Blog - Card Trick Leads to New Bound on Data Compression

Here's a card trick to impress your friends. Give a deck of cards to a pal and ask him or her to cut the deck, draw six cards and list their colours. You then immediately name the cards that have been drawn.

Magic? Not quite. Instead, it's the next best thing: mathematics. The key is to arrange the deck in advance so that the sequence of the card colours follows a specific pattern called a binary De Bruijn cycle. A De Bruijn sequence is a set from an alphabet in which every possible subsequence appears exactly once.

So when a deck of cards meets this criteria, it uniquely defines any sequences of six consecutive cards. All you have to do to perform the trick is memorise the sequences.

Usually these kinds of tricks come about as the result of some new development in mathematical thinking. Today, Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago turns the tables. He says that this trick has led him to a new mathematical bound on data compression

Gagie achieves this new bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards' colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn.

This time you're relying on probability to get the right answer. "It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128," say Gagie.

He goes on to consider the probability of correctly predicting the sequence of cards pulled at random from a deck of a certain size and after a few extra steps, finds a lower bound on the probability of doing this correctly.

This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.

"We know of no previous lower bounds comparable to [this one]," he says.

That's impressive, a really neat trick in itself.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4609: Bounds from a Card Trick

Print Favorite Share facebook twitter
-->

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=023b7ec7200686447ca34d68f025ac14

school closures turkey brine thanksgiving quotes nfl power rankings week 12

Crowdsourcing Jobs to a Worldwide Mobile Workforce

A few years ago, Nathan Eagle had a big idea. What if millions of people in poor countries?people who couldn't find work in their local economies?could become a remote workforce for organizations all over the world? And what if, instead of traveling to do such jobs at call centers or other outsourcing offices in big cities, they could do their work quickly, reliably, and easily through text messages on their mobile phones?

Eagle founded a small startup, Txteagle, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to put the idea to the test. It has struck deals with mobile-phone carriers around the world to pay workers in credits for mobile airtime. In many places, that's as good as cash.

But while the concept sounds promising, expanding the business has proved difficult. Eagle told Technology Review this summer that his venture is "going to be binary?a huge hit or a spectacular failure."

One big challenge is to find valuable tasks that can be completed through text messages and phone calls. Eagle got the idea for the company after he created a service that let nurses in the coastal Kenyan village of Kilifi send text messages to tell central blood banks how much blood their hospital had on hand, so its supplies could be refilled more efficiently. Simply compensating the nurses for the cost of their text messages turned out to be the key to its success.

He launched Txteagle in Kenya and eventually had 10,000 people doing part-time tasks such as filling out surveys for international agencies, translating text, or collecting address data for business directories. One of his first partners was Nokia, which paid local people to translate mobile-phone menu functions into the 60 languages used in the country. But that task was quickly exhausted.

Now Txteagle needs to form several solid partnerships with multinational corporations that could supply a steady stream of small tasks. Eagle believes one promising idea is to use Txteagle as a market-research tool: workers could be paid to help companies learn what sorts of products would be desired in their rural corners of the world.

Txteagle recently announced a collaboration with the United Nations, which will use the mobile-phone platform to survey up to 500,000 people in 70 countries about their local governance. That brings the number of countries with Txteagle workers up to 80. The U.N.'s goal is to lay the foundation for future disaster-response efforts by learning how well communities and their governments communicate with each other. People who complete the survey will be paid about $1 and reimbursed for the cost of the text message.

For the U.N. initiative, Txteagle is working with the Global Network for Disaster Reduction, a nonprofit organization that influences policy in more than 90 countries. Most nonprofits operate on a relatively small scale, says Terry Gibson, a project manager at GNDR, but Txteagle allows them to reach a significantly larger audience.

Txteagle isn't the only company exploring ways to crowdsource small tasks to people all over the world. In 2005, Amazon launched its Mechanical Turk project, which sets up a way for a large group of distributed workers to participate in jobs like identifying elements in a set of photographs or performing data entry and transcription. A San Francisco-based startup, CrowdFlower, collaborated with nonprofit organizations this year to have people translate and map text messages that were sent from victims of floods in Pakistan and the earthquake in Haiti. Lukas Beiwald, CEO of CrowdFlower, says his company compensates its workers through PayPal and, in some cases, with virtual currency like the money used in Second Life.

The fundamental technology behind Txteagle includes algorithms for quality control, so that people who do consistently accurate work make higher wages. Workers who recruit others are paid small bonuses. To generate revenue, the company takes a tiny fraction of certain paid transactions.

