Penguin Canada opened a bookshop! And it’s really pretty. SEE THE PICS: Cool Bookish Places: The Penguin Bookshop in Toronto | BOOKRIOT
We Need a Better Way to Visualize People’s Skills | HBR #skills #data #visualization #employment #analytics #competencies
Photo Source: HBR
How can companies get a better idea of which skills employees and job candidates have? While university degrees and grades have done that job for a long time, they’ve done it imperfectly. In today’s rapidly evolving knowledge economy, badges, nanodegrees, and certificates have aimed to bridge the gap – but also leave a lot to be desired. While HR departments are eager for better “people analytics,” that concept is still fuzzy. And simply collecting data is not enough – to be used, data has to be presented usefully. READ MORE: We Need a Better Way to Visualize People’s Skills | HBR
Algorithms Could Save Book Publishing—But Ruin Novels | WIRED #algorithms #books #publishing #recommendations #marketing
Over four years, Archer and Jockers fed 5,000 fiction titles published over the last 30 years into computers and trained them to “read”—to determine where sentences begin and end, to identify parts of speech, to map out plots. They then used so-called machine classification algorithms to isolate the features most common in bestsellers. READ MORE: Algorithms Could Save Book Publishing—But Ruin Novels | WIRED
Evo Is a Little Robot With a Big Mission: Get Girls to Code | WIRED #coding #STEM #tech #women #robots #education #gadgets
WHEN HIS DAUGHTERS were young, Nader Hamda says, they were really into apps and computers. But now that they’re a little older, their interest is waning. And that’s not unusual. “They’re not an exception,” he says. “They’re more of a rule.”
Sadly, this is true. According to numerous studies, young girls are moving away from computer science, not towards it. And Hamda says this is why his company, Ozobot, is now offering an educational robot called Evo. Evo is small and spherical, only about an inch in diameter. It looks kinda like an IBM Selectric type ball. But it’s also designed to be social.
READ MORE: Evo Is a Little Robot With a Big Mission: Get Girls to Code | WIRED
Google’s AI is getting really good at captioning photos | engadget #AI #images #metadata #classification
Photo: engadget
It has open-sourced an algorithm that describes images with 94 percent accuracy… READ MORE: Google’s AI is getting really good at captioning photos | Engadget
#3D ‘unwrapping’ tools let scientists read an ancient Hebrew scroll | Mashable #archives #manuscripts #digitization #science
Source: Seales et. al, Science Advances 21 Sep 2016: Vol. 2, no. 9, e1601247, Fig. 2 Completed virtual unwrapping for the En-Gedi scroll.
New software tools have enabled scientists to read an ancient, damaged Hebrew scroll without ever unfurling the fragile, disintegrating parchment.
The digitization techniques, known as “volume cartography,” transformed what were the charred remains of the nearly 2,000-year-old En-Gedi scroll into legible columns of handwritten text from the book of Leviticus, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.
“We are reading a real scroll that hasn’t been read for millennia,” said Brent Seales, who helped develop the cartography techniques and is a computer sciences professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
READ MORE: 3D ‘unwrapping’ tools let scientists read an ancient Hebrew scroll | Mashable
Sex and sexuality: The Jane Austen game breaking the MMO rules | engadget #Austen #MMOG #gaming #RPG #transmedia
Ever, Jane is an online role-playing game set in the dramatic, romantic worlds of Jane Austen. It invites players to attend sophisticated dinner parties and fancy balls, share gossip, keep secrets, fall in love, get married and climb the ribbon-lined social ladder of Regency-era England. It is definitely not a sex game, though sometimes players get wrapped up in this universe of exquisite gowns and forbidden desire, and they simply can’t help themselves.
“Let’s just say that we had to put in private chat,” Ever, Jane creator Judy Tyrer says with a laugh. READ MORE: Sex and sexuality: The Jane Austen game breaking the MMO rules | engadget
Post Disclosure: I supported the Ever, Jane Kickstarter campaign by giving a small donation. Downloaded the beta version but unable to run software properly yet on my 2010 MacBook Pro Intel OS X Yosemite. Note to self: Buy new computer so I can play Ever, Jane.
MIT uses #radiation to read closed books | engadget #books #tech #imaging #manuscripts #archives
There are some books that are simply too delicate to crack open — the last thing you want to do is destroy an ornate medieval Bible simply because you’re curious about its contents. If MIT has its way, though, you won’t have to stay away. Its scientists have crafted a computational imaging system that can read the individual pages of a book while it’s closed. Their technology scans a book using terahertz radiation, and relies on the tiny, 20-micrometer air gaps between pages to identify and scan those pages one by one. A letter interpretation algorithm (of the sort that can defeat captchas) helps make sense of any distorted or incomplete text. READ MORE: MIT uses radiation to read closed books | engadget
Watson helped make a trailer for a horror movie about AI | engadget #AI #film #IBMWatson
IBM Watson can add yet another skill to its resume: the ability to make movie trailers. 20th Century Fox has tapped into the supercomputer’s powers to create the first AI-made trailer for its upcoming thriller film Morgan. It’s a fitting start for Watson’s trailer-making career. Morgan is, after all, a sci-fi flick about a group of scientists who created a humanoid machine that rapidly gained capabilities and went out of control. READ MORE: Watson helped make a trailer for a horror movie about AI | engadget
Controversial Maya Codex Is the Real Deal After All | Gizmodo
Scientists have been arguing over the authenticity of an ancient document called the Grolier Codex for 50 years. A new analysis published in a special section of the journal Maya Archaeology has concluded that the codex is indeed genuine, making it the oldest surviving manuscript from the pre-Colombian era. READ MORE: Controversial Maya Codex Is the Real Deal After All | Gizmodo
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