Ver ep. 1 na RTP Play. A RTP2 está a transmitir Fortitude até dia 6 de Outubro. A não perder, todos os dias às 22h. Só é pena que o site da RTP seja tão parco na informação prestada sobre a programação das séries e que seja quase preciso ir adivinhando dia a dia se vai dar ou não. Mas sim, é todos os 5 dias da semana em ponto, às 22h.

A série passada no circulo polar ártico tem paisagens deslumbrantes e um clima único. Se é fã de Twin Peaks ou Wayward Pines vai encontrar algum paralelismo embora a realização não seja de David Lynch. A verdade é que aquele glaciar esconde muito bem o seu segredo e há gente a morrer por causa disso, . . . ou talvez não.

Os personagens da série são complexos, com passados muitas vezes negros e que contrastam com a dureza do ambiente de Fortitude onde a espécie mais forte são os ursos polares.

Já agora prestem dois minutos de atenção à banda sonora de Fortitude.

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Check The Longest Ride Website. The storyline is set with a Bull-riding background and when I started seeing this movie it looked like a summer love with girl leaving at the end of summer kind of film (and it still is that). The twist that kept me seeing until the end is that the story is connected to the past (WWII) via Ala Alda’s character Ira that had a box full of letters to his wife.

Honestly, Oona Chaplin and Jack Huston, the actors that portray the young couple from the past, made the The Longest Ride interesting. Their acting was good and solid and the film lives through those moments. In contrast to the poorly performance of the two “modern” young actors. It is not really a perfect movie, and in some sense it is full of cliches but is good enough. The Longest Ride is an adaptation of the same book by Nicholas Sparks and naturally the romantic-drama literature sells, and Nicholas Sparks sells his better than most.

And is with all the love films where the basic premise is “Love prevails in adversity” everything comes to a perfect end in The Longest Ride. Well, that was expected but . . . one can always hope that one day a director surprises you in this kinds of movies and doesn’t go with the test group ending.

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Thank you for taking the time to read this message. Please bear with me and listen to these two episodes of the Allusionist and then think for a moment about the Portuguese 1990 language agreement.

I hope this didn’t mess your political convictions, but if by any chance the neuron in your brain made the connection please go get elected and revoke that stupid law.

thank you,

D.

PS – I really don’t want a technocratic portuguese and don’t need it.

PS2 – Did you noticed the small caps? did you? Smart Reader!!!

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When I was first looking into bringing my car from the UK I was suggested to take a look at the ferries for Santander and Bilbao. At first I was a bit afraid of the trip. There were many parameters to choose from, many preparations to do. And the trip itself is 24h at sea.

The alternative was to drive through France, something I really didn’t want to do (And I’d also need to cross the channel). In the end the Ferry is the most affordable and practical way to take / bring the car to / from the UK.

When I searched for the ferries there weren’t many testimonies about the crossing itself, and namely about the crossing on the Pont-Aven. The Brittanny Ferries Pont-Aven is a RoRo ship — meaning Roll On Roll Out, where you drive your car on to the ship, enjoy 24h of sea, and on arrival start you car and drive away. Track the Pont-Aven’s Position

The truth is that all the service onboard was excellent, I really enjoyed the ship, and although not being a big ship, it is big enough that you don’t get tired of onboard life during the 24h crossing. If your are travelling solo like I was, well, the best tip I can give you is to get a Beer in the upper deck, get some BINOCULARS and go see the Dolphins of the Bay of Biscay (amazing, just amazing), or get a Book (You also have 2 cinemas, a small shopping area and a small upper deck pool, if you want).

24h don’t look like much, but you better be prepared — have in your onboard luggage all that you need. After departure you cannot go to your car again until arrival in Santander. Also, book a cabin. Don’t sleep in the corridors or the bars/restaurants. This is probably even more important if you are driving the next day. An inside cabin is fine, not luxurious but more than perfect for 1 night sleep, and you’ll have a shower in the morning. Think about it!

Internet access is free but the speeds are slow and connection fails often because the connection is via satellite, so be patient and don’t even think about skype calls or any thing like that. Remember old dial-up modem days? You’ll be able to post a picture to instagram or send an email but it will take a long time.

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Second Life is only an example, but you can clearly imagine the same thing happening to other worlds like WoW or Minecraft. Obviously right now they are highly sought and present users might say that they don’t feel that the online entity is going to disappear. Are really you sure about that? Second Life was a pain. A evolved IRC for finger and imagination impaired people. I never liked it, but just 8 years ago everybody was writing about it (me included saying how bad it was (in PT)).

The moral of finding all these abandoned places in the virtual worlds is that there always some Bullish movement sponsored by companies that are real Bears. Be careful where you place your online bets. We really need an Internet janitor.