To make real money with this business model, however, Eagle will need millions of workers using the platform. For now, he estimates, about 100,000 people will be using Txteagle to make money by the end of U.N. survey. And he hopes to find enough partners, with enough of the right sort of small tasks, to push those numbers even higher. "We'd like to be the largest knowledge workforce in the world," he says.

Kate Greene and Nathan Eagle are coauthoring Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, to be published by MIT Press.

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=3569a5f034d0482435d1028d743ddfd5

cranberry sauce recipe thanksgiving word search printable cranberry relish sweet potato casserole

US government seizes 77 piracy and counterfeit domains

The US government has seized at least 77 domains belonging to sites associated with P2P file sharing and counterfeit goods. It appears that their owners were not notified, and the court system was apparently skipped, according to TorrentFreak.

The seizures were carried out suddenly and without warning by a branch of Homeland Security known as ICE. Many of the seized domains were online stores offering counterfeit goods, but there were also a few piracy websites, including a torrent search engine.

Torrent-Finder.com was a meta-search engine, meaning it didn't host BitTorrent links itself, but it offered an interface that loaded a selection of other BitTorrent search engines in iframes on the page. In other words, it didn't host copyright material, nor links to copyright material, but rather links to links to copyright material.

All of these domains now display the image shown above. Here is the corresponding text:

This domain name has been seized by ICE - Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court under the authority of 18 U.S.C. 981 and 2323.

Willful copyright infringement is a federal crime that carries penalties for first time offenders of up to five years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution (17 U.S.C 506, 18 U.S.C 2319). Intentionally and knowingly trafficking in counterfeit goods is a federal crime that carries penalties for first time offenders of up to ten years in federal prison, a $2,000,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution (18 U.S.C. 2320).

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41321-us-government-seizes-77-piracy-and-counterfeit-domains-.html

cranberry relish sweet potato casserole columbia house thanksgiving math worksheets

Blog - Card Trick Leads to New Bound on Data Compression

Here's a card trick to impress your friends. Give a deck of cards to a pal and ask him or her to cut the deck, draw six cards and list their colours. You then immediately name the cards that have been drawn.

Magic? Not quite. Instead, it's the next best thing: mathematics. The key is to arrange the deck in advance so that the sequence of the card colours follows a specific pattern called a binary De Bruijn cycle. A De Bruijn sequence is a set from an alphabet in which every possible subsequence appears exactly once.

So when a deck of cards meets this criteria, it uniquely defines any sequences of six consecutive cards. All you have to do to perform the trick is memorise the sequences.

Usually these kinds of tricks come about as the result of some new development in mathematical thinking. Today, Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago turns the tables. He says that this trick has led him to a new mathematical bound on data compression

Gagie achieves this new bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards' colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn.

This time you're relying on probability to get the right answer. "It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128," say Gagie.

He goes on to consider the probability of correctly predicting the sequence of cards pulled at random from a deck of a certain size and after a few extra steps, finds a lower bound on the probability of doing this correctly.

This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.

"We know of no previous lower bounds comparable to [this one]," he says.

That's impressive, a really neat trick in itself.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4609: Bounds from a Card Trick

Print Favorite Share facebook twitter
-->

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=023b7ec7200686447ca34d68f025ac14

columbia house thanksgiving math worksheets easter 2011 thanksgiving trivia

Chrome extension and Kinect control the browser with gestures

A group of students at the MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group, devoted to move UI design past the typical keyboard-and-mouse interface, has turned the Kinect motion controller into a tool for Web browsing. They wrote an extension for Google Chrome called DepthJS (yes, it uses Javascript) so that surfers can manipulate the browser with just gestures.

The group has demonstrated fairly simple website navigation in their video, embedded below (via Engadget). Making a fist is for selecting while a swatting motion allows scrolling.

"DepthJS is a web browser extension that allows any any web page to interact with the Microsoft Kinect via Javascript," according to the video's description. "Navigating the web is only one application of the framework we built - that is, we envision all sorts of applications that run in the browser, from games to specific utilities for specific sites. The great part is that now web developers who specialize in Javascript can work with the Kinect without having to learn any special languages or code. We believe this will allow a new set of interactions beyond what we first developed."

For those of you that came here just to watch the video, here's a bonus one:

In the video above, the Munich-based software company Evoluce shows Windows 7 applications being controlled through Kinect. There's multitouch support, which we've seen before, based on the company's Multitouch Input Management (MIM) driver for Kinect. The user can easily zoom and resize images as well as draw using two hands at once.

