For web designers out there, this would be an interesting place to spend some time.
LivIcons is a project dedicated to animated icons with the power of scalable vector graphics.
You can download the entire set from Code Canyon here.
Some features worth mentioning are
<div>, <span>, <li> or <i> with class .livicon and some data- attributes
Wonderful feature story by Ron Nixon in the NY Times on the US Postal Service’s data conversion operators, a techie title for someone who deciphers unreadable addresses.
You should read it here.
It envelopes you with a sense of nostalgia and a sense of loss, as in September, the post office plans to close one of its two remaining centers where workers try to read the scribble on envelopes and address labels that machines cannot. Compare it with the fact that at one time, there were 55 plants around the country where addresses rejected by machines were guessed at by workers aided with special software to get the mail where it was intended.
It’s an amazing story of human will to go to any length to solve a problem and slowly losing relevance to automation taking over human processing capabilities.
Read through -
“Over the years, the Postal Service has become the world leader in optical character recognition — software capable of reading computer-generated lettering and handwriting — sinking millions of dollars into equipment that can read nearly 98 percent of all hand-addressed mail and 99.5 percent of machine-addressed pieces.
That was not always the case. In the beginning, people sorted mail. As the volume and variety increased, the post office turned to automation. But the machines could read only about 35 percent of the mail at first and had trouble with handwritten addresses. So the Postal Service set up the centers, using people to supplement the scanners. At the height of the program, in 1997, the centers processed 19 billion images annually, about 10 percent of all mail at the time, the post office said.
In the last year, this center, and the one in Wichita, Kan., that will close in September, deciphered just 2.4 billion images, or a mere 1.5 percent of the mail, the post office said.”
Kudos. You Guys.
Ray Kurzweil has held many hats. Accomplished scientist, entrepreneur, among the foremost thinkers in the realm of artificial intelligence and most recently as Director of Engineering at Google.
The naturally held belief is that Kurzweil will use his 50 years of expertise in AI and bring it together with the learnings from Knowledge Graph to revolutionize semantic search for Google.
Fascinating interview of how he intends to do it here, by Forbes journalist, Robert Hof.
However one part of this enthralling interview stood out for me.
“I will say that IBM’s Watson [the famous Jeopardy!-playing computer] does an impressive job of actually understanding semantic language, and it shows the feasibility of doing this. All the knowledge that Watson had was not hand-coded in some computer language. The idea that you could write down all this common-sense knowledge … turns out to be very brittle, because it doesn’t reflect the ambiguities sufficiently in language and common-sense knowledge.
Watson didn’t work that way. It actually got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and several other encyclopedias, and then played a game that is not a narrow task. It’s really equivalent to answering questions. The queries can be very diverse. For example, it got the query, “A long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping,” and it answered, “What is a meringue harangue?” Watson got a higher score in Jeopardy! than the next best two human players put together.”
This came in yesterday.
Mozilla is partnering with cloud-based 3D graphics rendering firm OTOY to develop a new codec called ORBX.js, which is capable of streaming high-definition video and Windows, Linux or Mac OS X apps to any browser that supports HTML5.
What is does tell us:
If you were all wowed by the 3D rendering in complex CGI work in hollywood Sci FI flicks, wait to be more enamored.
This just made it much more simpler, faster and dynamic.
And understand, that software coding and hardware design was the closest be being an artiste in the realm of technology.
Its pure art. Period.
It’s the true form of creation that can create technological change.
And though I got a good enough opportunity to walk that line early in my career I chose not to, because of some silly preconceived notions.
The stupid naivety of youth.
[video]
Is not an innovation.
An innovative idea is a great idea, but still- not innovation.
Let’s not confuse ideas with innovation.
Innovations do start with an idea, but are not tactical, have a long term value and generally aim at solving critical problems.
Probably the most effective social TV tool.
So now let’s everyone add a hashtag to our TV ads, soap opera’s, serials, movies,cooking shows, news, run it on primetime, and ask TV viewers to use that tag and join an online conversation.
Let’s define it in business parlance as this is how we are drawing your television audience to social media and increasing “engagement”.
Let’s call that innovation.
In the world is to try your hand at social media marketing.
You can be an expert in less than a year.
In no other skill set / job can you gain expertise level in that short a time-frame.
Give it a shot.
A social media campaign adds thousands of new followers, millions of impressions and fans overnight, apart from mutual congratulations from other social media junkies, glitzy presentations which go to great pains to define something as engagement, and award submission frenzy , what insight does it really tell you ( the brand) ?
It does tell you ( the brand) that a bunch of people liked your social media campaign without telling you that they liked it because it was you ( the brand) who was driving it- but that they are happy that you came up with that idea.
It does tell you that because of all those tweets and retweets, the traditional media wrote about it ( because you fed a PR story) which was again shared and tweeted and posted and created a lot of awareness and consideration for the brand image.
It does tell you it’s a good way to get some good PR with relatively less effort.
It does tell you that you have a lot of metrics to show but you don’t REALLY know what it ACTUALLY means.
Not Yet.