Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is an interesting option in which services, ideas, and content are outsourced from a wider online community, towards streamlining of cost-effectiveness, and faster delivery of work, in a distributed fashion without the added complexity. Although, quality can be a bit questionable at times but that is what one attains from economies of scale and the mass division of labor. There are now many contextual ways of crowdsourcing based on various needs and requirements. Amazon MechanicalTurk, provides an option for crowdsourcing on distribution of granular tasks based on specific human intelligence requirements that may not be very plausible for computers. There are now even different types of crowdsourcing emerging as business and individual needs grow in the world of globalization. Crowdvoting allows one to garner topical opinions and judgements directly from the online community. Even crowdsourcing for creatives allows businesses to get various design work completed quickly. There are even crowdsourcing options available when different language translation needs arise. Also, crowdfunding has become popular as small businesses and individuals look for alternatives for funding their projects who may have been declined by banks or find funding from a pool of people more accessible option. Crowdsourcing also adds a way of getting a large input from the crowd ranging in various contexts. Although, for individuals that are providing the work resource, it may not be so lucrative as often the pay is quite low. In other respects, it may allow one to gather opinions quickly about their own work in a collaborative manner and provide a way to better showcase their work for recommendations. Internet is moving towards a more collaborative and connected web. While this may offer more options for business and individual collaboration, it also provides a lot of drawbacks and complexities for employment law and in the global regulatory scheme of things.  

Can You Spare £100,000

Begging is a growing epidemic in many big cities of the world. Often high unemployment and strains from the economic climate bring people to desperation. But, what we also see is that the inflationary effects can also be seen with beggars. People in general are also reluctant to offer help in big cities and are quite skeptical of getting involved in other peoples' personal affairs or situations. Beggars also have many sides to them and require a careful observance from a passerby. At times, many beggars even appear to dress better than the passerby. Is this to say that they are making more on any given day or week than a minimum wage earning worker? Should one really drop change to a beggar, if they can wear clothes that look like they weren't bought from a yard sale or a charity shop? If one can afford to keep a dog, should one really be begging on the streets? It is a conundrum of sorts at times in the context of which people can find a beggar and the way they are able to exploit the good nature of many. Perhaps, identifying genuine beggars requires a keen observant eye. In places like London, beggars may even frown if one leaves them a 1p coin. But, one that really gets the pickle is in the expensive areas. Ironically, there are beggars that can be found sitting on sides actively asking for £100,000 to spare from passersby "can you spare me a £100,000". They can actively be seen sitting in corners with well washed football jerseys, clean denims, and pretty sleek pair of trainers. One wonders whether there really are such gullible people out there to fall for such dubious tricks of the begging trade. Beggars are really shafting up the wrong end of the stick. An almost synonymous to the Oliver Twist shenanigans. In other areas, we can find a whole team of worker honeypots of women edged a few distances away from each other begging for money. Perhaps, they are even supporting their income in such a way while living on benefits. We can imagine in some cases there could be people running a business of begging, right from under us, while exploiting the good nature of many. Such things are also quite typical in developing countries as was so vividly illustrated in Slumdog Millionaire. Although, there are many genuine beggars that exist in cities who really do deserve our support. Unfortunately, such double-dealing antics makes one more dubious of the genuineness of beggars and in keeping to an overall vigilant attitude.

Pattern

Pattern is quite a useful web mining module which provides bundles for searching, textual analysis, and data visualization. As a Python module it could be variously used alongside NLTK. With 30+ example scripts to utilize there is a quick way of easily picking up on specific methods but also building functionality. 

Web Of Security

It would be useful to have a global linked database of identifiable viruses in a semantic database which can be graphically tracked to identify vulnerabilities and shared methods for identification, detection, awareness, and prevention. Security vulnerabilities pose a big threat on the Internet. They can even be attached to semantic data as random noise. Once viruses are semantically represented they could then provide for richer context for artificial immunology. In almost all cases, Internet security software is left behind playing catch up leaving many vulnerabilities undetected. Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence can play a big role in tackling many security issues both from view of identity protection as well as in the processing of data resources over the Internet. 

Global Optimization

Global Optimization is an area of study in mathematical terms in dealing with aspects of system optimizations based on a set criteria function. There are numerous applications of such optimization strategies towards finding a global optimal state within a set parametric constraint. There may even be many states within a given search space. And, there are formulated algorithms devised to provide ways of finding optimizations for various contextual domains. The below reference sources provide for more information in the area especially within the domains of natural computation.

Global Optimization Algorithms

Essentials of Metaheuristics

Bio-inspired Artificial Intelligence

Global Optimization with Matlab
Global Optimization on Wolfram MathWorld

Swarm Intelligence: From Natural To Artificial Systems

Ant Colony Optimization

Particle Swarm Optimization

An Introduction To Genetic Algorithms

Differential Evolution

Game Of Thrones Editing

Editing of scenes is crucial towards meeting realism within story expectations and providing a consistent character profiles. One of the most annoying aspects that could be had is when the very important part of the scenes are exploding with character mistakes. Game of Thrones has many unique character profiles. However, central to every role is the use of the sword. When one plays their roles or lines incorrectly this can often be overshadowed by the flawed use of the sword. Arya Stark is a character profiled as left-handed. However, this character portrayal is rather confusing as the core aspects of wielding the sword are quite badly managed in sequence. This seems to occur in almost every scene. One would imagine that unless the individual is ambidextrous, it may be quite a training phase to shift the mindset to left-handed. However, where the sword is central to almost every role, it becomes quite crucial in maintaining a certain level of consistency with the character or the realism can often be dissipated. The Hound and Arya scene at the bar is one such example. She starts out clutching the sword with both hands, even throws a bout with both hands, but then we see her attacking with right-hand then picking up needle with the right hand also, only to later swap hands.