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41320-chrome-extension-and-kinect-control-the-browser-with-gestures.html

columbia house thanksgiving math worksheets easter 2011 thanksgiving trivia

Behold, the Airless Mesh Moontire by NASA and Goodyear [TNW Gadgets]

NASA and Goodyear invent a tire and writers get to invent another word. Behold the moontire, an airless, mesh tire design, able to handle extreme temperatures, both hot and cold, making it perfect for moon vehicles. NASA and Goodyear were awarded a 2010 R&D Award for their design, also called the Spring Tire, which includes 800 interwoven load-bearing springs.

?This tire is extremely durable and extremely energy efficient,? noted Jim Benzing, Goodyear?s lead innovator on the project. ?The spring design contours to the surface on which it?s driven to provide traction. But all of the energy used to deform the tire is returned when the springs rebound. It doesn?t generate heat like a normal tire.?

According to NASA researcher Vivake Asnani, the Spring Tire does not have a ?single point failure mode. What that means,? he said, ?is that a hard impact that might cause a pneumatic tire to puncture and deflate would only damage one of the 800 load bearing springs. Along with having this ultra-redundant characteristic, the tire has a combination of overall stiffness yet flexibility that allows off-road vehicles to travel fast over rough terrain with relatively little motion being transferred to the vehicle.?

The tire was made for the upcoming return of the human race to the Moon.

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2010/11/26/behold-the-airless-mesh-moontire-by-nasa-and-goodyear/

turkey brine thanksgiving quotes nfl power rankings week 12 westminster abbey

Crowdsourcing Jobs to a Worldwide Mobile Workforce

A few years ago, Nathan Eagle had a big idea. What if millions of people in poor countries?people who couldn't find work in their local economies?could become a remote workforce for organizations all over the world? And what if, instead of traveling to do such jobs at call centers or other outsourcing offices in big cities, they could do their work quickly, reliably, and easily through text messages on their mobile phones?

Eagle founded a small startup, Txteagle, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to put the idea to the test. It has struck deals with mobile-phone carriers around the world to pay workers in credits for mobile airtime. In many places, that's as good as cash.

But while the concept sounds promising, expanding the business has proved difficult. Eagle told Technology Review this summer that his venture is "going to be binary?a huge hit or a spectacular failure."

One big challenge is to find valuable tasks that can be completed through text messages and phone calls. Eagle got the idea for the company after he created a service that let nurses in the coastal Kenyan village of Kilifi send text messages to tell central blood banks how much blood their hospital had on hand, so its supplies could be refilled more efficiently. Simply compensating the nurses for the cost of their text messages turned out to be the key to its success.

He launched Txteagle in Kenya and eventually had 10,000 people doing part-time tasks such as filling out surveys for international agencies, translating text, or collecting address data for business directories. One of his first partners was Nokia, which paid local people to translate mobile-phone menu functions into the 60 languages used in the country. But that task was quickly exhausted.

Now Txteagle needs to form several solid partnerships with multinational corporations that could supply a steady stream of small tasks. Eagle believes one promising idea is to use Txteagle as a market-research tool: workers could be paid to help companies learn what sorts of products would be desired in their rural corners of the world.

Txteagle recently announced a collaboration with the United Nations, which will use the mobile-phone platform to survey up to 500,000 people in 70 countries about their local governance. That brings the number of countries with Txteagle workers up to 80. The U.N.'s goal is to lay the foundation for future disaster-response efforts by learning how well communities and their governments communicate with each other. People who complete the survey will be paid about $1 and reimbursed for the cost of the text message.

For the U.N. initiative, Txteagle is working with the Global Network for Disaster Reduction, a nonprofit organization that influences policy in more than 90 countries. Most nonprofits operate on a relatively small scale, says Terry Gibson, a project manager at GNDR, but Txteagle allows them to reach a significantly larger audience.

Txteagle isn't the only company exploring ways to crowdsource small tasks to people all over the world. In 2005, Amazon launched its Mechanical Turk project, which sets up a way for a large group of distributed workers to participate in jobs like identifying elements in a set of photographs or performing data entry and transcription. A San Francisco-based startup, CrowdFlower, collaborated with nonprofit organizations this year to have people translate and map text messages that were sent from victims of floods in Pakistan and the earthquake in Haiti. Lukas Beiwald, CEO of CrowdFlower, says his company compensates its workers through PayPal and, in some cases, with virtual currency like the money used in Second Life.

The fundamental technology behind Txteagle includes algorithms for quality control, so that people who do consistently accurate work make higher wages. Workers who recruit others are paid small bonuses. To generate revenue, the company takes a tiny fraction of certain paid transactions.

