Month: July 2007

UK Flood Mapping

While OSM is a wiki with an archive, it doesn’t really handle change connected to specific moments in time. Roads are flooded for only so long. Here in Brighton, one of the core roads is reduced to one lane for a year while the Victorian Sewer is replaced. The changes need to be marked as impermanent. Also an issue in representing historic maps — I’m interested in producing historical literature maps of London, and that data needs proper tagging to show validity in only certain time slices.

makes the case that some of the flood data should be in the base map.

Stochastic Encoding

The Minimum Description Length framework is powerful but is often overlooked. I believe that 1 reason for this is that methods for attaining efficient encodings are subtle. In this paper, I discuss one of those techniques, stochastic encoding. When there are multiple nearly equally valuable choices of a parameter, it is more valuable to choose stochastically—according to a probability distribution— rather than selecting the single best choice. Why? Because information can be transmitted in which parameter is chosen. This is exactly the “bitsback” argument

shows how text classifiers can be traced back to compression algorithms

Inductive charging

Soljacic and his collaborators had demonstrated a new way of coaxing magnetic fields into transferring power over a distance of several meters without dispersing as electromagnetic waves. The demonstration ushered in a technology that might eventually become as pervasive as the gadgets it could power. Laptops, cell phones, iPods, and digital cameras might someday recharge without power cords. With the proliferation of wireless electronics, perhaps it was just a matter of time before power transmission would go wireless, too.

pretty good layman’s introduction to the recent MIT induction breakthrough

Farcical debates

As for these being questions from ’average’ people, I find this unlikely. Leaving aside the skewed age demographic, these aren’t questions from people too poor to have the computer equipment. These aren’t questions from people who work 2 jobs, just to make ends meet and who don’t have the time to create such videos.

CNN is filtering the questions and therefore doubts that “tough questions” make it through. “This isn’t politics, this is entertainment,. All that’s different from entertainment offerings in the past is we’ve exchanged the Ziegfield girls for YouTube sock puppets.”