20 WebGL sites that will blow your mind | Feature | .net magazine Almost all modern computers and most smartphones have powerful GPUs, graphics processors that often have more number-crunching power than the CPU. But until recently web pages and mobile websites couldn't use them - meaning slow, low-quality graphics, almost always in 2D. That all changed when WebGL was released in the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome. WebGL, based on the well-known OpenGL 3D graphics standard, gives JavaScript plugin-free access to the graphics hardware, via the HTML5 canvas element - making realtime 3D graphics in web pages possible. Tech support Apple are supporting the standard too, so we can (hopefully!) So sit back, crank up your latest browser, and check out these demos - if you think you can do better, go for it: there are some hints and tips on how at the end. 01. 3 Dreams of Black 02. 03. No Comply is another WebGL demo from the Mozilla Audio API team, mixing video and graphics with a very 1980s-computer-game-meets-the-Matrix vibe. 04. 3Dtin 05. 06. 07. 08.
dimple PC AI sucks at Civilization, reads manual, starts kicking ass The Massachusetts institute of technology have been experimenting with their computers' AI. Specifically the way they deal with the meaning of words. You might think that the best way to analyse this kind of thing would be with a human to PC conversation, like in Short Circuit. That's not the case. Instead, the boffins handed over PC classic, Civilization, and let the AI get on with it. Then the researchers handed over the instructions and taught the PCs a "machine-learning system so it could use a player's manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy." Associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering, Regina Barzilay, offered insight into why they used a game manual to prove their point. Civ was picked because it's a really fun game, and they didn't want the computers to get bored during the testing. Not really. These kind of systems could make developer's jobs a lot easier. What's the best AI you've ever played against? (via Reddit)
Big Data, How to Detect Relationships Between Categorical Variables The goal of the techniques described in this topic is to detect relationships or associations between specific values of categorical variables in large data sets. This is a common task in many data mining projects as well as in the data mining subcategory text mining. These powerful exploratory techniques have a wide range of applications in many areas of business practice and also research - from the analysis of consumer preferences or human resource management, to the history of language. These techniques enable analysts and researchers to uncover hidden patterns in large data sets, such as "customers who order product A often also order product B or C" or "employees who said positive things about initiative X also frequently complain about issue Y but are happy with issue Z." How association rules work. Sequence Analysis. Link Analysis. Unique data analysis requirements. Computational Procedures and Terminology Categorical or class variables. Multiple response variables.
Why the Big Bang is Wrong undefined John Kierein The Big Bang theory of the universe is wrong because the cosmological red shift is due to the Compton effect rather than the Doppler effect. See The Endless, Boundless, Stable Universe by Grote Reber and Hubble's Constant in Terms of the Compton Effect by John Kierein. The latter describes how the Compton effect cosmological red shift accelerates with increasing distance. Reber showed that the Compton effect was the cause of the red shift in order to explain the observations of bright, very long wavelength, extragalactic radio waves. Quasars may be much closer than their red shift would indicate if they have an "intrinsic" red shift due to being surrounded by a 'fuzzy' atmosphere containing free electrons and other material. Some such quasars may be double stars, with one member being an ordinary star and the other exhibiting a large red shift and being labeled as a quasar. The red shift on the sun is obviously not Doppler since the sun is not moving away from us.
Databionic ESOM Tools - Databionic ESOM Tools The Complexity and Artificial Life Research Concept for Self-Organizing Systems R Commander John Fox and Milan Bouchet-Valat Please Read the Rcmdr Installation Notes (click on the image for a larger view) For more details, see my paper on the R Commander in the Journal of Statistical Software (which is somewhat out of date) and the introductory manual distributed with the package (accessible via the Help -> Introduction to the R Commander menu). The R-Commander GUI consists of a window containing several menus, buttons, and information fields. The menus lead to simple dialog boxes, the general contents of which are more or less obvious from the names of the menu items. By default, commands generated via the dialogs are posted to the output window, along with printed output, and to the script window. Commands access a current or active data set (data frame). In addition to standard packages, the R Commander uses functions in a number of other packages. My original object in designing and implementing this GUI was to cover the content of a basic-statistics course.
11.19.2007 - New technique captures chemical reactions in a single living... UC Berkeley Press Release New technique captures chemical reactions in a single living cell for the first time By Sarah Yang, Media Relations | 19 November 2007 BERKELEY – Bioengineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered a technique that for the first time enables the detection of biomolecules' dynamic reactions in a single living cell. By taking advantage of the signature frequency by which organic and inorganic molecules absorb light, the team of researchers, led by Luke Lee, professor of bioengineering and director of UC Berkeley's Biomolecular Nanotechnology Center, can determine in real time whether specific enzymes are activated or particular genes are expressed, all with unprecedented resolution within a single living cell. The technique, described in the Nov. 18 issue of the journal Nature Methods, could lead to a new era in molecular imaging with implications for cell-based drug discovery and biomedical diagnostics.
John Holland, Emergence The Bactra Review: Occasional and eclectic book reviews by Cosma Shalizi 46 From Chaos to Order by John Holland Addison-Wesley, 1997 Game Rules, or, Emergence according to Holland, or, Confessions of a Creative Reductionist John Holland was one of the world's first Ph.D.s in computer science, and even before that one of the first workers in machine learning. One of the things Holland has been thinking about for a long time is the puzzle of building blocks, of re-usable categorical parts. The problem of emergence is, roughly speaking --- and half the trouble with it is that everything we say about it is only rough --- the flip side of the problem of building blocks. Like almost all working scientists, Holland assumes that a valid explanation of (any one of) these puzzles is a reductionist one, one that explains the behavior or properties of the larger entity from those of its components and their interactions. Emergence is not so broad or ambitious as its title and publicity may suggest.
Computer learns language by playing games Computers are great at treating words as data: Word-processing programs let you rearrange and format text however you like, and search engines can quickly find a word anywhere on the Web. But what would it mean for a computer to actually understand the meaning of a sentence written in ordinary English — or French, or Urdu, or Mandarin? One test might be whether the computer could analyze and follow a set of instructions for an unfamiliar task. And indeed, in the last few years, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have begun designing machine-learning systems that do exactly that, with surprisingly good results. Starting from scratch “Games are used as a test bed for artificial-intelligence techniques simply because of their complexity,” says Branavan, who was first author on both ACL papers. Moreover, Barzilay says, game manuals have “very open text. So initially, its behavior is almost totally random. Proof of concept
Whos Who In Human Evolution By Peter Tyson Posted 11.01.08 NOVA Despite a fragmentary fossil record, paleoanthropologists have assembled a solid general picture of human evolution. They have traced hominins–that is, species that are bipedal and that are more closely related to humans than to other apes–back more than six million years. Note: The illustration, adapted with permission from the Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins by Carl Zimmer (Smithsonian Books, 2005, p. 41), does not include all hominin species that experts have proposed but rather offers a representative sample. Credits Design Tyler Howe Programming Alan Kwan Images (diagram) from Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins by Carl Zimmer, HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.