metamerist

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Cabbages and Kings...

Microsoft's Bill Crow: "Today, the Joint Photographic Expert's Group (JPEG) announced a new work item for the standardization of a HD Photo as a new file format called JPEG XR (XR is short for "extended range".) You can read the full details in the Microsoft press release here and the JPEG press release here. (Go ahead and check it out; we'll wait here.)"

Sven Birkerts considers the effects of blogs on literary culture: "A GRADUALLY GRAYING book reviewer with several decades in the trenches, I've been nibbling at literary web sites and blogs for some time now -- out of curiosity, to be sure, but also from a sense of vocational self-preservation. I've been trying to make my peace with the changes -- and to decide once and for all if they represent an advance, a retreat, or simply the declaration of an emerging new order against which there is no point in kicking...." more (via 3QD)

Computers beat humans at face recognition task: "The top performing system exhibited better performance than human evaluators when matching faces under varying lighting conditions in NIST large scale face recognition benchmark. See Figure 8 in this report. (via Machine Learning, etc.)

Initially, I had an interest in A.I., but it didn't seem to be going anywhere when I studied it in the late 1980s. I felt it was too heavily focused on logic (Prolog, Expert Systems, etc) and not enough on statistics. Back then, inspired by the Turing Test and Eliza, I wrote a devious little chatbot that fooled a lot of people. It was based on Markov Chains constructed from chat room convos.

Ben Stein says: The Looting of America isn't Funny.

A while back Jason Kottke posted a link to an article in New York Magazine showing how various businesses in N.Y. make a profit. Finally got around to reading it today. It is interesting. (link)

Apple's selling DRM-free tunes. (link)

If you're interested in free online Scrabble, Scrabulous is a nice site.

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