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A model of an Ant System where ants are controlled by a spiking neural circuit and a second order pheromone mechanism in a foraging task is presented. A neural circuit is trained for individual ants and subsequently the ants are exposed to a virtual environment where a swarm of ants performed a resource foraging task. The model comprises an associative and unsupervised learning strategy for the neural circuit of the ant. The neural circuit adapts to the environment by means of classical conditioning. The initially unknown environment includes different types of stimuli representing food (rewarding) and obstacles (harmful) which, when they come in direct contact with the ant, elicit a reflex response in the motor neural system of the ant: moving towards or away from the source of the stimulus. The spiking neural circuits of the ant is trained to identify food and obstacles and move towards the former and avoid the latter. The ants are released on a landscape with multiple food sources where one ant alone would have difficulty harvesting the landscape to maximum efficiency. In this case the introduction of a double pheromone mechanism (positive and negative reinforcement feedback) yields better results than traditional ant colony optimization strategies. Traditional ant systems include mainly a positive reinforcement pheromone. This approach uses a second pheromone that acts as a marker for forbidden paths (negative feedback). This blockade is not permanent and is controlled by the evaporation rate of the pheromones. The combined action of both pheromones acts as a collective stigmergic memory of the swarm, which reduces the search space of the problem. This paper explores how the adaptation and learning abilities observed in biologically inspired cognitive architectures is synergistically enhanced by swarm optimization strategies. The model portraits two forms of artificial intelligent behaviour: at the individual level the spiking neural network is the main controller and at the collective level the pheromone distribution is a map towards the solution emerged by the colony. The presented model is an important pedagogical tool as it is also an easy to use library that allows access to the spiking neural network paradigm from inside a Netlogo—a language used mostly in agent based modelling and experimentation with complex systems.

Intelligence and decision in foraging ants. Individual or Collective? Internal or External? What is the right balance between the two. Can one have internal intelligence without external intelligence? Can one take examples from nature to build in silico artificial lives that present us with interesting patterns? We explore a model of foraging ants in this paper that will be presented in early September in Exeter.

Co-authored with Cristian Jimenez-Romero, Jeffrey Johnson and Vitorino Ramos and available in arXiv 1507.08467 and Researchgate, this will be presented latter this year at UKCI 2015.

References:

[1] C. G. Langton, “Studying artificial life with cellular automata,” Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, vol. 22, no. 1–3, pp. 120 – 149, 1986, proceedings of the Fifth Annual International Conference. [Online]. Available: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ science/article/pii/016727898690237X

[2] A. Abraham and V. Ramos, “Web usage mining using artificial ant colony clustering and linear genetic programming,” in Proceedings of the Congress on Evolutionary Computation. Australia: IEEE Press, 2003, pp. 1384–1391.

[3] V. Ramos, F. Muge, and P. Pina, “Self-organized data and image retrieval as a consequence of inter-dynamic synergistic relationships in artificial ant colonies,” Hybrid Intelligent Systems, vol. 87, 2002.

[4] V. Ramos and J. J. Merelo, “Self-organized stigmergic document maps: Environment as a mechanism for context learning,” in Proceddings of the AEB, Merida, Spain, February 2002. ´

[5] D. Sousa-Rodrigues and V. Ramos, “Traversing news with ant colony optimisation and negative pheromones,” in European Conference in Complex Systems, Lucca, Italy, Sep 2014.

[6] E. Bonabeau, G. Theraulaz, and M. Dorigo, Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems, 1st ed., ser. Santa Fe Insitute Studies In The Sciences of Complexity. 198 Madison Avenue, New York: Oxford University Press, USA, Sep. 1999.

[7] M. Dorigo and L. M. Gambardella, “Ant colony system: A cooperative learning approach to the traveling salesman problem,” Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Tech. Rep. TR/IRIDIA/1996-5, ´ 1996.

[8] M. Dorigo, G. Di Caro, and L. M. Gambardella, “Ant algorithms for discrete optimization,” Artif. Life, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 137– 172, Apr. 1999. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/ 106454699568728

[9] L. M. Gambardella and M. Dorigo, “Ant-q: A reinforcement learning approach to the travelling salesman problem,” in Proceedings of the ML-95, Twelfth Intern. Conf. on Machine Learning, M. Kaufman, Ed., 1995, pp. 252–260.

[10] A. Gupta, V. Nagarajan, and R. Ravi, “Approximation algorithms for optimal decision trees and adaptive tsp problems,” in Proceedings of the 37th international colloquium conference on Automata, languages and programming, ser. ICALP’10. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2010, pp. 690–701. [Online]. Available: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1880918.1880993

[11] V. Ramos, D. Sousa-Rodrigues, and J. Louçã, “Second order ˜ swarm intelligence,” in HAIS’13. 8th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, J.-S. Pan, M. Polycarpou, M. Wozniak, A. Carvalho, ´ H. Quintian, and E. Corchado, Eds. Salamanca, Spain: Springer ´ Berlin Heidelberg, Sep 2013, vol. 8073, pp. 411–420.

[12] W. Maass and C. M. Bishop, Pulsed Neural Networks. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1998.

