BERLIN — Weston Hankins, an entrepreneur in Germany currently juggling three startups, was complaining to a friend one night about the lack of computer programmers in Berlin, when they stumbled into an idea: What if they trained refugees to code? “It was just so obvious,” said Hankins, who, along with his friend Anne Kjær Riechert, reasoned that coding classes for refugees would not only offset a shortage of technical skills across Europe, but also help kickstart the students’ new lives. “We can help them integrate because we know the startup community and we’re well connected here,” Hankins said. Also, he pointed out, “they need something to do.” READ MORE: Entrepreneurs launch coding school for refugees in Germany | Mashable
Author Archives: infophile
Postage #Stamps from Bhutan That Double as Playable #Vinyl #Records | Open Culture #audio #history #coolstuff
The tiny, Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has a unique national aspiration that sets it apart from its neighbors, China and India. (And certainly the United States too.) Rather than increasing its gross national product, Bhutan has instead made it a goal to increase the Gross National Happiness of its citizens. There’s wealth in health, not just money, the Bhutanese have argued. And since the 1970s, the country has taken a holistic approach to development, trying to increase the spiritual, physical, and environmental health of its people. And guess what? The strategy is paying off. A 2006 global survey conducted by Business Week found that Bhutan is the happiest country in Asia and the eighth-happiest country in the world. It’s perhaps only a nation devoted to happiness that could throw its support behind this — postage stamps that double as playable vinyl records. READ MORE: Postage Stamps from Bhutan That Double as Playable Vinyl Records | Open Culture
#Library Builder’s Monument of #Books | BBC News #libraries #literacy #education #reading #nonprofit
At some point this year, a child somewhere in the developing world became the ten millionth beneficiary of Room to Read, a non-profit organisation created 15 years ago after a high-flying Microsoft executive quit his job to help children in Nepal. The charity, which works to eradicate child illiteracy and gender inequality in education, builds libraries and stocks them with books. It’s no surprise that its founder, John Wood, invokes the spirit of the 19th Century library-building steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie. In a sense, Room to Read has outstripped its spiritual mentor, building 17,500 libraries to Carnegie’s 2,500. READ MORE: Library builder’s monument of books | BBC News
Georgia Tech Uses #ArtificialIntelligence #AI to Crowdsource #Interactive #Fiction | GT #tech #crowdsourcing #storytelling #gaming #users
Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new artificially intelligent system that crowdsources plots for interactive stories, which are popular in video games and let players choose different branching story options. READ MORE: GT | Georgia Institute of Technology | News Center | Georgia Tech Uses Artificial Intelligence to Crowdsource Interactive Fiction
Scouring the Web to Make New #Words ‘Lookupable’ | TNYT #search #discovery #language #dictionaries #online #datascience @wordnik
Ms. McKean started a campaign last month on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, to unearth one million “missing” English words — words that are not currently found in traditional dictionaries. To locate the underdocumented expressions, she has engaged a pair of data scientists to scrape and analyze language used in online publications. Ms. McKean said she planned to incorporate the found words in Wordnik.com, an online dictionary of which she is a co-founder…Before her analytics project gets underway next month, Ms. McKean is crowdsourcing a list of missing words for possible inclusion in Wordnik.
READ MORE: Scouring the Web to Make New Words ‘Lookupable’ | The New York Times
New Platform Makes #Content Of #Videos As Searchable As Text | Fast Company #search #discovery #curation #data #contextual #analysis #machinelearning
To make poorly labeled videos easier to discover, Manhattan-based video analysis startup Dextro is launching a platform that analyzes and tags the contents of publicly available videos, using algorithms to identify common scenes, objects, and speech. Mic, a news site aimed at millennials, has partnered with Dextro and will use the platform, called Sight, Sound & Motion (SSM), to discover newsworthy videos that may otherwise be difficult to find. READ MORE: This New Platform Makes The Contents Of Videos As Searchable As Text | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
Officials threaten to destroy a #LittleFreeLibrary in Texas | LA Times #LFL #libraries #free #books #community
More LFL in trouble…
Who would want to hurt a Little Free Library? Officials from the Department of Code Compliance in Dallas, that’s who. READ MORE: Officials threaten to destroy a Little Free Library in Texas | LA Times
Related
- Indianapolis’s own ‘Big Free Libraries’ | TeleRead #LFL #littlefreelibraries #libraries #free #art #community
- U.S. #DHS and Local #Governments Cracking Down on #Libraries | #email #privacy #intellectualfreedom #community #LittleFreeLibrary #WTF
- ‘Most Amazing, Stupendously Clever’ Little Free Library of the Day | Shelf Awareness
Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind to Be a Movie and TV Show | Tor.com #film #adaptations #books #television #gaming #SciFi
Lionsgate has won a bidding war to adapt Patrick Rothfuss’ The Kingkiller Chronicle series! And not just into a movie, or a television series—but both, and a video game, to boot! This deal sets up the studio to develop the multiple stories from The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man’s Fear, and various novellas (including The Slow Regard of Silent Things) simultaneously and across multiple platforms. READ MORE: Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind to Be a Movie and a TV Show | Tor.com
The Most Popular #Romance #Novels of the Past Decade | BookBub Blog #books #HEA #reading #recommendations #list
No explanation is given on how this list was determined or the source for the “most popular” rankings. I definitely do not agree with all the selections!
Looking for a steamy, dreamy love story? Here are 23 most popular romance novels of the past decade. READ: The Most Popular Romance Novels of the Past Decade | BookBub Blog
You May Like This List More: Happy Ever After: 100 Swoon-Worthy #Romances | NPR #list #books #romance #HEA
The Weird, Obsessive World of #Free DIY #Audiobooks | WIRED #LibriVox #publicdomain #books
I’VE SPENT THE past year with strange voices in my head. Soothing, rich-voiced, strangers intermittently whispering, crying, yelling, and practicing terrible accents in my ear. This is because I discovered the weird world of LibriVox, a charmingly scrappy DIY community site dedicated to creating free audiobooks for public domain texts. LibriVox is like Audible, the audiobook service owned by Amazon, except that every book is made for free by volunteers, and every book was published before 1923. A legion of volunteer readers—from professional stage actors to people practicing reading English as a second language—patiently, and sometimes not so patiently, inch through thousands of texts, posting the end results for free. READ MORE: The Weird, Obsessive World of Free DIY Audiobooks | WIRED
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