Graphic artist Yang Liu has a sharp eye for cultural comparison, honed by personal experience. In 1990, at the age of 13, she moved from Beijing, to Berlin. After exactly 13 years there, she started an illustrated project to document her dual experiences in China and Germany. Originally created as 47 simple blue and red posters, Yang Liu's nonjudgmental...
The mathematical concept of a "scheme" seems to pop up everywhere, but it's hard to get a good grasp on what a scheme actually is. Any time you might ask someone what a scheme is in passing, there never seems to be enough time to explain it. On the other hand, if someone finds the time to internaliz
This is the first in The Vanishing University, a four-part series exploring the tech-driven future of higher education in America. Right now, this very morning, thousands of young adults in the United States are scrambling through the same minor hell. They've woken up to the very last in a series of half-futile phone alarms. Made, and likely...
An objective function is a measure of how similar a prediction of a value and the actual value are. Usually, we are looking to find the set of parameters that lead to the smallest possible cost which would imply that your algorithm will perform well.
I have been working on Reinforcement Learning for the past few months and all I can say about it: It is different. A writeup of the common quirks and frustrations of Reinforcement Learning I have…
Our bodies are biologically based and therefore are not equipped to communicate with electronics efficiently. New research could make it possible to genetically engineer our cells to be able to communicate with electronics. The development has the potential to allow us to eventually build apps that autonomously detect and treat disease.
This post is part of a series - go here for the index. Welcome back! The previous post gave us a lot of theoretical groundwork on triangles. This time, let's turn it into a working triangle rasterizer. Again, no profiling or optimization this time, but there will be code, and it should get us set…
by Computer Vision Department of NTRLab Suppose we are given a set of distinct points P = {(xi, yi) ∈ ℝm ×ℝ}i=1,...,n which we regard as a set of test samples xi ∈ ℝm with known answers yi ∈ ℝ.
The HashSet<T> collection type was first introduced in C# v3 and with .NET 3.5. This article will explore features of Hashset and also compare its performance with List.
At some point, you can’t get any further with linked lists, selection sort, and voodoo Big O, and you have to go get a real algorithms textbook and learn all that horrible math, at least a little. But which book? There are tons of them. I haven’t read every algorithms book out there, but I…
For something that we spend a third of our lives doing (if we’re lucky), sleep is something that we know relatively little about. “Sleep is actually a relatively recent discovery,” says Daniel Gartenberg, a sleep scientist who is currently an assistant adjunct professor in biobehavioral health at Penn State. “Scientists only started looking at sleep...
In the spring of 2010, I was privileged to have a conversation with Simon Schaffer, who pointed me to the work of a sociologist and philosopher of science named Harry Collins. This year, I discovered and read Collins' new book, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, and a somewhat older book, The Shape of Actions (co-authored with…
"Networking" and "connecting" as most people attempt it is a waste of time. [1] As most people with large networks know, focusing on helping others is the best strategy. The more people who ask you for help, the more connected you actually are, and the more able you will be to use your network to…