[13] E. M. Izhikevich and E. M. Izhikevich, “Simple model of spiking neurons.” IEEE transactions on neural networks / a publication of the IEEE Neural Networks Council, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 1569–72, 2003. [Online]. Available: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pubmed/18244602

[14] C. Liu and J. Shapiro, “Implementing classical conditioning with spiking neurons,” in Artificial Neural Networks ICANN 2007, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, J. de S, L. Alexandre, W. Duch, and D. Mandic, Eds. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2007, vol. 4668, pp. 400–410. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74690-4 41

[15] J. Haenicke, E. Pamir, and M. P. Nawrot, “A spiking neuronal network model of fast associative learning in the honeybee,” Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, no. 149, 2012. [Online]. Available: http://www.frontiersin.org/computational neuroscience/10.3389/conf.fncom.2012.55.00149/full

[16] L. I. Helgadottir, J. Haenicke, T. Landgraf, R. Rojas, and M. P. Nawrot, “Conditioned behavior in a robot controlled by a spiking neural network,” in International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering, NER, 2013, pp. 891–894.

[17] A. Cyr and M. Boukadoum, “Classical conditioning in different temporal constraints: an STDP learning rule for robots controlled by spiking neural networks,” pp. 257–272, 2012.

[18] X. Wang, Z. G. Hou, F. Lv, M. Tan, and Y. Wang, “Mobile robots’ modular navigation controller using spiking neural networks,” Neurocomputing, vol. 134, pp. 230–238, 2014.

[19] C. Hausler, M. P. Nawrot, and M. Schmuker, “A spiking neuron classifier network with a deep architecture inspired by the olfactory system of the honeybee,” in 2011 5th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering, NER 2011, 2011, pp. 198–202.

[20] U. Wilensky, “Netlogo,” Evanston IL, USA, 1999. [Online]. Available: http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

[21] C. Jimenez-Romero and J. Johnson, “Accepted abstract: Simulation of agents and robots controlled by spiking neural networks using netlogo,” in International Conference on Brain Engineering and Neuro-computing, Mykonos, Greece, Oct 2015.

[22] W. Gerstner and W. M. Kistler, Spiking Neuron Models: Single Neurons, Populations, Plasticity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

[23] J. v. H. W Gerstner, R Kempter and H. Wagner, “A neuronal learning rule for sub-millisecond temporal coding,” Nature, vol. 386, pp. 76–78, 1996.

[24] I. P. Pavlov, “Conditioned reflexes: An investigation of the activity of the cerebral cortex,” New York, 1927.

[25] E. J. H. Robinson, D. E. Jackson, M. Holcombe, and F. L. W. Ratnieks, “Insect communication: ‘no entry’ signal in ant foraging,” Nature, vol. 438, no. 7067, pp. 442–442, 11 2005. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/438442a

[26] E. J. Robinson, D. Jackson, M. Holcombe, and F. L. Ratnieks, “No entry signal in ant foraging (hymenoptera: Formicidae): new insights from an agent-based model,” Myrmecological News, vol. 10, no. 120, 2007.

[27] D. Sousa-Rodrigues, J. Louçã, and V. Ramos, “From standard ˜ to second-order swarm intelligence phase-space maps,” in 8th European Conference on Complex Systems, S. Thurner, Ed., Vienna, Austria, Sep 2011.

[28] V. Ramos, D. Sousa-Rodrigues, and J. Louçã, “Spatio-temporal ˜ dynamics on co-evolved stigmergy,” in 8th European Conference on Complex Systems, S. Thurner, Ed., Vienna, Austria, 9 2011.

[29] S. Tisue and U. Wilensky, “Netlogo: A simple environment for modeling complexity,” in International conference on complex systems. Boston, MA, 2004, pp. 16–21.

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• The athenian democracy first appeared in ancient Greece in Athens in 508 BC and while it had its problems (only 1/5 of the population could vote for example) it was the first case where direct decision by the citizens steered the polis forward. As in the past Greek Democracy is going back to its roots and asking their citizens to decide their future in the way they’ve taught the world to do.
• 10M Greeks are going to vote today and why is this Pnyx gathering scaring the remaining Europeans? The reality is that the EU/IMF/ECB has been playing the “we don’t care what happens to you if you don’t play along with us” bluff for so long that Greece may be close to calling the bluff today—if the OXI wins. And that’s probably why suddenly the EU is campaigning for the NAI to win like they never did before. But this shows you how week non-democratic governments are. The bureaucrats of Europe are trembling with fear.
• Greece government in the past have overspent. That is undeniable, but the vision in this conservative Europe is that their banks are entitled to receive their money back even if that provoques a social destruction (as long it is greeks population suffering that is OK, seems to be the rational) of a poor foreign country. There is no Ethical concern in money lending.
• There is no exist strategy. Every EU bureaucrat acts like a couch coach. They know everything, and they know better. Or are they just repeating instructions coming from somewhere else?
• Greece debt is around €323bn of witch around €165bn are owed to Germany, France, Italy and Spain alone. Four EU countries have more than 50% of Greek debt in their hands. Worse thing and scariest thing is that Spain is the fourth with €25bn. Guess why is everybody so scared of Greece exiting? Can one escape an avalanche?
• My opinion is that greeks should do what greeks decide to do. Since when should Greece do things that interest Brussels and are decided by Brussels instead of doing what is of Greek interests? Can you imagine Brussels dictating what the UK should do internally? Would its population ever accept that? Well why should Greece accept then that someone in Brussels that works 9 to 5 dictates what they should do?
• I’ve always thought about EU as a democracy of the nations of Europe but since the EU succumbed to become just the market of nations the EU is loosing its appeal. And that is why so many right wing nationalist movements are emerging across the Eurozone. Not because they are against the EU per se, but because this EU, this comercial entity that is the modern EU is not democratic and is all about money. And in the end if the only policy of this EU is money, why would anyone want to participate if the returns are only measured in terms of financial capital? While the EU doesn’t restructure itself to be the cohesive social force we’ll see these appeals to ban the monetarily weak from the union, to close borders, and burn witches in bonfires.
• The EU solidarity spirit has been lost. Jacques Delors, one of the truly last European leaders, just wrote an article in Le Monde where he asks European leaders for a solidarity plan to save Greece. He asks for cooperation and solidarity, two lacking qualities of disintegrating Europe.

