent.org/article/419-whats-mobile-mean-how-apple-and-the-ipad-are-forcing-the-debate/

 

 

X-Rayted Pinup

via Bad Astronomy:

What’s more naked than naked?

" It was put together for EIZO, a monitor manufacturer; their equipment is used to display high-resolution medical displays… like radiographs. So it’s clever, and apropos."

Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings

via A List Apart

During project-based work, every freelancer, agency, or internal department has "the kickoff meeting." In theory, this meeting should have all the energy, excitement, and potential of the opening salvo of the Superbowl. Project team members should be inspired coming out of that meeting, full of ideas, and a desire to begin exploring solutions. Agencies and freelancers should begin to see their clients as friends and collaborators with unique insights that can only come from frank, open discussion of the design challenge at hand. But this rarely happens.

read more: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/kick-ass-kickoff-meetings/

Google Attempts To Count Number of Books In The Worldi

Via Inside Google Books

When you are part of a company that is trying to digitize all the books in the world, the first question you often get is: “Just how many books are out there?”

Well, it all depends on what exactly you mean by a “book.” We’re not going to count what library scientists call “works,” those elusive "distinct intellectual or artistic creations.” It makes sense to consider all editions of “Hamlet” separately, as we would like to distinguish between -- and scan -- books containing, for example, different forewords and commentaries.

One definition of a book we find helpful inside Google when handling book metadata is a “tome,” an idealized bound volume. A tome can have millions of copies (e.g. a particular edition of “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown) or can exist in just one or two copies (such as an obscure master’s thesis languishing in a university library). This is a convenient definition to work with, but it has drawbacks. For example, we count hardcover and paperback books produced from the same text twice, but treat several pamphlets bound together by a library as a single book.

Our definition is very close to what ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers) are supposed to represent, so why can’t we just count those? First, ISBNs (and their SBN precursors) have been around only since the mid 1960s, and were not widely adopted until the early-to-mid seventies. They also remain a mostly western phenomenon. So most books printed earlier, and those not intended for commercial distribution or printed in other regions of the world, have never been assigned an ISBN.

The other reason we can’t rely on ISBNs alone is that ever since they became an accepted standard, they have been used in non-standard ways. They have sometimes been assigned to multiple books: we’ve seen anywhere from two to 1,500 books assigned the same ISBN. They are also often assigned to things other than books. Even though they are intended to represent “books and book-like products,” unique ISBNs have been assigned to anything from CDs to bookmarks to t-shirts.

What about other well-known identifiers, for example those assigned by Library of Congress (Library of Congress Control Numbers) or OCLC (WorldCat accession numbers)? Rather than identifying books, these identify records that describe bibliographic entities. For example the bibliographic record for Lecture Notes in Mathematics (a monographic series with thousands of volumes) is assigned a single OCLC number. This makes sense when organizing library catalogs, but does not help us to count individual volumes. This practice also causes duplication: a particular book can be assigned one number when cataloged as part of a series or a set and another when cataloged alone. The duplication is further exacerbated by the difficulty of aggregating multiple library catalogs that use different cataloging rules. For example, a single Italian edition of “Angels and Demons” has been assigned no fewer than 5 OCLC numbers.

So what does Google do? We collect metadata from many providers (more than 150 and counting) that include libraries, WorldCat, national union catalogs and commercial providers. At the moment we have close to a billion unique raw records. We then further analyze these records to reduce the level of duplication within each provider, bringing us down to close to 600 million records.

Does this mean that there are 600 million unique books in the world? Hardly. There is still a lot of duplication within a single provider (e.g. libraries holding multiple distinct copies of a book) and among providers -- for example, we have 96 records from 46 providers for “Programming Perl, 3rd Edition”. Twice every week we group all those records into “tome” clusters, taking into account nearly all attributes of each record.

When evaluating record similarity, not all attributes are created equal. For example, when two records contain the same ISBN this is a very strong (but not absolute) signal that they describe the same book, but if they contain different ISBNs, then they definitely describe different books. We trust OCLC and LCCN number similarity slightly less, both because of the inconsistencies noted above and because these numbers do not have checksums, so catalogers have a tendency to mistype them.

We put even less trust in the “free-form” attributes such as titles, author names and publisher names. For example, are “Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1234” and “Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Logical Foundations of Computer Science” the same book? They are indeed, but there’s no way for a computer to know that from titles alone. We have to deal with these differences between cataloging practices all the time.

We tend to rely on publisher names, as they are cataloged, even less. While publishers are very protective of their names, catalogers are much less so. Consider two records for “At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror” by H.P. Lovecraft, published in 1971. One claims that the book it describes has been published by Ballantine Books, another that the publisher is Beagle Books. Is this one book or two? This is a mystery, since Beagle Books is not a known publisher. Only looking at the actual cover of the book will clear this up. The book is published by Ballantine as part of “A Beagle Horror Collection”, which appears to have been mistakenly cataloged as a publisher name by a harried librarian. We also use publication years, volume numbers, and other information.

So after all is said and done, how many clusters does our algorithm come up with? The answer changes every time the computation is performed, as we accumulate more data and fine-tune the algorithm. The current number is around 210 million.

Is that a final number of books in the world? Not quite. We still have to exclude non-books such as microforms (8 million), audio recordings (4.5 million), videos (2 million), maps (another 2 million), t-shirts with ISBNs (about one thousand), turkey probes (1, added to a library catalog as an April Fools joke), and other items for which we receive catalog entries.

Counting only things that are printed and bound, we arrive at about 146 million. This is our best answer today. It will change as we get more data and become more adept at interpreting what we already have.

Our handling of serials is still imperfect. Serials cataloging practices vary widely across institutions. The volume descriptions are free-form and are often entered as an afterthought. For example, “volume 325, number 6”, “no. 325 sec. 6”, and “V325NO6” all describe the same bound volume. The same can be said for the vast holdings of the government documents in US libraries. At the moment we estimate that we know of 16 million bound serial and government document volumes. This number is likely to rise as our disambiguating algorithms become smarter.

After we exclude serials, we can finally count all the books in the world. There are 129,864,880 of them. At least until Sunday.

Social Networks and Online Games Rule Our Lives

via Discovery News

"A new study conducted by market researcher Nielsen reveals that Americans are spending almost a quarter of their online time checking in with friends on social networking sites and blogs -- more than double the time they spend checking their emails."

Denver the Last Dinosaur

because 1988 was awesome...

Google Wave Dead

Update on Google Wave

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html

8/04/2010 02:00:00 PM

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.

Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

Cell Phones And WiFi Set To Invade NYC’s Subways

via Wired

 

After years of negotiations, a plan is afoot to wire New York City's subway platforms for both cellular and WiFi service, a move that may see service extend into many of the subway system's tunnels.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been looking for a contractor to perform the service for a number of years, and has finally reached an agreement with a company called Transit Wireless which would see Transit sell access to major carriers.

Although many of the city's perpetually connected residents will welcome the opportunity to keep their BlackBerrys and iPads online through the commute, a fair number are likely to resent the intrusion of loud cellphone conversations into what is one of the last refuges from half of other people's conversations.

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/cell-phones-and-wifi-set-to-invade-nycs-subways/#ixzz0vYZbDSIz

 

 

 

Nerd out

guitarglitch test2 from Calum Scott on Vimeo.

JengAR