Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.
Intel energizes decades-old real-time Linux kernel project
Intel announced a move on Wednesday that will inject fresh energy into a Linux kernel project that started close to two decades ago – and was lacking funding and contributors.
The claimed effect size is about a zillion times higher than is plausible
Joe Hilgard writes:
Some years ago, you blogged about a research article by Hasan and colleagues (2013).
I had tried to direct your attention to the narrowness of the error bars, which I found suspicious. What I was really trying to say was that the effect size was much, much too big — by day 3, it is 3.5 standard deviations, or an R^2 of 78%.
I’ve finally managed to publish an article pointing out how implausibly massive that effect size is. I find that a much stronger manipulation yields a large effect size that is still only half as large as the original authors’ effect. It seems that there’s some kind of serious error in the original research.
Project Oberon
Project Oberon is a design for a complete desktop computer system from scratch. Its simplicity and clarity enables a single person to know and implement the whole system, while still providing enough power to make it useful and usable in a production environment. This website contains information and resources for exploring and using the system.
Cryptographers Achieve Perfect Secrecy With Imperfect Devices
For the first time, experiments demonstrate the possibility of sharing secrets with perfect privacy — even when the devices used to share them cannot be trusted.
Ink/Stitch
An open-source machine embroidery design platform based on Inkscape.
Ink/Stitch aims to be a full-fledged, cross-platform embroidery digitizing platform based entirely on free, open-source software. Our goal is to be approachable for hobbyists while also providing the power needed by professional digitizers.
MuZero’s first step from research into the real world
Collaborating with YouTube to optimise video compression in the open source VP9 codec.
In 2016, we introduced AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence program to defeat humans at the ancient game of Go. Its successors, AlphaZero and then MuZero, each represented a significant step forward in the pursuit of general-purpose algorithms, mastering a greater number of games with even less predefined knowledge. MuZero, for example, mastered Chess, Go, Shogi, and Atari without needing to be told the rules. But so far these agents have focused on solving games. Now, in pursuit of DeepMind’s mission to solve intelligence, MuZero has taken a first step towards mastering a real-world task by optimising video on YouTube.
Moral Machine
A platform for public participation in and discussion of the human perspective on machine-made moral decisions. Read more…
PanWriter: Distraction-free writing environment
Available on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Focus on the content of your text. No fiddling around in menus or getting distracted by buttons. No selecting fonts and layouting before your text is actually written. Instead, you can write text in Markdown – a convention on how to write plain text files. Basically, it’s like you would write an Email. Read more…
Abstractions, Their Algorithms, and Their Compilers
Computational thinking, which centers around devising abstractions for problems so they can be solved with computational steps and efficient algorithms, is a concept that serves not only computer science (CS) but progressively more of science and everyday life. After Jeannette Wing published her influential paper on computational thinking, the discussion of computational thinking has greatly expanded in scale to include topics such as modeling natural processes as information processing. Read more…
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