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port upgrade outdated

but sometimes some packages gets broken and can not be installed, leaving other macports packages that could be upgraded stuck at old versions. The only solution is to manually upgrade each one of them with port upgrade. The way I force the upgrade of all macports packages is just to list all outdated packages and then try to upgrade one by one with:

for l in `port outdated | awk '{print $1}'`  
do  
port upgrade $l  
done

this doesn’t stop packages from failing, but at least allows you to upgrade all macport packages that can be upgraded. The process will take time, and is a bit crude because it doesn’t take into consideration things like dependencies, but works and in the end I’ve found that sometimes it even solves some of the problems of broken packages. Give it a try.

Extra: After successful upgrades—and only if you don’t need the old versions that are still installed but not activated—you can just uninstall the unactivated macports with

port uninstall inactive

(All commands should be issued under superuser permissions either with sudo prefixed or using sudo -i)

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But when talking about big data sometimes one talks about the difficulty of managing data being produced. The difficulty lays because the data is mainly heterogeneous, because they appear in high volumes and with variety. This led to the appearance of the ‘paragon’ 3V (Variety, Velocity, and Volume of data).

But in reality this corresponds to two views of our society. One that is eminently technical. The growth in data, the growth in the capacity to analyse it, and the growth of Echelon to gather communications in real time are inevitable. These are infrastructural problems. The view of the world as a technological system that wants to extract more and more information, process it in a sequence of marginal gains to find and tell (usually the verb is sell) us the secret patterns that we didn’t suspect about ourselves.

But on the other hand you have the socio-cultural factors where society is changing and where people produce more data, where people want to have the commodity to press a button in the fridge and place automatic orders for milk on the local store of choice. Were cars will be autonomous and safer because they talk to each other. Where people want to share their photos with family. And in all these processes some (or many) metadata will be shared. The Internet of Things allows anyone to convert a simple electric toy with a microcontroller to repurpose it and connect it to the IoT. We are all happily contributing to the digitisation of everything.

The data produced has always been a problem for those that want to understand it. For them knowledge is paramount. They can be a monk copying ancient manuscripts in the medieval ages (a long and slow process) that are technological challenged when wanting to copy a library, or they can be like IBM deploying Apache-Spark as the next big hammer after Hadoop. There is always a limitation to the amount of data society can process, and there is always some limitation to the amount of information that one can extract from that data. There is always a limit, and although the term Big Data is new, the problem isn’t.

The digitisation of the world we know is a social phenomenon that is growing with each new device sold. The life simplification of digitisation brings with it the production of streams of data and metadata that some consider excessive. Security might be a problem for some, but changes will happen, not because technology is being imposed by big companies, but because we as a society need the changes to accommodate our new needs in terms of connectivity and functionality.

This discussion leads me to think that we are dealing with two views of the Big Data. One that treats Big Data as the technological challenge of gathering, processing, and acting upon the world, the data that is increasingly being produced, and promotes that advances will come if we only are able to understand those streams of data. Another is to look at this as a sociological phenomenon where the growing digitisation of the planet is producing changes at a faster pace and where Big Data is just a side effect of this social change. So, is Big Data Cause or Consequence?

This seems to be a chicken and egg problem. Is Big Data the analysis of more and more data, and with that analysis the cause of new knowledge that is transformative to the society? Or is the digitisation of the world and the social changes observed producing a drastic change in the output of their digital signatures, that in the end Big Data is a side product of?

The reality is that the two phenomenon might be interconnected in a positive feedback mechanism and the more we see behavioural changes in the populations, the more data will be produced and the more the technicalities of Big Data will be publicised. The more Big Data guardians have knowledge about the world, the more will they act on it, asking for more data. If you imagine what society can be if you read an encyclopaedia, imagine what it can produce when Watson receives enough information to decide the next fashion trend.

The present is the inventor of the future. And the question comes down to individual participatory choices (at least in democratic worlds). You cannot escape the future, but you can choose how much you want to engage with it. Progress (as a transformative force) is upon us every day. But progress is a society concept, not a technical one. And how much you engage is always going to be relative to a moving baseline, and not to a fixed reference point. The digitisation of the world is making Earth a better place (even if will be to hot to live in it soon). Today’s Big data challenges are just the same of the past. How society changes and technology evolves are like the two faces of a Möbius strip, both interconnected, always affecting each other in eternal motion, always on a eternal continuum like present and future.

