Decision trees have proven to be sucessful in direct marketing/ecommerce applications such as incremental response modeling. Because of their explicit nature, decision trees trees can be used for workflow optimization in industrial environments as well.
The company I work for does CMS and business-directory products for news/media companies; we've been doing the "open until" (and, for places not yet open, "opens at") thing for a while. Example:
and for us daysleepers, doing something reasonable for the resteraunts 'will be opening in the next half hour' would be useful. probably also useful for people wanting an early lunch, etc..
Haha, that makes me think of 'voting' for clojure as voting for Nader.
Funny, since I wrote my blog in clojure/compojure and found it easy going compared to Rails (which, to be fair, I had attempted to learn before having any real programming experience). That was my first experience with "a lisp", and it went well. Unfortunately, I think self-imposed cynicism about lisp is a big part of what keeps it from going mainstream.
EDIT: however, I respect that experiencing lisp not going mainstream for years would kill pretty much anyone's optimism :)
This looks neat, but it appears to be an 'academic' exercise. I couldn't find any source code written for the JOP (the only project in the Links section was down) after scanning some of the pdfs. I did, however, notice the 64 journal publications the creator has on the subject.
OTOH, he definitely appears to have put a lot of work into this, and I would like to test it out, if I can figure out how.
It doesn't look too hard, if you have an Altera FPGA. Just follow the "Getting Started" link, and it will show you how to download and build the source.
We just covered Neural Nets in my machine learning class, and the professor made some comments about how far a good name can take you. Neural Nets are better than other learning algorithms in some ways and worse than others, but the name gives you the sense that you are learning the secrets of how the brain works. That may or may not be true, but it sure has served as good branding for the Neural Networks algorithm.
I'd buy that. For me, listening to music while coding is an engineering problem: how to minimize the tendency to let the mind wander without overwhelming it with new input.
For me that means using music that is ambient enough without verging on elevator muzak style irritation. I ended up with instrumental hip-hop (dj shadow, etc).
Of course that 'solution' eventually led to the great schism and many different versions (king james, etc.). So maybe the deeper truth is that people enjoy arguing?
They should have called it clay (you know, model stuff, like with clay ;); the first thing I thought of was http://www.cray.com supercomputers. Maybe that was intentional.
After browsing the source, it seems they are using Java2D primitives, specifically BufferedImage to do textures and shaders. I wonder if this project could use JOGL bindings...
EDIT: btw, I meant to say that this looks pretty badass
Right, although there are options to combine the two.
Shader language can be used to write raytracers running entirely on the GPU, rendering the output to merely two textured triangles streched over the screen.
However as we are talking about Clojure, not shader languages, an alternative way would be offloading some of the weight lifting to OpenGL, for example by calculating visibility using the videocard's z-buffers or creating shadow maps by rendering the scene from the lights' viewpoint into shadow buffers and using the results in the raytracer.
Ah, thanks, that makes sense. What I was thinking of was the many times I've crashed java by trying to load/render decently sized images in memory (something about how heap space takes awhile to dynamically allocate). You could specify initial heap size with a command line flag, but it was hacky and I had a hard time getting it to work consistently.
See, but this is very much the problem. Records provided an unequal distribution of wealth amongst performing artists before the internet. Why pay to listen to an up-and-coming classical artist when an exquisite recording of Chopin's work all ready exists?
Now, the internet has magnified this even further. An incredibly narrow band of artists are currently being compensated in any way (live performance, merch, cds), and this trend appears to be continuing. In general, the life of a performing musician pretty much sucks. Take a blog post by David Byrne I found on here awhile ago http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2009/08/080809-edinburgh-so-ho... . He's working pretty damn hard, and he's famous!
I'm not saying that file sharing is inherently wrong, I'm just saying deep down, we know there's a system that will rise out of this that will undoubtedly be regulated. I'd rather be having that discussion, than saying 'oh, I wouldn't have paid for that'
The Internet has been indispensable in my quest to find up-and-coming artists! Many of the bands I've learned about have been introduced at random by Pandora. I've gone on to buy quite a few albums (and seen shows) thanks to that passive discovery process.
...we know there's a system that will rise out of this that will undoubtedly be regulated.
That sounds wonderful -- because we all know how much regulation fosters innovation! I'd rather never have that discussion. I guess I don't understand what you're advocating in general. Music has been an integral part of society since caveman days; just because record labels found a way to get fat by extorting consumers and artists alike doesn't mean people have some god-given right to be paid for their self-expression (but often times they deserve it.)
Hmm, you definitely have a point. People have rarely felt musicians should be paid (a lot) for their self-expression; I can't really recall when it was a lucrative career. What I suppose I meant was that the best musicians have often (though not always) been poor business people.
You're also right that sometimes they deserve to be paid. It is my intuition that the free market works against supporting the largest number of musicians. It may work to reward the best, but to me, that doesn't foster innovation (since musicians rarely look at the payoff in terms of money--probably fame). Certain acts are always going to be very famous, but there probably is a lot of room for diversity.
The optimal strategy for creativity/diversity would be to provide a (minimal) amount of reimbursement for attempting to create music. This would not only bring music creation back to the masses (where it probably should be) but could also provide an incentive for creative people to put work out and also buy dinner.
