- Data Defenders — game for grade 4-6 that teaches children and pre-teens the concept of personal information and its economic value, and introduces them to ways to manage and protect their personal information on the websites and apps they enjoy. (via BoingBoing)
- Readings in Applied Data Science — pointers to interesting papers, via Hadley Wickham’s Stanford class.
- COST: Configuration that Outperforms a Single Thread — The COST of a given platform for a given problem is the hardware configuration required before the platform outperforms a competent single-threaded implementation. […] We survey measurements of data-parallel systems recently reported in SOSP and OSDI, and find that many systems have either a surprisingly large COST, often hundreds of cores, or simply underperform one thread for all their reported configurations.
- Finding Alternative Musical Scales — is there nothing that AI cannot improve/ruin? We search for alternative musical scales that share the main advantages of classical scales: pitch frequencies that bear simple ratios to each other, and multiple keys based on an underlying chromatic scale with tempered tuning. We conduct the search by formulating a constraint satisfaction problem that is well suited for solution by constraint programming. We find that certain 11-note scales on a 19-note chromatic stand out as superior to all others. These scales enjoy harmonic and structural possibilities that go significantly beyond what is available in classical scales and therefore provide a possible medium for innovative musical composition. (via Mark J. Nelson)
Article image: Four short links