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awk '{print length($0), ++nn}' file.txt | sort -n

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Mas que importa o que diz este primeiro ministro? Se por acaso Portugal entrasse em guerra com algum vizinho e o primeiro ministro fosse apanhado de pantufas, sem ter tempo de dizes “Eu declaro guerra a… X” poderia dizer a seguir que a guerra era uma miragem, ou culpa dos portugueses, que desafiava alguém a procurar quando é que teria ele levado o país para a guerra?

A verdade é que um primeiro ministro tanto é responsável pelo que diz, como pelo que não diz. Ser primeiro ministro não é ser sabugo do estrangeiro enquanto é hostil do nacional. Os portugueses que foram atirados para foram podem, um a um, dizer-lhe, não as palavras que o primeiro ministro diz que não disse, mas o hostilidade que sentem dos governantes portugueses em relação aos nacionais. A hostilidade em relação às ideias produzidas internamente. Os entraves nas coisas mais mundanas para que se possa levar a vida sem controlo. Sem a ameaça constante do estado que trata os nacionais como criminosos. Não há outra ideia de Portugal neste governo que não seja a de um Portugal empregada doméstica do estrangeiro.

Nunca se viu um governo para o qual ser Português significasse tão pouco e onde aquilo que verdadeiramente lhe interessa é popular as nossas cidades de alemães, angolanos ou chineses endinheirados, enquanto aos portugueses é vendida a cantiga de ir conquistar Alcácer Quibir. Com flautas, pandeiros, guitarradas e muita festa.

Não, não me interessa se o primeiro ministro disse ou não disse. A verdade é o êxodo aconteceu, por acção ou inacção. E tudo o resto é conversa fiada e barulho, como se de um bombo de festa se tratasse, que de tanto rufar acaba com a pele rompida, mas onde o rapaz do bombo continua a bater, porque o que importa é fazer barulho, que é festa, que é preciso levar esta gente para Alcácer Quibir contente e sossegada.

10 Junho, Woburn Sands, UK

— David

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Now Leica has produced another Leica Monochrome—Typ 246—a revision, upgrade, or a new beast of photographic camera. Your definition might be different but the fact is that the camera also reveals another thing: There exists a market for a BW camera, even if it is a niche camera. As I wrote in the past, I imagine that other manufacturers could take Leica in this game. In the past all manufacturers removed the anti-alias filter from the camera sensors. Now maybe it is the time to remove the Bayer filter and get excellent Black and White photographs. I see this as a potential great marketing advantage for some brands like Fuji (Maybe a X100BW?) or even a Ricoh (GR-bw?). A great BW camera in the range €500–€1000 would be killer, and prompt a lot of orders.

Until then, the Leica Monochrome is the only landmark in the Black and White camera world (if you don’t take into consideration astronomy bw cameras). One can hope . . .

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THE STORY OF BIKES VS CARS

We are immersed in a great global crisis that we will eventually have to face: climate change, the exhaustion of fossil resources, urban and ocean pollution. In this context, the bicycle stands as a powerful tool for change. However, this is a David and Goliath fight, since the automobile industry invests millions of dollars every year to maintain its business. Car sales are currently higher than ever before and there are more than one thousand million vehicles in the world.

Activists and thinkers around the world, from São Paulo to Los Angeles, including the idyllic situation in Copenhagen, get organized to change the state of things and make cities more sustainable. Alongside those citizens who refuse to stop cycling despite the increase in the number of deaths from traffic accidents, they carry out a small action that can lead to great changes.

from DocsBarcelona.

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• Na luta entre ebook e papel, o ebook já vale mais de um terço das receitas. Para uma indústria madeireira isto dos ebooks afinal não é residual.
• É preocupante que se esteja a por o ónus de polícia no fornecedor de acesso. Este princípio é assustador porque o mesmo princípio é utilizado na Coreia do Norte. Os estados filtrarem o que está acessível é perturbador. Não sei qual é mais criminoso, a censura ou piratear um livro. E há muitos websites onde descarregar ebooks
• O representante da indústria revela entretanto muita preocupação que a decisão só seja válida para o Reino Unido, e gostava que uma decisão Britânica fosse estendida automaticamente à União Europeia. Isto é irónico, numa altura em que David Cameron ameaça sair da Zona Euro (Qual a diferença para Grécia?) a indústria sonha que as decisões judiciais Britânicas possam automaticamente condicionar toda a União. O espirito colonialista imperial por detrás deste pensamento é revelador.

update: pequenas correcções gramaticais e um link para um post sobre onde encontrar ebooks

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— Speaking of even more interesting Photography. Anytime Daido Moriyama is mentioned you must Listen. You might not know who he his, and then YOU MUST REALLY LISTEN. And if think you know who Daido Moriyama is you should go and buy On Daido. As a side note, Daido is known for using the small P&S Ricohs. . .

— Speaking of Ricoh GR… there are some rumors about a GR II coming soon. DROLL.