To make real money with this business model, however, Eagle will need millions of workers using the platform. For now, he estimates, about 100,000 people will be using Txteagle to make money by the end of U.N. survey. And he hopes to find enough partners, with enough of the right sort of small tasks, to push those numbers even higher. "We'd like to be the largest knowledge workforce in the world," he says.

Kate Greene and Nathan Eagle are coauthoring Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, to be published by MIT Press.

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=3569a5f034d0482435d1028d743ddfd5

nfl power rankings week 12 westminster abbey school closures due to weather lee majors

Crytek: the PC is "a generation ahead," but PS3 and 360 holding it back

Crytek believes that because developers are focusing on the PS3 and the 360, the game quality on the PC is being held back. This is happening despite the company saying that the PC is already "a generation ahead" of Sony's and Microsoft's consoles.

Crytek is currently working on Crysis 2 for all three platforms. The original Crysis was an exclusive for the PC. That being said, Crytek has already stated that Crysis 2 will be graphically superior on the PC.

"As long as the current console generation exists and as long as we keep pushing the PC as well, the more difficult it will be to really get the benefit of both," Cevat Yerli, founder, CEO, and President of Crytek, told the latest issue of Edge, according to CVG. "PC is easily a generation ahead right now. With 360 and PS3, we believe the quality of the games beyond Crysis 2 and other CryEngine developments will be pretty much limited to what their creative expressions is, what the content is. You won't be able to squeeze more juice from these rocks."

Developers have very low sales expectations for the PC, compared to consoles. It's a vicious cycle: the PC market doesn't give the same revenue as the console market, so companies don't spend much on the PC version of a game. This is certainly true for games like Unreal Tournament 3: it would have been much better had it been released as a PC exclusive.

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/41323-crytek-the-pc-is-a-generation-ahead-but-ps3-and-360-holding-it-back.html

cranberry relish sweet potato casserole columbia house thanksgiving math worksheets

Visualizing thanks: ThankfulFor and JESS3?s Gratitude Index 2010 [TNW Shareables]

Take one part ?thank you? and one part social media. Mix well and pass it out to the world for a tasty bit of infographic from JESS3 and ThankfulFor. The site, which allows you to create what it calls a ?personal gratitude journal?, has handed over a wealth of anonymous data to the JESS3 crew. Doing the thing that JESS3 does, they put together a pretty amazing set of visualizations showing what people are most thankful for.

There are some interesting points to be seen, as noted in the ThankfulFor Blog. Among these points, is that people are most often thankful for other people. While there are 39 other general ?themes? for which people express their thanks, people was the runaway leader with 45.2% of the activity in this section.

Beyond that, people tend to be thankful for experiences, inspiration, things and of course activities. But some of the rest might surprise you. Want to take a look? Here?s the full report:

Gratitude Index 2010 from Thankfulfor.com

Our personal thanks, of course, goes out to ThankfulFor and the JESS3 crews for providing a really cool look at this timely subject. Do make sure to check out the other JESS3 things that we?ve highlighted on TNW as well.

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/11/26/visualizing-thanks-thankfulfor-and-jess3s-gratitude-index-2010/

beaverton school district ina garten north korea bombs south korea thanksgiving games

Numulus for iPhone: A unique approach to math-based puzzle games [TNW Apps]

While we don?t cover games very often here at TNW, it?s Friday and that means that things sometimes take a lighter heart. With that in mind, we?d like to present you with Numulus.

Numulus is, at its heart, a game of math puzzles. But unlike the quick addition or find that number style games that we?ve seen in the past, Numulus takes a completely different approach. In one game, for instance, you?ll see a cloud of numbers. Your job is to find the medium sized number of one color, then a large sized number of another color, add them together and then input your answer.

Sounds easy? It?s incredibly challenging, to say the least. By forcing your mind outside of its comfort zone of a single-line process, Numulus proves to be engaging, fun and best of all effective.

Like any good game, there?s a global scoring system, so as you get better and faster, you?ll move up in the ranks. That alone is worth the replay value, but the added benefit of continually challenging yourself will keep you coming back for more.

Broken into four sections, Numulus awards you extra time for your next puzzle when you finish your current one quickly. As you progress, predictably, the levels get harder. While it will seem like child?s play at first, the later levels are challenging and fast enough to have you at an Angry Birds level of fun frustration.

Give it a shot. It?s got our vote, for sure. It?s $.99 from the App Store, but will likely be the cheapest thing you?ll buy on Black Friday.

Powered by WizardRSS | Best Membership Site Software

Source: http://thenextweb.com/apps/2010/11/26/numulus-for-iphone-a-unique-approach-to-math-based-puzzle-games/

turkey brine thanksgiving quotes nfl power rankings week 12 westminster abbey