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Gingerbread Serenity is the sweetest ship in the 'Verse [Concept Art]

Click here to read Gingerbread Serenity is the sweetest ship in the 'Verse

Perhaps if there had been a Christmas episode of Firefly, Kaylee would have made a gingerbreadish version of her home, the starship Serenity, out of some ghastly protein substance. But this gingerbread Serenity looks plenty good enough to eat. More »

These Apps Are Rampantly Stealing Your Info Without Permission [Privacy]

I love Pandora. I really couldn't do without it. But I could do without its sending my demographic information, phone ID, and location to eight trackers across six companies. And Pandora's far from the worst offender, the WSJ shows us. More »

Progress in Algorithms Beats Moore’s Law

Every so often Lance tweets about some science policy report. My natural tendency, like any good techie, is to keep my distance from such reports. I do recognize that they serve an important social function (like dentists or lawyers) but personally I would want to have as little as possible to do with them. However, I do sometimes skim over them, trying to gain some fuzzy insight or point of view. Here is an observation I picked from the Report to the President and Congress: Designing a Digital Future: Federally FUnded R&D in Networking and IT:

Everyone knows Moore’s Law – a prediction made in 1965 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the density of transistors in integrated circuits would continue to double every 1 to 2 years. (…) Even more remarkable – and even less widely understood – is that in many areas, performance gains due to improvements in algorithms have vastly exceeded even the dramatic performance gains due to increased processor speed.
The algorithms that we use today for speech recognition, for natural language translation, for chess playing, for logistics planning, have evolved remarkably in the past decade. It’s difficult to quantify the improvement, though, because it is as much in the realm of quality as of execution time.
In the field of numerical algorithms, however, the improvement can be quantified. Here is just one example, provided by Professor Martin Grötschel of Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin. Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later – in 2003 – this same model could be solved in roughly 1 minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algorithms! Grötschel also cites an algorithmic improvement of roughly 30,000 for mixed integer programming between 1991 and 2008.

From tables to 5 star linked data

The goal and vision of the Semantic

Web is to create a Web of connected and interlinked data (items)
which can be shared and reused by all. Sharing and opening up “raw
data” is great; but the Semantic Web isn’t just about
sharing data. To create a Web of data, one needs interlinking
between data. In 2006, Sir Tim Berners-Lee introduced the notion of
linked data in which he outlined the best practices for creating
and sharing data on the Web. To encourage people and government to
share data, he recently developed the following rating system -

The highest rating is for the data

that can link to other people’s data to provide context. While the
Semantic Web has been growing steadily, there is lot of data that
is still in raw format. A study by Google researchers shows that there are 154 million
tables with high quality relational data on the world wide web. The
US government along with 7 other nations have started sharing data
publicly. Not all the data is RDF or confers with the best
practices of publishing and sharing linked data.

Here in the Ebiquity Research Lab,

we have been focusing on converting data in tables and spreadsheets
into RDF; but our focus is not on generating just RDF, but rather
generate high quality linked data (as now Berners-Lee calls it
“5 star data”). Our goal is to build a completely automated
framework for interpreting tables and generating linked data from
it.

As part of our preliminary

research, we have already developed a baseline framework which can
link the table column headers to classes from ontologies in
the linked data cloud datasets, link the table cells to entities in
the linked data cloud and identify relations between table columns
and map them to properties in the linked data cloud. You can read
papers related to our preliminary research at [1]. We will use this
blog as a medium to publish updates in our pursuit of creating
“5-star” data for the Semantic Web.

If you are data publisher, go grab

some Linked Data star badges at [2]. You can show your support to
the open data movement by gettings t-shirts, mugs and bumper
stickers from [3] ! (all profits go to W3C)

Happy Holidays ! Let 2011 be yet

another step forward in the open data movement !

[1] – http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/person/html/Varish/Mulwad/?pub=on#pub

[2] – http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/lod-badges/

[3] – http://www.cafepress.co.uk/w3c_shop

That’s Not Very Happy

Filed under: Image Tagged: computer, error, funny, terminal

Submitted by: Unknown

New Year's Resolutions

I drew this comic at the dawn of 2010. Here's how the somewhat autobiographical resolutions in the first panel turned out: I've failed miserably at getting organized. I still floss every night, as any non-hypocritical dental student should. I've written poetry, but it's been mostly goofy light verse. I've enjoyed ethnic food, smiled, practiced yoga, worked out, and volunteered, but only sporadically. I've enjoyed literary fiction (as pretentious as that sounds), especially the novels of Haruki Murakami. I can't bike to work - I'm not employed. And finally, I never actually quote bad movies - I only quote great movies that other people think are bad. My resolution for 2011: to keep going back and coloring old comics so I can repost them on my blog and make them available as posters.

21 E-Commerce Plugins and Shopping Carts for WordPress 3.0+

Want to start the new year off by turning your WordPress website into a full-fledged online store? You’re in luck – WordPress has a wide range of options available. We’ve put together a list of e-commerce plugins and carts that work with WordPress 3.0+, as well as a short introduction to each to help you narrow down your options. These are in no particular order. Some are free and some are premium, but what they all have in common is that they’ve been fairly recently updated for the latest version of WordPress.

MarketPress

MarketPress is the only e-commerce plugin designed from the ground up for seamless integration with WP Multisite and BuddyPress, enabling you to create a single store or a network of stores. It’s packed full of features so that you can manage everything related to your transactions through the WordPress dashboard.

Kamis, 20 Januari 2011

MarketPress