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And, like in America, here in Portugal they immediately started writing a story to cover the facts, except that the cameras were rolling. But as in so many aspects of portuguese daily life you have to shut up and move on, be quiet about things, don’t talk about it. I hope that this barbarian acts are not forgotten and this rampaging cop becomes ex-cop and is prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

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As a fan of Twin Peaks I’m sure I’ll be disappointed, but I promise not to be very biased while watching. Are you going to enter Wayward Pines, knowing that you cannot ever leave again?

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— What is strategy, again? I just say… let the algorithms kick in and you’ll need to make this question again, and again, and again, and you’ll need an algorithm to answer it because human brains will not be able to cope with the answer very soon.

— Lily, the first throw and shoot camera. Now, selfies suck. But everybody is taking selfies. Then came the selfie stick. That everybody thinks is ridicule but that you see in every corner of any touristic location. And now??? the Selfie Drone? Crap… THE WORLD IS BECOMING A LONELY PLACE. GET A FRIEND PEOPLE.

— And speaking of loneliness, Sudan needs a partner. This is very sad story but I imagine that human (selfie) stupidity will put the northern white rhino in the same shelf as the Dodo.

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— Clustering. Clustering and Classification are probably the two main tasks you want machine learning to do. So, it is always good to see how others are doing theirs. In this paper Hasnat et al. do a comparative study of clustering methods in multinomal distributions.

— 100 synapses and you get yourself a mini brain, capable of doing image classification. But wait… it only classifies 3 letters… Hm. I think the implementation still needs to be improved a little before we have skynet…

— If you study Twitter from a scientific perspective and are interested in how twitter reflects politics, then head out o this paper by Murthy and Retto where they compare the print coverage and tweets in the US. Republican Primaries. It focuses on sentiment analysis — something that is becoming more prevalent in science these days. The study of emotion moves money, and scientists love money.

— And finally, the gods of the Mountains must be angry. So, for a minute think about how ephemeral everything is when put in the right perspective.

The post Are you Brainless today? Go read these. appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

— And if we don’t trust algorithms, what about AI? Artificial INTELLIGENCE? Isn’t that more and more like ALIEN INTELLIGENCE? Ok, stop with the fun and go down to The Economist for another shot of your daily dose of FEAR. The article covers mostly what is being done in terms of Deep Learning — great stuff by the way and probably the best new thing after my mother in law’s chocolate cakes.

— Up next in the show, a few more connections between AI, Aartificial Birds and Aeroplanes. Even if the take home topic is Turing AI and the differences between fiction and reality — Isn’t that the real problem always?

— Next, a revisitation of one of the earliest Social Network works from the 1930s reveals interesting new insights on the network structure visualisation practices of one of the most studied works. Yey, this one is not AI related!

— Finally, but still speaking of Visualisation, in R, you can do it too… just enrol.

The post Reading the Visual, AI, and social networks, worlds, in R. appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

— A $9 computer that wants to replace the Raspberry Pi as the hacker platform of choice? The size is 6cm X 4cm and this is smaller than the 8.5cm X 5.6cm of the Pi. But is this important? For deployment the cost of the chip might make it a success, but for development maybe the Pi is going to be more practical. In any case, more options is always a good thing. Yeay! Their success is going to depend on the distribution channels. If availability of this computer is low . . .

— Amazon Drones. This is going to be exciting, but details where scarce. Now if your are curious a patent was awarded that gave more details about the drones.

The post And now for some Tech reading . . . appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

— Still in the UK, and talking about equal rights, equity and all that, we get back to discussing Race and discussing quotas and I feel that we are back to 1960s. This is a very complex problem and I don’t have a solution to it but is with great sorrow that I see that in the 2010s we are still so archaic and full of prejudice in matters of race, job equality, and sexual orientation. Things that are so essential to the condition of being human that I sometimes think that we’ve been invaded by an alien species.

— Michele Obama talked about the trials she had to go through during the 2008 campaign where she was held to a different standard of the other candidates wives. Another example of my disquiet with how modern society is still not so modern after all.

— And finally for some stupid stunt that could be other sad news in the necrology, some Russian freerunner decided to jump from pillar to pillar on the top of a Dubai Hotel. Paid stunt by the HOTEL? Dubai not being in the news enough? In any case, another example of humans doing stupid things for showing off.

The post Things that caught my eye this Sunday … appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

…and this is a bit hypocritical given the reviewer’s own ideological biases throughout the review, for example: (3/4) pic.twitter.com/aJ8aTIRdYL

— Fiona Ingleby (@FionaIngleby) April 29, 2015

Many times the reviewer knows what he’s doing and the comments actually help improve the paper, but sometimes the reviews are just plain incompressible and look like they were written by a monkey punching a keyboard while watching themselves on the mirror.

I’ve seen reviewers showing a total lack of understanding about the subjects in hand, being partial, being biased, or worse, not even being able to write a sentence in English. Some reviewers I’ve read, wrote in some language similar to English that until today none of the authors or the editors have been able to understand. A mystery for the science historians of the future. Worse, there are reviewers that protected by anonymity are bluntly rude. Real douchebags. This was another of these cases.

It came from a reviewer saying that the authors should consider finding some male scientist to co-author a paper that was authored only by female scientists. Worse, he went on rambling about the marginal superiority of male scientists. You can get the details of this particular case at RetractionWatch. The tweet above is just an illustration of this reviewer medieval thinking.

