A pretty nice way on the different approaches to public speaking with a funny comic strip explaining the TED way (not!) of preparing.
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Author: Aditya
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[LinkBlog] Public speaking the TED way
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The power of defaults
This’ll be even more important when bots start giving out default responses to queries:
So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000.
Source: Internet mapping turned a remote farm into a digital hell | Fusion
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[LinkBlog] The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender: 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines
A really cool study putting the gender imbalance anecdotes to the test. And yes, things are really imbalanced overall. E.g. Minions is a gender balanced movie and so is Terminator, but not Alien.
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What’s a few hundred megapixels between shots
Kill the green screen maybe, but take datacentres to a different level:
The Lytro Cinema camera gathers a truly staggering amount of information on the world around it. The 755 RAW megapixel 40K resolution, 300 FPS camera takes in as much as 400 gigabytes per second of data.
Source: Lytro’s 755 megapixel Cinema light field camera is going to kill the green screen | TechCrunch
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Power efficiency of AlphaGo’s victory
So another decade maybe before it achieves power parity?
Lee Sedol used about 20 Watts of power to operate. By contrast, AlphaGo runs on a whopping 1920 CPUs and another 280 GPUs for an estimated power consumption of approximately 1 MW (200 W per CPU and 200 W per GPU). That’s 50,000 times as much power as the amount of power that Lee Sedol’s brain uses and the two are not quite evenly matched but it is close enough to use for comparison.
Source: Another Way Of Looking At Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo · Jacques Mattheij
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Securing the Panama Papers
It’s a case of the stolen data being stored more securely than the original.
Source: From Encrypted Drives To Amazon’s Cloud — The Amazing Flight Of The Panama Papers – Forbes
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Mobile Is Eating the World (2016)
Quite an informative read and this is just the beginning of the global mobile revolution.
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Getting rid of song auto ratings in iTunes
I use the iTunes ratings quite extensively for organizing my music collection with smart playlists. Of late I started seeing some songs I had never rated in my smart playlists and they show up with grey stars in iTunes that can’t be removed from the song directly. On the iPod/iPhone/iPad it’s even worse as they show up as normal ratings making you wonder how your library got messed up.
Turns out that it was apparently due to the album ratings being applied automatically to the songs. In fact, this feature has been around for a while, but one of the recent iTunes updates seems to have created ratings for albums on its own and messed things up. Fret not, as there’s a simple solution – just go to the albums view and remove the album rating. Any songs manually rated in the album don’t get affected of course.
Source: How to remove the automatic ratings from songs in iTunes? – Ask Different
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[LinkBlog] Street Fighting Scientists
Fight as your favourite scientist. Too bad it’s not in English yet. There’s a mobile app planned as well it seems.
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