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Contributions Appearing in the Book

Contributions Appearing in the Book

Top Science Longreads of 2013 I’m really optimistic about the future for long, deep, rich science reporting. There are more places that a publishing it, more ways of finding it, and a seemingly huge cadre of people who are writing it well. So without further ado, here’s a list of my top pieces of the year. It has blossomed to 15 from last year’s 12 because I was gripped by indecision and they’re all so good. 1) Bones of Contention, by Paige Williams for the New Yorker. “He sold sloth claws, elephant jaws, wolf molars, dinosaur ribs—a wide range of anatomical fragments that went, mostly, for between ten and fifty dollars. 2) Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future, by Maryn McKenna for Medium. ““Many treatments require suppressing the immune system, to help destroy cancer or to keep a transplanted organ viable. 3) Uprooted, by Virginia Hughes for Matter. 4) The Social Life of Genes, by David Dobbs for Pacific Standard. 5) A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA, by Amy Harmon for the New York Times. And finally…

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky Wednesday, October 08, 2003 Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you're supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be? Did you ever get an email from your friends in Bulgaria with the subject line "???? ?????? I've been dismayed to discover just how many software developers aren't really completely up to speed on the mysterious world of character sets, encodings, Unicode, all that stuff. But it won't. So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. And one more thing: In this article I'll fill you in on exactly what every working programmer should know. A Historical Perspective The easiest way to understand this stuff is to go chronologically. And all was good, assuming you were an English speaker. Unicode Hello Encodings

The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page Placement and Content 7. Keep It Above the Fold The space a visitor sees without having to scroll is where the most important parts of the webpage should be. 8. Optimize a landing page for conversion over time. 9. Implementing motivational speeches, videos of user testimonials, and product images into a home page can have a positive impact on viewers, as well as give shoppers an extra push to look further into a product. Bellroy uses great imagery and videos on many of their pages. 10. Links connecting the user to a bunch of other sites or pages will distract them and have a negative impact on conversions. This landing page is designed well, but look at all those header links getting in the way of the message!

Hugh C. Howey - Best selling author of WOOL and the Molly Fyde series Understanding Tail Recursion | CodeKraft A tail call is the last call executed in a function; if a tail call leads to the parent function being invoked again, then the function is tail recursive. In the first function – foo; the baz() function is a tail call while in foo2, the baz and biz are tail calls because both are the last calls to get executed in the function. The second example shows that the tail call doesn’t have to be the last line of the function – it just has to be the last call the function makes before it returns. Deep Dive Lets analyze the factorial function. A fact(3) call is traced out below: fact(3) -> 3 * fact(2) 3 * (2 * fact(1)) 3 * (2 * 1) 3 * 2 6 Every recursive call has to be totally evaluated before the final value can be calculated. Now let’s make a tail-recursive version of the same function. Evaluation of this function now looks like this: fact2(3) -> fact2(3, 1) fact2((3-1), (3*1)) fact2(2, 3) fact((2 -1), (2*3)) fact(1, 6) 6 fact3(2) trampoline(tailFact(2,1)) trampoline(tailFact(1, 2)) trampoline(2); 1.

Selenium Browser Testing framework language agnostic - What are the lesser known but useful data structures Programming Paradigms: An Introduction | CodeKraft A programming paradigm is a way of programming, a style of solving problems and thinking about the domain. Languages directly or indirectly influence programming style; for example, Haskell is purely functional while Python allows a blend of OOP, functional and imperative programming. Even though most new languages are multi-paradigm, they usually make it easiest to program in a single paradigm; C programs can be written in a functional programming style (instead of the orthodox procedural fashion) – it is just extremely difficult. Paradigms can be viewed as abstractions and metaphors for modelling problems – logic programs can be viewed as theorem solvers; functional programs rely on mathematical models while OOP models real-life objects and their interactions. Nearly every standard problem can be solved using any of the programming paradigms however some problems are best solved using some paradigms (e.g. recursion vs loops). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Conclusion Like this: Like Loading... Related

Out in the Great Alone I landed in Anchorage in the middle of the night. The next morning, I drove an hour north to Wolf Lake Airport, a private airfield near Wasilla. You know those old photo-backdrop screens that little kids in department stores used to have their portraits taken in front of? It was like driving into one of those. The majority of this extreme vastness can’t be reached by road. Jay Baldwin met me at the hangar. His best friend was a musher, Linwood Fiedler, who’d been the Iditarod’s runner-up in 2001. Enlarge Clippings of crash reports hang on the wall of the ACTS hangar. “You’re not a pilot in Alaska,” Jay said, fixing me with a blue-eyed and somehow vaguely piratical stare, “until you’ve crashed an airplane. Having lost more friends than he could count to wrecks in the remote Alaskan wilderness, he was obsessed with crash reports, fatality statistics, replaying weird scenarios. Choosing an airplane — that was the first step. They were so small. “God love ’em,” Jay said. Into the cockpit.

Aprende a programar en diez años Por Peter Norvig. Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. Traducción libre al español por Carlos Rueda - ¿Por qué todos tienen tanto afán? Entra a cualquier librería y encontrarás Aprende Java en 7 Días y demás variaciones interminables ofreciendo enseñar Visual Basic, Windows, Internet, etc., en unos pocos días u horas. pubdate: after 1992 and title: days and (title: learn or title: teach yourself) y obtuve 248 ítems de resultado. La conclusión es que, o bien la gente tiene un gran afán por saber de computadoras, o bien las computadoras son algo fabulosamente más fácil de aprender que cualquiera otra cosa. Analicemos lo que podría significar un título como Aprende Pascal en Tres Días (Learn Pascal in Three Days): Aprende: En 3 días no tendrás tiempo de escribir varios programas significativos, y de aprender de tus éxitos y errores con ellos. Aprende a programar en diez años Aquí está mi receta para el éxito en programación: Referencias Bloom, Benjamin (ed.) Respuestas

The Mammoth Cometh Photo The first time Ben Novak saw a passenger pigeon, he fell to his knees and remained in that position, speechless, for 20 minutes. He was 16. At 13, Novak vowed to devote his life to resurrecting extinct animals. At 14, he saw a photograph of a passenger pigeon in an Audubon Society book and “fell in love.” But he didn’t know that the Science Museum of Minnesota, which he was then visiting with a summer program for North Dakotan high-school students, had them in their collection, so he was shocked when he came across a cabinet containing two stuffed pigeons, a male and a female, mounted in lifelike poses. Continue reading the main story

When did America become too afraid to explore a frontier? America's idea of itself is inextricably tied to the opening of the American West. In the 19th century America embraced the entrepreneurs, and rugged individuals who sought to reinvent themselves by going west. Joe Manchin seems to have forgotten who we are. He seems to have forgotten that it was not the bankers or the boy scouts who opened the West, it was the entrepreneurs, and yes, the hucksters, and the speculators, and all manner of flawed characters looking for a place where they could enjoy the relative freedom of the frontier, away from the tentacles of an overreaching government. He seems to have forgotten that, more than anything else, it was the frenzied speculation of the Gold Rush that led to California becoming a state, the building of roads, churches, and schools throughout California and the development of the transcontinental railroad that bound California to the rest of the United States.

Planning Algorithms / Motion Planning

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