Arya starts her revenge 

Hello Beautiful

The Selfridges campaign of 'Hello Beautiful' comes across a bit devilish in the way it mirrors and resembles the symbolic representations of the illuminati. Perhaps, just an oversight in representation. But, if one notices the words and symbols it almost sounds like it is stating 'Hell Beautiful' with the all seeing eye symbol, illuminated to the right, which is really meant to be an 'o'. Or, maybe it is just meant to imply that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

the beauty project hello beautiful

Open Annotations

Open Annotations Community is an interesting collaborative group defining the standards for specifications on interoperable and extendable annotations which can be enabled for sharing across multiple application, device, and service domains. The open approach here looks towards maximizing on accessibility with unfettered access and even for the addition of new techniques. At same time, there is compatibility with use of standard approaches of publish/subscribe models. Although, it does not define a specific protocol for such interactions. The seamless effort is designed to work with the simplicity of the displaced architecture of the web. As a semantic web standard the approach towards an annotation is taken from the viewpoint of an RDF graph serialization. The design stipulates for body with one or more targets which can be defined as URI resources.  Although, some annotations may not utilize a body. Each resource then has a very distinctive metadata and provenance information with any relevant media type that can be dereferenced. Additional representations can also be defined or resolved as changes arise to resources via content negotiation. There are extensive use cases available for open annotations. The open annotations community is also very active and has draft specification in place for data model.

Clerezza

Clerezza is an OSGI service approach to building semantically driven web applications. It comes with a rich set of integration points and features which make it aptly useful for building to modular services. There is even a conscious effort towards security management with use of WebID which at times is almost lacking in some frameworks. As most aspects of semantic web processing is layered through a workflow process, building to bundles is often more efficient and useful for seamless integration of components. Such bundles might provide features for RDF/JSON formats for building semantic applications and using standard open technologies for implementations such as Jersey, Felix, Jena, Jetty, and even JQuery. The approach can even be made as a platform with specific compile and runtime requirements. Content management systems have multiple parts for working with aspects of content. Semantic web not only makes content more accessible but also using Clerezza can ease the implementation. There are two aspects to the Clerezza project: semantic web application development as well as the RDF storage and manipulation. The core implementations of Clerezza have been engineered in Scala language and provides for use of renderlets which are defined as part of ScalaServerPages for creating various representations. The approach follows the W3C RDF specification and triples are stored using smart content binding which is a versatile layer and very much agnostic to technology providing for both access and modification. The smart content binding also makes use of named graphs to facilitate operations on the data model as well as options to access multiple domain graphs. There are also various adaptors available for processing of RDF graphs. Lastly, the smart content binding provides serialization and parsing services for various conversions and representations. Although, the project does try to provide a very seamless approach, one of the core drawbacks to the initiatives has been in the lack of documentation which makes the stack difficult to understand as well as the use cases for implementation. There have been some efforts made towards improvement in this area and the project is actively in development. One very interesting integration convention is between UIMA/Clerezza for textual annotations using the Annotations Ontology. One can refer further to this on the Domeo Annotations Toolkit paper or the slideshare. 

Dart Programming

Apart from having clearer code base and more structure, Dart has very little traction so far compared to lush green pastures of Javascript. Especially, when it comes to community driven libraries and support, there is hardly a comparison that can be matched on the front-end. JavaScript is even pacing itself on the server-side as well. There is also a major compatibility hurdle for Dart where almost everything will require a need to port to support the language. Already, many industry vendors have rejected the notion of supporting Dart on their platforms and even browser support is still fairly limited. A few clear drawbacks emerge from using Dart especially when: it is not supported by Chrome, lacks vendor support, even dart2js is fairly limited in support and developer community is also fragmented. Google has also built Angularjs. Although, a port for Dart also exists, it seems to make very little sense to build a framework based on HTML5 and JavaScript if the intended view was to replace it with Dart.  In terms of the richness of libraries available, Javascript is also a cooler language and more versatile. One can agree that JavaScript is not a perfect language. But, every language has its quirks which does not mean it is flawed. Since, there is little support for Dart in the browser it will have a very slow traction in the community in similar respects to how Java struggled to meet community demand and had to bestow itself as primarily a server-side language. Although, there is very little in comparison to Dart and Java especially as one is more of a web programming language and the other is a very well established platform. Even the confusing domain use of Dart as a replacement to JavaScript can be seen as side stepping the mark. The slow pace with which Dart community is moving may imply that it is only in time when the project will reach a standstill and perhaps may even be shelved as another experiment of the past.

24: Live Another Day

A new season continuation of a hotly anticipated 24 which is to be aired as Live Another Day. The episodes might just be diabolical or just rudimentary in failure. In all fairness, the whole set of 8 seasons of the past show series have been exceptional which have over time made them a classic as well as a box set to be had in every home. We will see what new drama and action thrills awaits Jack Bauer as well as the political intrigue that follows to push him over the edge of an almost single handed G.I.Joe like figure.

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