"Carmina Burana" flash mob

YouTube link.

I'm not back (yet) - still on blogcation.  But I can't resist a flash mob.  As explained by Mademoiselle Titam at her Curiosities blog:

"En avril 2012, les solistes, le chœur et orchestre du Volksoper Wien (l’opéra populaire de Vienne, Autriche) a réalisé une flashmob dans la gare de Vienne. Devant des passants et voyageurs aux yeux ébahis, ce sont d’autres passants, employés, qui deviennent peu à peu artistes…"

Released Data Set: Features Extracted From YouTube Videos for Multiview Learning

Posted by Omid Madani, Senior Software Engineer

“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”

The “duck test”.

Performance of machine learning algorithms, supervised or unsupervised, is often significantly enhanced when a variety of feature families, or multiple views of the data, are available. For example, in the case of web pages, one feature family can be based on the words appearing on the page, and another can be based on the URLs and related connectivity properties. Similarly, videos contain both audio and visual signals where in turn each modality is analyzed in a variety of ways. For instance, the visual stream can be analyzed based on the color and edge distribution, texture, motion, object types, and so on. YouTube videos are also associated with textual information (title, tags, comments, etc.). Each feature family complements others in providing predictive signals to accomplish a prediction or classification task, for example, in automatically classifying videos into subject areas such as sports, music, comedy, games, and so on.

We have released a dataset of over 100k feature vectors extracted from public YouTube videos. These videos are labeled by one of 30 classes, each class corresponding to a video game (with some amount of class noise): each video shows a gameplay of a video game, for teaching purposes for example. Each instance (video) is described by three feature families (textual, visual, and auditory), and each family is broken into subfamilies yielding up to 13 feature types per instance. Neither video identities nor class identities are released.

We hope that this dataset will be valuable for research on a variety of multiview related machine learning topics, including multiview clustering, co-training, active learning, classifier fusion and ensembles.

The data and more information can be obtained from the UCI machine learning repository (multiview video dataset), or from here.

The MiniZinc Challenge

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager

Constraint Programming is a style of problem solving where the properties of a solution are first identified, and a large space of solutions is searched through to find the best. Good constraint programming depends on modeling the problem well, and on searching effectively. Poor representations or slow search techniques can make the difference between finding a good solution and finding no solution at all.

One example of constraint programming is scheduling: for instance, determining a schedule for a conference where there are 30 talks (that’s one constraint), only eight rooms to hold them in (that’s another constraint), and some talks can’t overlap (more constraints).

Every year, some of the world’s top constraint programming researchers compete for medals in the MiniZinc challenge. Problems range from scheduling to vehicle routing to program verification and frequency allocation.

Google’s open source solver, or-tools, took two gold medals and two silver medals. The gold medals were in parallel and portfolio search, and the silver medals were in fixed and free search. Google’s success was due in part to integrating a SAT solver to handle boolean constraints, and a new presolve phase inherited from integer programming.

Laurent Perron, a member of Google’s Optimization team and a lead contributor to or-tools, noted that every year brings fresh techniques to the competition: “One of the big surprises this year was the success of lazy-clause generation, which combines techniques from the SAT and constraint programming communities.”

If you’re interested in learning more about constraint programming, you can start at the wikipedia page, or have a look at or-tools.

The full list of winners is available here.

"... there will be a short delay..."

"Transtellar Cruise Lines would like to apologize to passengers for the continuing delay to this flight. We are currently awaiting the loading of our complement of small lemon-soaked paper napkins for your comfort, refreshment and hygiene during the journey. Meanwhile we thank you for your patience. The cabin crew will shortly be serving coffee and biscuits again.''..

"You're the autopilot?" said Zaphod.

"Yes,'' said the voice from the flight console.

"You're in charge of this ship?''

"Yes,'' said the voice again, "there has been a delay. Passengers are to be kept temporarily in suspended animation, for their comfort and convenience. Coffee and biscuits are being served every year, after which passengers are returned to suspended animation for their continued comfort and convenience. Departure will take place when the flight stores are complete. We apologize for the delay.''..

