Last week I was lucky enough to be able to attend a presentation by Grant Ingersoll to the RTP Semantic Web Group on Apache Mahout. Mahout is set of technologies designed to tackle machine learning problems in various clever ways, one of which is by using it’s fellow Apache project Hadoop (hence the name, Mahout apparently means “elephant driver”).
Grant did a great job explaining the use case for Mahout, by touching on how machine learning algorithms like those available in Mahout make Google news, Netflix recommendations, Amazon suggestions and virtually every other feature advanced web applications have come to rely on possible.
While HTML5 has been widely touted as “the future of the web”, I think it’s important to remember that the content has to come from somewhere, no matter how beautifully rendered, and that increasingly the content will be the result of inferences created by software like Mahout. Yet more of an incentive to continue plowing through Algorithms of the Intelligent Web.
Grant also spoke briefly about his new book Taming Text, which is all about extracting inferences from blobs of text. This also strikes me as a highly useful set of related techniques to have on hand, given the amount of data-munging typical software development jobs inevitably require.
Thanks to Phil Rhodes for putting together this excellent presentation.
As someone who gets gadget fever on a regular basis, I found OSNews’s article describing the state of computer “recycling”, or what passes for it, very disturbing. Low or no safety standards for workers, shell charity organizations, and complete disregard for the environmental impact of discarded toxic waste are the norm in the foreign countries that receive our mountains iTrash.
The article mentions legal solutions to fix regulatory loopholes that allow this to go on in the United States, but more importantly it makes a solid argument for using refurbished equipment. Something I will have to consider before wandering the isles at Best Buy.
These pictures are courtesy of Basel Action Network
“But when the memory controller moves back onto the CPU die and takes the GPU with it, that’s going to give an instant, one-time boost to the overall platform’s performance and efficiency. In the case of both Intel and AMD, this boost should be large enough that, if you can hold off on your next laptop upgrade until next year, you should. These kinds of discontinuities, where a major, disruptive repartitioning of the standard system architecture drives a one-off performance boost, are quite rare. They’re worth holding out for if you can manage it.”
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Come one, come all to the new Chapel Hill / Durham Peace Corps Meetup group! I’m not sure what direction the group will take, but I’m definitely excited to meet some other volunteers, and folks interested in volunteering.
“Dozens of academic labs across the globe have since shown that small molecules designed to block the activity of mGluR5 have the same effect, reducing abnormalities in mice with the fragile X mutation. Those abnormalities include seizures, atypical rates of protein synthesis, and other molecular glitches…”These compounds have made remarkable changes in animal models of fragile X, rescuing abnormal synaptic connections,” says Hagerman. “We’re very hopeful it will do the same for humans.”
“HealthCampRDU aims to be a highly-collaborative, day-long conference with a focus on issues and opportunities related to the changing face of healthcare.”