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Designers on acid: the tripping Californians who paved the way to our touchscreen world

The Guardian

Next time you drag a document across your desktop and put it in a folder, spare a thought for acid. Organising your files might not seem like a psychedelic experience now, but in 1968, when Douglas Engelbart first demonstrated a futuristic world of windows, hypertext links and video conferencing to a rapt audience in San Francisco, they must have thought they were tripping. Especially because he was summoning this dark magic onto a big screen using a strange rounded controller on the end of a wire, which he called his "mouse". Like many California tech visionaries of the time, Engelbart was an enthusiastic advocate for the mind-expanding benefits of LSD. As head of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, he and his team would drop acid under test conditions in the hope of inspiring new breakthroughs. His own technological epiphanies while tripping seem to have been limited: in one session, after staring at a blank wall in fascination for hours, he came up with the "tinkle toy", a potty-training aid in the form of a miniature water wheel that would spin and tinkle when peed on.


Ubisoft's 'Assassin's Creed: Origins' Leaked In New Image

International Business Times

An off-screen image of an upcoming "Assassin's Creed" game has leaked online, with reports claiming that the new entry into the franchise will be called "Assassin's Creed: Origins." The off-screen image of "Assassin's Creed: Origins" was posted on Reddit by a user with the handle "shoutouttoashraf." The username is speculated to be referring to Ashraf Ismail, a Ubisoft employee that also worked on "Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag" and is also known to be working on the still-unannounced game, according to Eurogamer. A source has also confirmed to the gaming news site that the leaked image is legitimate. The leaked photo shows a player character on a wooden sailboat.


Linear, Machine Learning and Probabilistic Approaches for Time Series Analysis

@machinelearnbot

In this post, we consider different approaches for time series modeling. The forecasting approaches using linear models, ARIMA alpgorithm, XGBoost machine learning algorithm are described. Results of different model combinations are shown. For probabilistic modeling the approaches using copulas and Bayesian inference are considered. Time series analysis, especially forecasting, is an important problem of modern predictive analytics.


Mind the Gap: A Well Log Data Analysis

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The main task in oil and gas exploration is to gain an understanding of the distribution and nature of rocks and fluids in the subsurface. Well logs are records of petro-physical data acquired along a borehole, providing direct information about what is in the subsurface. The data collected by logging wells can have significant economic consequences, due to the costs inherent to drilling wells, and the potential return of oil deposits. In this paper, we describe preliminary work aimed at building a general framework for well log prediction. First, we perform a descriptive and exploratory analysis of the gaps in the neutron porosity logs of more than a thousand wells in the North Sea. Then, we generate artificial gaps in the neutron logs that reflect the statistics collected before. Finally, we compare Artificial Neural Networks, Random Forests, and three algorithms of Linear Regression in the prediction of missing gaps on a well-by-well basis.


FEDS’ FLIGHT PLAN Airlines told to prep for wider electronics ban

FOX News

U.S. officials have told airlines to "be prepared" for an expanded ban on carry-on electronic devices allowed on airplanes. Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan confirmed to reporters Tuesday that the administration is considering expanding the ban on laptops, which currently applies to U.S.-bound flights from eight countries in the Middle East and North Africa. An expanded ban on devices larger than cellphones could potentially include "more than a couple" other regions, including flights from Western Europe. Lapan reminded reporters that DHS Secretary John Kelly has alluded to the ban "likely" being expanded. DHS officials, however, are still deciding where and how the new restrictions will be implemented.


Hey Look, The New 'Assassin's Creed Origins' Game Just Leaked

Forbes - Tech

The next Assassin's Creed game is called Assassin's Creed Origins and it takes place at the very beginning, when the Assassins were first crawling from the sea to walk on two legs. The new game is set in ancient Egypt, and is being developed by the team behind Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, one of my personal favorites in the video game franchise. That's all according to various leaks, including the latest on Reddit, in which someone associated with the game posted some new information, while also confirming that "most of that 4chan info that was leaked a few months ago is real, although some things have changed since then." I suspect heads will roll at Ubisoft before the day is done. Eurogamer reports that its sources at Ubisoft have confirmed that the leak is real.


US 'likely' to expand electronics ban to UK flights

The Independent - Tech

The US is considering expanding its electronics ban to all flights departing UK and European airports, according to a new report. Passengers travelling to the US would not be able to board a US-bound plane carrying any electronics larger than a mobile phone. Laptops, tablets and cameras would instead need to be checked-in ahead of flights and stored in the cargo hold. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.


How One Scrappy Startup Survived the Early Bitcoin Wars

WIRED

The girls were dancing on a neon tank, wearing sequined bikinis lit up by red and green laser light. A strobing fixed-wing aircraft passed overhead like the acid-trip kissing cousin of a Mitsubishi A6M Zero, with more sequined women dangling from it, trapeze-style. Flashing robots had preceded them -- wheeling through the room, pumping their fists at the crowd -- while the audience, seated on tiers of glittery red plastic swivel chairs, waved glow sticks. As the music throbbed, twin walls of video screens threw up bizarre images. The Technicolor dream machine the women were using as a stage displayed, at the end of its barrel, a rainbow-colored star -- just where, on an ordinary tank, the death comes out. But this was no ordinary tank. It was a fixture of the one-hour show that takes place three times a night at Robot Restaurant, a kind of eye-melting Japanese dinner theater, a cabaret show of such migraine-inducing decadence that Las Vegas falls silent before it. On this hot Tokyo night in July 2013, two Americans, Roger Ver and Nicolas Cary, sat in the crowd. As far as Cary could tell, they were the only gaijin in the place. He was drinking a beer, while Ver, as usual, was abstaining. Their unappetizing bento boxes sat untouched: you don't go to Robot Restaurant for the food. In the midst of the cartoonish spectacle -- earlier, a woman wielding an oversized mace had ridden in on a stegosaurus to battle two heavily armored robots -- they had business to discuss.


Step aside, Siri: A new AI-powered assistant is in town, and she's kawaii

The Japan Times

When Siri is asked whether she has a boyfriend, the iPhone's digital assistant is usually quick to deflect the question with a quip about drones always trying to pick her up. Takechi is the creator of Hikari Azuma, a miniskirt-wearing avatar. She can hold a basic conversation and wake you up in the morning by turning on the lights. Hikari will message you at work and greet you when you return home. She'll also set you back about ¥300,000.


Tokyo startup working on digital assistant you can also date

The Japan Times

When Siri is asked whether she has a boyfriend, the iPhone's digital assistant is usually quick to deflect the question with a quip about drones always trying to pick her up. Takechi is the creator of Hikari Azuma, a miniskirt-wearing avatar. She can hold a basic conversation and wake you up in the morning by turning on the lights. Hikari will message you at work and greet you when you return home. She'll also set you back about ¥300,000.