Sunset Clouds Over Swansea Bay

Image: Sunset Clouds Over Swansea Bay, this photo is available to licence on EyeEm.

#131

Friday, November 2, 2018

In This Edition:
The Shining, IAWM, Knitted Sky Map, Reading Tips, Tensorflow Lite, Information Is Beautiful Awards, time travelling words, phone form field UX, Internet history, Python crash course, CIA disguises, Hen Ogledd's Tiny Witch Hunter, space repetition and The Information book review!

Happy belated Halloween everyone! I hope you all enjoyed partaking in some spooky treats this week. I'm ashamed to say I never saw The Shining, so this Halloween I rectified that. I feel like the countless pop culture references somewhat reduce the impact of the film now, but I can only imagine how mind boggling it was to watch in 1980. The opening scene with the amazing aerial shots and the fantastic music is something to behold though, wow!

Image: artofthetitle.com

IAWM Annual Concert

Image: Kirkos Ensemble

This week I had the pleasure of photographing the IAWM Annual Concert in the Chapel at Trinity College Dublin. The concert featured works from women composers from all over the world and was delivered in spectacular fashion by Kirkos Ensemble and Michelle O'Rourke. You can check out the photos from the concert here. I also photographed the Composers Panel Discussion in RIAM and the Composers Coffee Morning hosted by CMC.

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Knitted Sky Map

Image: Twitter, HeartOfPluto_

Australian software engineer Sarah Spencer hacked a 1980's knitting machine to create a massive equatorial star map, with the plan to exhibit it at the Electromagnetic Field Camp festival on Aug 31st, 2018. As a result, the star map is aligned with the night sky on the date of the festival!

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Reading Tips

Image: Farnham Street

Farnham Street has a short but nice post with tips about how to read better, including note taking methods and links to other resources about reading.

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Android Tensorflow Lite Example

Image: Medium, Amit Shekhar

Amit Shekhar has a short but helpful medium post on MindOrks with an example of how to use Tensorflow Lite on Android for object detection, including a link to the sample application.

Information Is Beautiful Awards

Image: informationisbeautifulawards.com

The Information Is Beautiful Awards have released thie year's shortlists in categories such as Humanitarian, Breaking News, Leisure, Games & Sport and Visualization & Information Design, among others. Go inhale the data visualisation goodness on their site.

Time Travelling Words

Image: merriam-webster.com

Merriam-Webster have an interesting site they call Time Traveller which allows you to see by year which words first appeared in print. There was I thinking that Blindboy coined the term "hot-take", but it has actually been around since 2012!

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Phone Form Field UX

Image: UXMovement.com

UX Movement have a handy post that describes bad practices on phone form fields, along with some recommendations on how to reach the holy grail of UX; don't make users think.

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Notable Internet History

Image: Slate.com

Slate.com published a great article detailing some unique events in internet history, such as how Arpanet users created the first social network in 1979 to share their favourite science fiction, created emoticons to differentiate work topics from jokes, and wrote the first "Spoiler Alert" about Star Trek II!

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Python Crash Course

Image: Grahamwheeler.com

Graham Wheeler has a great crash course tutorial on learning Python on his site, with lots of example code and recommendations on further reading.

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CIA Disguises

Image: YouTube, Wired

The Wired Masterminds YouTube series kicks off with a video interview with Jonna Mendez, the former chief of disguises with the CIA. The video gives an interesting insight into some of the older techniques used by the CIA to disguise its operatives.

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Hen Ogledd - Tiny Witch Hunter

Image: YouTube, Domino Recording Co.

Spaced Repetition

Image: Nicky Case

Following on from SuperMemo & The Spacing Effect in edition #123, Nicky Case has an excellent interactive tutorial on spaced repetition and how to use The Leitner Box method and other apps to fill your long term memory with all the learning!

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Book Review: The Information - James Gleick

Image:near.st

I picked up The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick last Christmas on a visit to the amazing Charlie Byrne's Bookshop in Galway. My reason for buying it was part intrigue about how the author could fill a whole book about there being too much information in the world, and partly because I must admit, the cover design drew me in. It took me a while but I finally got around to reading and finished the book this week and I was so happy with the choice I made all those months ago.

The book is a fascinating read and is both a historical account of how humans have perceived, dealt with and classified information, and a commentary about where we now find ourselves in the age of the information overload. The spine of the book's narrative centres around Claude Shannon and his information theory but branches out far and wide into the annals of communication and information history. Topics covered include the effects on humans of the transition from the oral to the written word, the history and promulgation of communications technology, including the somewhat short lived French Telegram, and the ground breaking work of Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Richard Dawkins, Alan Turing and many others. Concepts from Quantum Cryptography, Mathematics, Genetic Engineering, Music and Philosophy are interspersed throughout this enthralling read.

If you use this affiliate link to buy the book on Amazon, the commission will go towards supporting the running of FoundThisWeek.com (thanks!).

About Found This Week

Found This Week is a curated blog of interesting posts, articles, links and stories in the world of technology, science and life in general.
Each edition is curated by Daryl Feehely every Friday and highlights cool stuff found each week.
The first 104 editions were published on Medium before this site was created, check out the archive here.

Daryl Feehely

I’m a web consultant, contract web developer, technical project manager & photographer originally from Cork, now based in London. I offer my clients strategy, planning & technical delivery services, remotely & in person. I also offer freelance CTO services to companies in need of technical bootstrapping or reinvention. If you think I can help you in your business, check out my details on http://darylfeehely.com

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