I have run almost every day on my treadmill for the last four years. I have an Apple TV set up in front of the treadmill. This has allowed me to watch a lot of movies, television shows, documentaries, and TED talks while getting my run in. One thing I didn’t expect to happen is …
Monthly Archives: March 2017
Meteoric Descent
Every time I read the phrase “meteoric rise”, I think about how it is a dumb metaphor because when we see meteors, they are falling towards the Earth. We should instead use “meteoric descent” as a metaphor for things that dramatically catch fire and plummet to Earth in a violent crash (e.g., Theranos). I wondered when it started …
Edward Tufte’s “Presenting Data and Information” Course
This week I had the pleasure of attending Edward Tufte’s one-day course, “Presenting Data and Information” in Miami. I’ve followed Tufte’s work for years. This was the first time I was able to make it to one of his courses, so I jumped at the chance. There were at least 200 people in my session. …
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Historical Narrators
Baidu Research have published a paper about their work using neural networks to build a better system for converting written text to audible speech. This is really neat. Listen to the samples in the summary. It is trained on audio files of recorded human speech correlated with written text. Today, one has two options for listening …