November 2006 Archives
I'm at home today preparing for Thanksgiving - it's the one holiday that we always host at our place, and tomorrow we have a record-setting 25 people for dinner!
For the last twenty-five-or-so years I've made this cranberry bourbon relish, which has become somewhat of a cult favorite among family and friends - if you care to try it, here's how:
Bourbon Cranberry Relish
Combine 1 cup bourbon, 1/4 cup minced shallots, and grated zest of one orange in a non-reactive saucepan. Bring to a boil over moderate heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until bourbon is reduced to a glaze, about ten minutes.
Add one package of cranberries and one cup of sugar, stirring till sugar dissolves. Reduce heat and simmer until cranberries open, about ten minutes.
Remove from heat and stir in one teaspoon ground pepper. Let cool to room temperature, then refrigerate.
makes 10-12 servings.
Enjoy, and have a safe and joyous Thanksgiving!
Technorati Tags: puppy, cranberries, thanksgiving
This should be a very cool talk, and there's plenty of advance notice to get it on your calendars:
Cynthia Breazeal: “The Art and Science of Social Robots”
March 1, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Kane Hall 120, University of Washington
Cynthia Breazeal (Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT) directs the Robotic Life Group at the MIT Media Lab. She is internationally known for seamlessly blending scientific theories, artistic insights, and engineering principles to create compelling robotic creatures that have a lively social presence to those who interact with them. She has participated in the development of some of the world’s most famous robots including the upper torso humanoid robot, Cog, and the sociable robot, Kismet. Her current research extends these themes in the area of human-robot relations to create cooperative and capable robots that can work and learn in partnership with people. Her research program strives to revolutionize the art and science of human-robot interaction and cooperation—to develop robots that engage with us as helpful partners that will ultimately play a valuable, rewarding, and unprecedented role in the everyday lives of ordinary people. For more information on Cynthia Breazeal, see http://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/.
Breazeal’s talk is part of a special initiative on the digital humanities sponsored by the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington. The collaborative context for the Simpson Center’s digital humanities initiative is InFormation 2006-2007, an ambitious nation-wide project involving campuses across the country under the rubric of HASTAC, the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. As a consortium, HASTAC is dedicated to leveraging its collective institutional resources to integrate humanists into the projects and conversations shaping the digital world.
For more information on Breazeal’s talk or the digital humanities initiative, please contact Linda Wagner, UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, at lmwagner@ascomp.washington.edu or 206-221-3191.
Technorati Tags: events, technology, UW
My friends and colleagues over in the Catalyst Web Tools team have released a new version of WebQ, their quizzing and survey software. This version includes a feature they're calling Skip Logic:
Skip logic (also known as branching) allows you to create custom paths through your survey or quiz, showing the participants questions based on their response to a previous question.
This ability to add logic to questions essentially turns WebQ into a very nice lightweight generalized web forms and workflow tool.
I'm using this feature to build a RSVP form for an invitation we're sending out for a training class. The first question on the form asked people if they're going to attend (yes or no) or send someone else in their place. If they reply that they're sending someone else, then they get asked for that person's name and email. If they just reply yes or no they don't get asked that question.
It's a trivial example, but it's not hard to think up lots of uses for this feature - though I have to admit to being disappointed that I couldn't base logic on textual patterns in narrative answers. Maybe that will come later!
Here's what the skip logic looks like when you're building a WebQ - the person filling out the survey gets sent to one of several different places based on their answer to the first question:
One of the first programs I ever wrote, back in the early 1980s, generated a random set list for the band I was playing in at the time, Eddie and the Atlantics (the program was written in Basic on a Timex/Sinclair ZX81). While the program didn't encapsulate any of the "business" rules we used for planning set lists (start and end with faster tunes, vary the song keys and rhythmic styles, feature each of the singers and soloists, etc.), it did tend to turn up interesting combinations of songs or parts of sets.
I was reminded of this when Jim Bruce sent around this article about Eric Bonabeau's Hunch Engine software, that uses evolutionary algorithms along with human choice to progressively refine solutions to problems posed.
No software can take all these things into account. So programmers shouldn't even try, argues Bonabeau. Instead, they should look to nature, in which random mutation and natural selection produce the features that fit an organism to its environment. Evolutionary algorithms start with a few solutions and a set of constraints, then breed generation after generation of new solutions by recombining selected elements from the previous generations. In order to steer the solutions in a certain direction, the algorithms need only be told which solutions in each generation to recombine. The choices can be made automatically, or they can be made by humans.
The article goes on to give an example of how the software has been used to come up with new routes for letter carriers to cover in a French town. Instead of trying to understand all of the reasons the letter carriers have for preferring one route over another, the software generated sets of initial possibilities, the mailmen (and women, one supposes) picked out the ones they liked the best and those were used to generate successive generations, getting progressively more refined. A simple yet elegant approach to problem solving.
Wish I had had the Hunch Engine hooked up to the old random set generator!
Technorati Tags: algorithms, software
Just installed the Google mail mobile app on the E62 and it works great - it's incredibly fast and responsive. The only problems I've seen so far is that I get asked if I want to let the app use the network every time I click on anything (there's got to be a way to set that by app), and the navigation keys don't seem to work exactly as the prompts indicate.
It's definitely a lot snappier than IMAP on the standard installed email app that came with the phone.
Technorati Tags: e62, email, google, mobile-devices, Nokia
If you're thinking of subscribing to eMusic to get downloads of non-encrypted music, this is a good time to do it:
On November 21st, 2006, eMusic will begin offering new plan options to new members. While the price of our eMusic Basic, Plus, and Premium subscription plans will remain the same, the number of downloads in each plan will change:
eMusic Basic = 30 Downloads (formerly 40); eMusic Plus = 50 Downloads (formerly 65); eMusic Premium = 75 Downloads (formely 90)
Current subscribers get to keep their current levels.
Wonder what's driving the price increase? Seems like larger user bases should be driving prices downwards.
Technorati Tags: music
