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This month
Welcome to the USGS - U.S. Geological Survey
Living Galapagos: Battle for Balance Between Man and Nature
Experimenting with NLTK
The Natural Language Toolkit for Python is a great framework for simple, non-probabilistic natural language processing. Here are some example snippets (and some trouble-shooting notes).
Sponsorised links
December 2009
*NEW!* Natural Herbal Cures and Remedies - PRIVATE LABEL RIGHTS - Download eBooks
enriquepablo / nl / wiki / Home — bitbucket.org
nl is a python library, that exposes a declarative API that allows us to build sentences and rules. These are used as input for a knowledge base built on the CLIPS production system. CLIPS builds a Rete network with the rules and sentences, which can then be queried for the consecuences of those in a most efficient way.
The main claim of nl is to offer a syntax that can accommodate any coherent theory that we may build with the natural language (in the same sense as something like the semantic web's OWL-Full would), while at the same time being based on a simple finite domain first order theory. This theory is NL, a discussion of which can be found here. This discussion is probably required reading to understand the breadth and the limits of nl, but not to start using it.
Natural Earth
Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110m scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth you can make a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software.
November 2009
Top 10 Extreme Eco-Friendly Homes
WordNet Search - 3.0
The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Later - The Berlin Wall Through Time - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com
October 2009
Who’s afraid of the avant-garde? « Prospect Magazine
Time/Weather Desktop on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Well, most of the work is done by Earthdesk and GeekTool 3.
Earthdesk is set to Natural Color, Equirectangular projection, Natural Color, Real Moonlight, centered on Vienna, Background: Starfield. Zoom 80%, Clouds 80%, Brightness 80%.
In GeekTool, the times and the weathers are all separate Shell "geeklets".
Times are generated by running shell commands like
env TZ=Asia/Tokyo date " %l:%M %p"
every 20 seconds
The weather is the tricky part. The way I am doing it now, if I am not careful, gets me throttled for too many concurrent requests to the wunderground.com API server. It also fails badly if I am disconnected, so I will need to do it differently.
FWIW: I have a PHP script which I run as separate Shell Geeklets. I invoke it with the name of the city I want. It then hits wunderground and gets back an XML stream of the local weather, which I parse, format and echo. (the way I'd change this is run the script from cron, with a 30 second wait between requests, and cache the results locally, which I would then call from the Shell Geeklets)
From there it's just a question of setting fonts, sizes, colors and moving the little Geeklet boxes around as you want them.
Morals Without God | Articles de Frans de Waal - Public Page
Roots as Narrative - Framework 1/2004
Since I cannot tell you the final truth about the roots of the Finnish people, I shall tell you about the search for those roots. It is only natural that we search for our beginnings and use those beginnings to construct our identity. But why do we look to roots for our identity? This is the question I shall try to answer. I will use scientific and other public discourse as my material.
Linguistics Meets Linux: Morphix-NLP
September 2009
interactions magazine
Waste is part of life. Human and animal bodies produce natural waste, whereas societies produce synthetic waste. While we cannot control the level of natural waste as its production is an organic part of biological survival, we can drastically reduce the production of synthetic waste. Natural and synthetic waste come in two varieties - reusable and nonreusable. The aim of a sustainable waste economy is to reuse as much waste as possible, even to the point of reducing waste surplus to zero.
Natural Language Processing with Python - O'Reilly Media
This book offers a highly accessible introduction to Natural Language Processing, the field that underpins a variety of language technologies ranging from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation. You'll learn how to write Python programs to analyze the structure and meaning of texts, drawing on techniques from the fields of linguistics and artificial intelligence.
Land Art Generator Initiative
According to the US Department of Energy (Energy Information Administration), the world consumption of energy in all of its forms (barrels of petroleum, cubic meters of natural gas, watts of hydro power, etc.) is projected to reach 678 quadrillion Btu (or 7.15 exajoules) by 2030 – a 44% increase over 2008 levels (levels for 1980 were 283 quadrillion Btu and we stand at around 500 quadrillion Btu today).
NLTK Home (Natural Language Toolkit)
