aleatory » computer science

Shifting Crates

rutherford — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:21:22 +0000

Stuff like this makes me want to get back into Comp Sci

Things to Look Forward to in HTML 5

rutherford — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:26:56 +0000

the HTML 5 spec is being developed with the intention of updating the language to better reflect what it is used for in today’s web. Namely web applications. It notes the rise of third party addons such as Flash and marks itself out as an open alternative.

Real 2-Way Communication between Browser and Web Server – no more ajax hacks?

Cross Document Messaging – a way to allow interdomain communication without resorting to json and without the issue of xss?

Real Drag n Drop – no more ugly multiple browser workarounds or bloated client side apis?

Embedding Video, etc Directly in a Document – no more cpu-hogging, memory leaking flash-based video sites?

Firefox 3.1 beta 2 has support for several elements of the spec, including the video element and Canvas (Scripting access to images). IE8 beta 2 is working on bits and pieces too (Cross Document Messaging) the production release of which is thought to be pencilled in for the first half 2009.Both IE & FF are also having a stab at cross site XmlHttpRequests, which while I think is not specifically referring to the above HTML5 spec, should still provide the necessary power.

Sideways equities, Valley reality check & some object oriented clarity

rutherford — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:53:26 +0000

Macro Man’s view on current equities quarter – can’t see past a sideways moving August myself. Chinese PMI sub-50 also noted with an eye on the faux-support Asian demand has lent equities.

Cuil too cool – the Reg refreshingly telling it how it is as always

Unpacking concepts inside objects – something the standard java apis didn’t always adhere to

Machine Readable Google News

rutherford — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:07:31 +0000

Wired yesterday reports on a health site service that tracks disease outbreaks using news feeds such as Google news. A nifty bayesian-based machine learning algorithm is used, filtering out noise with some kind of intelligent phrase indexing -

For instance, key words like “mysterious” tend to pop up in outbreak stories, but not, say, in coverage of vaccine programs. Another common feature of outbreak stories is a small number in the headline, usually to denote a number of people infected or killed.

The site has actually been up & running since 2006 as this gmaps mashup blog records.

More detail on how it works can be found here.

I would like to create something along these lines for financial data, with buy/sell signals replacing the gmaps visualisation. Google News, owing to it’s concentration on news aggregation, does not currently capture stories quick enough for it to be used as part of a beat-the-market type event trading system. It’s aggregation nature would however lend itself perfectly to a more long term trend alerting mechanism. The smarts to be built on top of it would I imagine be pretty similar to what goes on in HealthMap above.

Industry talk on news flow algorithms seems to have disappeared after a bit of buzz a few years back. It may have went the way of the Neural Networks of the 80s.