"Delay?" he cried. "Have you seen the world outside this ship? It's a wasteland, a desert. Civilization's been and gone, man. There are no lemon-soaked paper napkins on the way from anywhere."

"The statistical likelihood," continued the autopilot primly, "is that other civilizations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins. Till then there will be a short delay. Please return to your seat."

TYWKIWDBI is also experiencing a slight delay.  The pilot has elected to take another mental health break/blogcation.  Service should be restored in a week or ten days.  In the meantime, those who feel bereft of ways to avoid doing the work they are supposed to be doing are reminded of the extensive past posts here, which can be accessed by going to the right sidebar and scrolling down to either the expandable "archive" and choosing a month before you became a regular visitor, or by selecting a Category.

Now please return to your seat.

Flight Behavior

This was my first encounter with the work of award-winning author Barbara Kingsolver ("Her 1998 bestseller, The Poisonwood Bible, won the National Book Prize of South Africa, and was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award.)  I was directed to this particular book by a reader who (correctly) thought the discussion of Monarch butterflies so central to the book would be of interest to me.

The title refers both to the migratory behavior of the Monarchs and (I presume) to the geographically-shorter but equally complex "flight" of the female protagonist from an increasingly restrictive lifestyle in the mountains of southern Appalachia.  I found the latter aspect of the book more compelling than the commentary on climate change (which for me would amount to "preaching to the converted").   I spent 20+ years living in central Kentucky and working with many people whose lifestyle and worldview were not much different from that of Dellarobia Turnbow, the protagonist of the novel.  Kingsolver's portrayal is "spot on" - not surprising, since she herself was raised in rural Kentucky.

I won't attempt a full review of the novel.  The discussion of Monarch behavior and physiology is comprehensive and well-informed, and will provide some additional insights even to committed butterfly enthusiasts.  This detail was new to me:

"Hester called the butterflies "King Billies."  She seemed to think each one should be addressed as the king himself.  "There he goes, King Billy," she would say. (p. 74)

I had to look it up, since my Kentucky acquaintances never used the term.

The name Monarch is probably related to the eponymous appellation "King Billy" used by Canadians; the butterfly has the black and orange colors associated with William of Orange, Coregent with Mary after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the hero of Protestant England for his victory over the Catholic James II at the Battle of the Boyne.

I enjoy reading works by authors who have enough command of the language to create new turns of phrases or colorful metaphors and similes.  Some examples from this book:

"Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken."

"The equipment was not necessarily new.  Most of it, in fact, seemed to be older than she was, "pre-Reagan admonistration," they both remarked dolefully, as if that had been some Appomattox Court House with the scientists on the losing side."

"She'd asked him to tidy things up, but men and barns were like a bucket of forks, tidy was no part of the equation."

"Dellarobia was amazed he could see roadkill from the backseat.  The animal was as flat as a drive-through hamburger."

"She'd seen the man's face.  Straining, neck veins and ligaments bulging.  He looked like a tied-up horse in a barn fire."

And I enjoy encountering new words.  (I haven't looked all these up yet):

"She could certainly bring over some more from Hester's, as they'd canned about fifty quarts.  How could a person never have heard of dilly beans?"

"It had no shoulder harnesses in the backseat, only lap belts, so the kids' car seats fit in a sigoggling way that was probably unsafe."

"niddy-noddy" and "Moorit" (a black sheep)

Author/cover image at top from Sustainable Kentucky, where the book is also reviewed.  The side embed is of a Monarch raised at our home last summer.

A diatom

Specifically, Navicula variolata.  Photographed by Arturo Agostino for the Nikon Small World Photomicrography 2013 competition.

It never ceases to amaze me how complexly beautiful the microscopic world is.

Video of a tornado destroying a family's home

YouTube link.

One of the Illinois tornados last week.

"Here is what my oldest daughter Josie Taylor Wells and I experienced, I am so glad Kerry Gorman Wells and the other girls were out of town when this storm came through. Very thankful we were not injured."

No gore, but difficult to watch for other reasons (the screams of the family in the dark).  Your choice...