A matter of Accountability and Public Peer Review

This leads me to think that we urgently need to end this lack of accountability in the review process. We need to quickly implement Public Peer Review. The idea is that first drafts go to an online repository, like arXiv for example. Reviewers will do their work and publish their reviews as comments in the repository. No anonymity, no protection of douches hiding behind the journal editors. They can still send private emails to the editors, but then what they write publicly has to match what they write privately. Reviews should be public. Authors can improve on their paper and submit a new version. At this point, everyone knows what is going on. Good reviewers will be praised by their scientific acuity and honesty. No one will keep saying things behind a blind knowing they will not become exposed to ridicule. It’s time to expunge those douches by exposing them publicly.

I imagine that some authors, editors and reviewers won’t like this open process. In any case, I imagine that it might be possible to keep the process private until sometime before publication. After publication, this online repository should become available so anyone could trace back the process. I prefer it to stay public always, but I imagine that some authors would prefer to have it closed mainly when collaborating with industry and NDAs were signed.

In any case, I think that the gatekeeper of this should be the author of the paper, not the editor or the reviewer. When submitting a new article the author should be able to keep it private for some time — say 1 month — after the last reviewer submitted his review. This is to give time to the authors to respond to the reviewers comments with a corrected version. After that month passes, the paper and comments should be public. Obviously the authors can go public with the process anytime before that date.

Finally, with all this changes, I also think that all papers should have a byline with the reviewers in the final print. What is the problem of having “This paper was reviewed by X and Y, reviewers comments are available online at HTTP…” in a footnote of the first page? Credit is due to where credit is due. Give reviewers credit for their good work and let the scientific community judge them when they are not good. Also, many other scientists, namely junior scientists starting their careers could learn from good reviewers. They could improve their own reviews by seeing how good scientist were doing theirs.

Being public about the process, is the first step to show the quality of your work. I don’t know why so many are afraid of having their work be publicly scrutinised. In a time where versioning is so simple — git is 10 years old now — where tracing back changes and accountability for actions is so important, I don’t understand how we are still in the feudal ages of protecting reviewers identities. Can it be because most reviewing work IS NOT PAID by journals and they just don’t care to do a quality work? If that is so, why keep this BROKEN SYSTEM?

We need PUBLIC PEER REVIEW, NOW!

The post In defence of a Public Peer Review System appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

The authors claim that “a swarm of robots is able to extract vehicles from confined spaces with delicate handling, swiftly and in any direction. The novel lifting robots are capable of omnidirectional movement, thus they can under-ride the desired vehicle and dock to its wheels for a synchronized lifting and extraction. The overall developed system applies reasoning about available trajectory paths, wheel identification, local and undercarriage obstacle detection, in order to fully automate the process.”

This is one amazing idea, and while right now they are probably targeting the security forces that need to deal with badly parked cars and potential threats to security, I imagine that these would be great in managing parking silos. One could just drop the car at the entrance and a group of robots would take the car and park the car in the silo as to optimise the space available. No more having to put with those drivers that need the space of three cars to park a CORSA.

Well, in any case the European team of AVERT is going to present this work on a conference, but I see a lot of potential in their idea to make this into a commercial success. The preprint of the paper is available for download.

In a not so far away future robots will replace valets and optimise parking space in silos. Great!

The post Can you park your car like this? appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

The self-driving car is coming to our streets. Might not be as soon as some predicted, but it will come in incremental steps. Technology has this feature: You dream about radical changes and then they appear slowly, one step at the time, and when you look back you realise that reality is bigger than your original dream. So let’s keep dreaming about self-driving cars, planes, bicycles or balloons. Someone will implement all the good things to get there and beyond.

The post Your Grandfather’s Oldsmobile—NOT! self-driving cars around the corner appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

• First, TREES, What are they? For any two given nodes have only one path between them and all nodes have one path between them. In 1857, Cayley coined the term TREE and it stuck though many graph TREES don’t have any resemblance to real trees.
• Trees have no cycles, thus, no transitivity, no triangles, no clustering coefficient. Trees are efficient when the cost of establishing connections is high (think for example subway lines that are costly to build).
• Minimum Spanning Trees are the optimisation of the COST of trees. If the graph is unweighted the cost is unitary and all edges are equal — and one can have multiple equivalent Minimum Spanning Trees. If the graph if weighted then you’ll have a unique Minimum Spanning Tree (usually).

An ALGORITHM to compute minimum spanning trees for a weighted undirected graph is the Prim’s Algorithm — although it was proposed 27 years earlier by a Czech mathematician called Vojtěch Jarník and the algorithm should be named after him (sometimes it is).

Here’s an example how the algorithm runs:

In R, the igraph package implements the Prim’s algorithm when computing minimum spanning trees.

