2015-09-10

HarthiTrust


HarthiTrust.org   Harthi means elephant in Hindi. Elephants have long term memories. HarthiTrust has digital collection of 10 millions books, 2.7 millions are in public domain.  Most of its books are digitized by Google Books project.

Starting from 2004, Google digitized books from libraries. The deal was when Google returned the books, it also returned the digitized copies. All these libraries created Harthi Trust as a shared digital library - HDL  

The copyrighted books are available only by search while the pubic domain books are available for full text view. The supreme court considered the "search of all books" is very different than reading a book. Therefore, HathiTrust's copyrighted book search is a tranformative use, which is considered as "fair use". No copyright infringement.




2015-09-07

Google Executive finished a marathon in 15 min ..

Google VP of Knowledge, Alan Eustace, jumped from stratosphere, 42KM (26 miles) above the sea level, in 15 minutes on Oct 24th, 2014. (Alan retired in March 2015.)  This jump is in a self-sustained system, like astronaut's suit.  Alan was lifted by a helium balloon and dropped with a parachute. If he used a capsule instead of a suit, he would be lifted by a lunching system. His suit is only 500 lb, but the capsule is 3000 lb.


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The super size ipad makes sense

The smart phone becomes bigger and its resolution get better.  People start to feel that no reason to own an iPad. A super size ipad could be meaningful. It can replace personal desktop or laptop.

2015-09-01

Jetpack personal flying vehicle

http://www.martinjetpack.com

Martin Jetpack, personal flying machine developed in New Zealand.

It targets on the emergency rescue uses. The safety of the pilot may be the main concern. However,  10 years ago, when Google started driverless car research, most of people thought it was just a crazy idea from the rich kid.

Most expensive house listed $140 million

In East Hampton, Long Island, Yew York.

6 bed room on 10,000 Sq ft in the main house. 4 bedroom 3500 sq ft guest house. $140 million listed price.

Face recognition program for whale

Kaggle.com provides $10,000 award for developing face recognition program, not for humans, for whales.  With this program, scientists can trace individual whale without using tag.
Whith proper machine learning algorithm, the human face recognition program should be able to be "trained" to recognize whale faces. In the sane way, the machine learning algorithm should be able to be "trained" to recognize ape or monkeys faces, which have features closer to humsns'.

With fewer than 500 North Atlantic right whales left in the world's oceans, knowing the health and status of each whale is integral to the efforts of researchers working to protect the species from extinction.
In this competition (Kaggle's 3rd on right whales!), you're challenged to build a "face recognizer" for right whales so scientists on the water can identify individual whales in real time. MathWorks is sponsoring the 
competition prize pool & providing complimentary software to participants. 

North Atlantic right whales (Eubalaena glacialis)













Details about the whale