Alex Polizzi's Secret Italy | Documentary | via ABC
The New York Times – Obituary – Overlooked No More: Karen Sparck Jones, Who Established the Basis for Search Engines. A pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field.
“When most scientists were trying to make people use code to talk to computers, Karen Sparck Jones taught computers to understand human language instead. In so doing, her technology established the basis of search engines like Google. A self-taught programmer with a focus on natural language processing, and an advocate for women in the field, Sparck Jones also foreshadowed by decades Silicon Valley’s current reckoning, warning about the risks of technology being led by computer scientists who were not attuned to its social implications. “A lot of the stuff she was working on until five or 10 years ago seemed like mad nonsense, and now we take it for granted,” said John Tait, a longtime friend who works with the British Computer Society. Sparck Jones’s seminal 1972 paper in the Journal of Documentation laid the groundwork for the modern search engine. In it, she combined statistics with linguistics — an unusual approach at the time — to establish formulas that embodied principles for how computers could interpret relationships between words. By 2007, Sparck Jones said, “pretty much every web engine uses those principles.”..”
Sasha aka Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Not quite the Right result: Congresswoman dancing video goes viral
The New York Times: Our Favorite Facts of 2018. “Each day, our editors collect the most interesting, striking or delightful facts to appear in that day’s stories throughout the paper. Here are 60 of our very favorites.”
US Spies Want to Know How to Spot Compromised AI Defense One
The Best Book Covers of 2018
Remastered Film Footage of 1890s Paris
Google Cloud: “For over 100 years, The New York Times has stored its historical news clippings and photographs in an underground archive lovingly named the “morgue.” Most of us keep stacks of pictures in our attic or basement. And media organizations are no different. The New York Times has archived approximately five to seven million of their old photos three stories below street level near their Times Square offices. Until now finding a photo in the morgue has been a manual task for journalists. A card catalog pointed them to a file cabinet and a drawer where the search for a topic began. With the exception of one extraordinary caretaker, many of the images haven’t been seen in years. Together with Google Cloud,The New York Times is digitizing the morgue and creating a custom software solution that will give journalists access to explore it in a whole new way. For the newsroom, the digital archive will inspire stories for Past Tense, a body of coverage dedicated to revisiting history through photographs.”NSW's 'shared' approach to fight terrorism unveiled
BRUCE BAWER: Hijab in the House. “One of the notable results of the November 6 midterm elections was that the U.S. House of Representatives went from two Muslim members — Indiana’s André Carson and Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, who on the same day was elected his state’s attorney general — to three Muslims, Carson plus two new female members from Michigan and Minnesota. With few if any exceptions, the mainstream media rooted for these ladies throughout the campaign season and lustily cheered their victories, not because of their skills or experience or political views but because they represented ‘diversity’.”
The NSW government has ramped up its approach to tackle terrorism with community leaders and the private sector playing a key role in combating the threat
Tania Bruguera, Just Out Of Prison, Files Defamation Lawsuit Against Cuban Government
“Tired of suffering defamations in state media publications such as Granmanewspaper … as well as official websites from the Ministry of Culture,” said the artist-activist in a statement, “I have decided to legally act against parties who have damaged myself and my family, psychologically, socially, and professionally.” —Artnet
“The illustrated and interactive Dante’s Inferno, an alternative learning tool for the Divine Comedy first Cantica, made for aiding visual memory. The printed version and thisdigital version of the Dante’s Inferno have been developed to be a synsemic access point to Dante’s literature, aiding its study.
The work is based on the anthology “Testi e scenari” – Volume 1 (Panebianco, Pisoni, Reggiani, Malpensa), published by Zanichelli in 2009, and it has been developed by Alpaca together with the Molotro design studio. The project won the Grand Prix and the Gold prize for Didactics at IIID Awards 2017, by the International Institute of Information Design. The translation to the English language is based on the one provided by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The whole text is available on Wikisource and it’s in the public domain. We chose the Longfellow translation not only because it’s open source, but also for its closeness to the language of Dante. The syntax, the rhythm, the lexicon used by Longfellow may feel odd for native english speakers, but they render the original language with great accuracy. As in the Italian version, we provided links to the Wikipedia descriptions of the Cantos or the characters, but we noticed that for this subject the English Wikipedia is less reliable and precise than the Italian one, so use it with caution and read the original text!..”
How A Surrealist Painting Saved The Lives Of The Family Of The World’s Most Dangerous Drug Lord
Victoria Eugenia Henao, widow of Pablo Escobar of the Medellín drug cartel (yes, Millennials, he was even worse than El Chapo), says that Salvador Dalí’s The Dance accomplished something that even the hipposcouldn’t: it kept her and her family safe more than once. — The New York Times