A simple example of the use of the minimum spanning tree in R follows:

library(igraph)
g <- erdos.renyi.game(20, 0.25)
E(g)$weight  <- runif(length(E(g)), 0., 1.)
E(g)$width  <- 3.0*E(g)$weight
 
mst <- minimum.spanning.tree(g)
E(mst)$color <- 'red'
 
layout  <- layout.kamada.kawai(mst)
 
plot(g, layout=layout)
par(new=T)
E(mst)$width  <-  3
plot(mst, layout=layout)
par(new=F)

The image that illustrates this post on minimum spanning trees is one run of the short code above. I generated a random graph with 20 nodes and a probability of connecting any two of 25%. Then I gave the edges random weights and computed the weighted Minimum Spanning Tree. The trick of how to plot a minimum spanning tree superimposed on the original graph is to do it in a two-step plot. First you plot the graph with a pre-computed layout. Then you use the same pre-computed layout to plot the second layer that holds the minimum spanning tree.

You need to set the parameter new=True so this R plot doesn’t erase the previous one. You can compute the layout for the minimum spanning tree if you want edges not to overlap and obtain a clear planar graph. iGraph offers many different graph layouts to experiment from. Kamada Kawai usually works very well for minimum spanning trees.

The post Thinking in Minimum Spanning Trees appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

As an engineer, I see this is one of those cases of failure by design. The rocket almost made it and that is amazing taking into account all the things wrong with the design they want to put in place. 

• You don’t land a stick on its head. It lands on its side, so the design should have taken that into account. Even if the CRS–6 could approach land vertically, they should have devised a way to lay it down. That would even allow for greater STABILITY AFTER LANDING (They almost did it by accident).
• Using the single rocket thruster to act as a fine attitude controller is dumb. You don’t use a hammer to perform eye surgery, but this landing project seems to be trying just that. This solution forces them to have one main engine with many variables to control power and direction. The uncontrollable aspects (degrees of freedom) are just too many.
• Another aspect that I don’t understand in this solution is FUEL. This solution needs a LOT of it. It is extra weight at launch because you need the fuel to bring the rocket to a standstill. All the weight could be used for cargo capacity to put more stuff in orbit. In the ’60s, they solved this problem by using something like PARACHUTES. Amazing isn’t it?

I know that Rocket Science isn’t easy. Trying to achieve this is a scientific challenge, but, as a scientist you sometimes come up with dumb hypothesis and TEST them, and TEST them, and TEST them until you either prove your hypothesis or you abandon it and make a new one. In this case, landing the rocket vertically has a big SHOWSTOPPER: It cost a LOT of MONEY for something a 5th grader knows is impossible to do.  

The post Why landing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is a DUMB decision? appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

Switching keyboard layouts is not easy. Many people give up and stick to qwerty forever. It is dumb but at least not as dumb as the old Portuguese hcesar keyboard layout.

COLEMAK OFFERS THE BEST OF TWO WORLDS, fewer keys change place—for example shortcuts keys like copy and paste stay in the same keyboard location—and more words are typed using the home row with less finger travelling.

PRACTICE. Typing fast is mainly a matter of practice and finger memory. I used Amphetype and Typeracer to improve over time. In Amphetype I downloaded a book from The Gutenberg Project and read it by typing it through.

I MADE SOME CHANGES to the original Colemak keyboard that have nothing to do with letters. I changed the numbers 6–0 to have the symbols of shifted 1–5 !@#$% that are very useful for programming, twitter, emails, latex, etc… and I didn’t want do be using shift to type them. I put 0 to the left of 1 and put 6–9 as shifted 1–4. I now need to press shift to enter those numbers, but I can use the number pad on the right of the keyboard. I AM STILL UNDECIDED ABOUT keeping this half system or to use the french azerty scheme of inverting all the numbers and shifted symbols (ColemaP figure above) — I used Ukelele for remapping Colemak to my version that I call ColemaP

DEFINE the caps lock key as a backspace. Even if you are still using qwerty. The caps lock is useless and having the backspace key on your left pinky is great. It takes some time to get used to but not having to rise and extend your right hand to reach the backspace is a time saver.

REVERTING BACK to qwerty is very easy as you don’t forget it that quickly. You lose some speed on qwerty but nothing that is that problematic. And when you go back you really feel it in your fingers how slow that layout is.

The post Switching to Colemak – My ColemaP appeared first on Dave's Conundrums.

Talvez seja verdade, ou tudo não passa de uma conspiração para fazer o prazer da rádio. Tudo em torno de um conceito tão simples como uma simples conversa de café (e SIM, já estou a preparar caminho para um plug ao Triplo Expresso).

Os autores do 10Web convidaram-me para participar numa conversa sobre podcast — Esses programas de rádio da era digital que podem ser levados para todo o lado, ouvidos em todo o lado, e que infelizmente não chegam ainda a todos para serem realmente globais. O tema claro foi mesmo O podcast, e após andarmos algum tempo a tentar encontrar uma data comum, lá se gravou o podcast numa noite friorenta de Janeiro.

Foi um espetáculo para matar saudades e ainda para re-ouvir alguns conhecidos como o Pedro Telles que participou no Triplo Expresso nos tempos em que Eu, a Maria João Valente e o Phil arrasávamos as nossas noites de eventos Apple com Gin e Moscatel.

Muito obrigado, ao Ricardo e Vitor pelo convite e ao André e Pedro pela conversa.

MP3: https://archive.org/download/10web12/10web_12_metapodcast.mp3

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